Recently, our group took a trip to the Sachsenhausen Concentration camp just north of Berlin. It was one of the most humbling things I have ever experienced. I have only ever seen concentration camps in pictures in textbooks or the internet, but being there and actually experiencing the camp is worth so much more than just looking at photos. I couldn’t get over the fact that there had been so many horrid acts against people there. The whole place felt so eerie. I think the thing that hit me the hardest was seeing the tables that victims were experimented on and dissected on top of. I honestly can’t explain the feeling of being in the presence of such a horrible room. Also, seeing the crematoriums where thousands of people had been burned was jaw-dropping. After all those years, things were still standing to be viewed by not only random people like our group, but also survivors who had lived through the atrocities that had taken place there.
The biggest thing that I couldn’t get out of my mind was that there are still people that deny the Holocaust. I cannot believe that. Those people must have never been to such a place to experience the same things our group just did. It is incredibly disrespectful and ignorant to believe the Halocaust never happened. I leafed through a book that was 700 pages long, with around 50 names on each page. These were all the victims. And this was only at Sachsenhausen! There were MILLIONS killed in Auschwitz. There is no other way to explain the deaths of that many humans within such a small amount of time.
All in all, I am very lucky to have gotten to experience the concentration camp. I will never, ever forget this experience.