Sachsenhausen

Just 20 miles from Berlin, a full-scale concentration camp existed. Today it is one of the most powerful and moving places I have ever visited. Not the camp with the highest murder totals, it still has the power to move anyone who finds such brutality and evil repulsive. These photos truly speak for themselves.

But they are silent. For sound input, all I can say is that we visited Sachsenhausen at the end of a long day and our bus let us out in the parking lot with instructions to walk across the lot and go into the Visitors' Center. The walk to the door was covered with fine-crushed cinders and we all walked with that foot-dragging slump that gave out a distinctive sound. It was not difficult to hear the halting footsteps of another fifty inmates, walking slowly but inexorably to this place of death.

More from Sachsenhausen in the next post.