I think I can speak for the whole group when I say that this was an extremely powerful week. From the emotional end to Fallada's "Every Man Dies Alone," to the tour of Jewish Berlin, to the very moving day we spent at Sachsenhausen, this week has had very strong emotional effects. This relates back to my first blog post, in which I realized truly how much history was surrounding us in a place like Berlin. I feel this even more so after this week.
At the Holocaust "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" near the Brandenburger Tor, I immediately got an eerie feeling as I gazed upon this massive, grey architectural structure. Because I was so hungry I did not spend too much time walking through it, but I would absolutely like to return to it. In the little time that I did walk through it I felt hopeless, lost, cold, and in the dark. I couldn't believe the chill it gave me on a 96 degree day. What would this important memorial feel like on a rainy, cool day? As I said, I'm hoping to go back and explore it on a gloomier day, to really feel the full effect of its coldness and darkness. We spoke about this in class, and I still feel like this memorial really works for me. It made me feel much stronger emotions than any of the other memorials we stopped at that day, although I think that each memorial was important and emotional in its own way. There was just something about this one that works for me- it's very hard to put into words the exact feelings that rushed over me as I stepped into its depths.
On Thursday we took an even more emotional journey, to the Sachsenhausen KZ. As we walked through Oranienburg, a town just north of Berlin that had been completely destroyed by the war, someone made a comment along the lines of "I can't imagine living here- so close to this concentration camp," and I really thought about that statement. Each time tourists walked through their town to gaze upon the site of the horrid atrocities the Nazi regime committed against millions of people, were these ordinary citizens reminded of those horrors? How could anyone go about daily life when they are living in a place so tainted by such recent history? What if some of their ancestors were a part of this violence, as the victims or as the perpetrators? My mind filled with questions like these.
When we actually entered Sachsenhausen I felt what I had previously felt at the memorial, just magnified by ten. With each stop, it seemed like the historical information David was giving us got worse and worse. I am constantly shocked by the dehumanizing behaviors of the Nazis in camps like these. When we finally arrived at the end of the tour, and what was once the extermination building of Sachsenhausen, I felt as though it would be disrespectful to ever laugh or smile again. Although I have learned about these severe cruelties many times in school and in my own freetime, actually being in one of the places where they occurred- stepping in the "Neutral Zone" and walking through the bathrooms where 400 men were sometimes all shoved in to, and looking at the ovens where thousands of dead bodies were burned, is so much more shocking and powerful than all of the previous learning I had done. The inhumanity and malice of people never ceases to amaze and terrify me. However, when I see touching and impressive memorials like those of the Stolpersteine, or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews, I am hopeful for the future of humanity.
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