Normal Sunday Afternoon Activities - Post by Clementine Kane

On Sunday afternoon, we visited Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin. As we approached, our normally ebullient group fell quiet; it seemed as though a slow weight had dropped onto all of us. The weather preceeded us. A bright, muggy morning became a damp cloudy afternoon with rain occasionally falling from a blank grey sky – the fourth wall in this strange, triange-shaped camp. The camp is extensive, and since most of the barracks have been destroyed, it is flat and expansive, grey and dead-grass-green, surrounded by a high stone wall puncuated with watchtowers. Dense woods press up against the borders of the camp; the land is not at peace here. In its mechanical and mathematic geometry, it creates another formula for the destruction of a group of human beings. As perfectly devised and laid out as a never-built utopian city, the geometry here was used to subjugate, organize, diminish, and intimidate its unwilling residents.

Footsteps are imprinted in the fine gravel paths that run through the camp. They are transient markers of the past; as much the footsteps of the unlawful inmates that were once here as they are the remnants of the rememberers that leave them here today. They are a tangible reminder of how it might have been not so many years ago.

Exhibits and memorials have taken the place of barracks and guardrooms, but I didn’t spend much time there. The best way for me to engage and eventually come to terms with this place was to sit on a bench on the main courtyard and look out and imagine and grieve and ultimately, express gratitude for each life that passed through here and the protection my own family has experienced. This is very near history for me, more than the other people in our group. My dad’s dad was an Austrian Jew. Until the age of sixteen, he lived in Vienna with his grandmother. After a brush with the Nazi police there, though, he escaped on a train to England, and never saw any of his relatives again. It hit me like a brick in the face – this could so easily have been the fate of my grandfather, or my fate, had I been born a few years earlier. And this was undoubtedly the fate of people he knew or was even related to.

Unaswerable questions fly between my friend and me – Why? How is this– ? How could the people in the town stand by? How could someone hate a group of people so much? How did the SS officers that ran this camp live with themselves? Where was God in this?

As I walk through this place of willfully and strategically imposed suffering and death, my heart is a dead weight inside of me, unable to truly empathize but aching to understand. My curly brown hair and dark brown eyes are a brand linking my blood to this place and reminding me of what could have so easily transpired. Yet I am alive. And I will not waste my time on the inconsequential. I refuse to not love deeply and be loved. I refuse to be embroiled in hate, especially if it is petty. This is how I fight back.

Everyone had a different experience here; I can only share mine. Yet we all came away a little more aware of the potential of humanity, and sombered at what a Sunday afternoon could hold.

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 This post was authored by Clementine Kane.