As I slowly walked around Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, I felt an air of finality everywhere. In the air where the guards may have watched the prisoners walking below; in the morgue with blood stains in the concrete; in the high fences with rolls of barbed wire and weather-beaten skull and bone signs. I never realized how big it was, and how many people they fit into the camp at one time.
It was morbidly deemed “the perfect concentration camp” in its ability to have a perfect line of sight to shoot anything in the camp at any time from main tower ‘A’. If there could be a theme of the camp, it would be theft. There was theft of life, freedom, property, security, and humanity. I wondered if any of the guards who had treated the prisoners so inhumanely ever had any regrets later in life, or if their dreams haunted them to the point of no sleep. I don’t see how you could commit such horrible crimes against other human beings and not have any sting of remorse.
I wasn’t aware that during the war, the Nazis used the prisoners as medical test subjects. The details of such tests were gruesome are too horrible to describe. At some points while walking around, I was grateful for the German language on the information plaques, so that I couldn’t read all the details.
Sometimes when we’re in public and one of our group mentions something about WW2, we’ll get a sharp look from a German native. It makes me hesitate a bit, because I know it is still a sore subject for a lot of people. Some are ashamed about their history and don’t want to remember it. Others want their history to be remembered, and make sure there is an importance placed on history that should not be forgotten.
-Hannah