Station Zed

Station Zed was the crematory. Our guide said that this was never a heavy-load murder station, but the bunker-like entrance to the actual ovens was as tough to see as I could imagine. Numbers are important, but even one person murdered in such a fashion is unthinkable to me. The statue is in the area, now attesting to the pain and suffering that accompanied this place and the others like it.

When I was teaching a Humanities course in my high school, I took my students on monthly field trips. One of them was to the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois, where we were fortunate enough in the 1990s to have a speaker, Elaine Welbel, who was a camp survivor. A lot of my thoughts were about hearing her accounts of 33 months in Auschwitz. Here is the poem I wrote about her and her success after our 1997 visit:

THE NAZI TRIED TO TAKE AWAY HER NAME

She existed thirty-three months in Auschwitz
With shaved head, empty stomach, emptier future,
And a number tattooed blue just below her left elbow:
The Nazi tried to take away her name,
Her life, her culture, her heritage.

Millions of souls, less lucky than she,
Lost their lives along with their names
In Auschwitz and Buchenwald and so many
Dozens of death camps across Europe.
The Nazi tried to take away their names,
Their lives, their cultures, their heritage.

Fifty years have now gone by; Auschwitz is a memorial
Rather than the death camp it was designed to be.
The Nazi took away his own name, becoming a faceless villain.
She meanwhile survived Auschwitz, emigrated to America,
Married, worked, raised her family, lived free.

This frosty morning she comes to teach our class of history,
Of the Nazi who tried to take away her name;
Of the Nazi who tried to take away the names of others.
She rises to speak; we listen as she is introduced.
Her voice quivers as she begins her tale of truth.

The nameless Nazi had tried to take away her name,
But he never realized she was stronger than he was.

I never caught her number; it might have had a four in it.
I did catch her name, and I will never ever forget it.

Her name is Elaine.
Heartfelt Thanks to Elaine Welbel 1997

We returned to the cruise ship after we left the camp. The ship offered a special Brat Fest up on the Lido deck, and after we stood in line and collected our sandwiches, we ordered some cold German beers. I thought about Sachsenhausen, and I thought about Elaine, who passed away a few years ago. And I drank to my friend, the wonderful woman I only met once, but who showed my students and me the power of a survivor. That night I wrote another poem, one that included the marching sound I had heard in my mind when we arrived at the camp. And I thought of how Elaine defeated the nameless Nazi.

L’CHAIM

As we walk across the open yard on the way to Sachsenhausen,
The former concentration camp at Oranienburg, just twenty minutes
Outside Berlin, we find ourselves striding across loose black gravel;
Our 53 tourists sound much as if we are marching, newly assigned,
Laden with our two old suitcases filled with our meager belongings.
We hush our talk as well, turning our minds inward, as if toward
Survival.
We enter a stifling hot barracks, we see the triple bunks with slats,
We fan ourselves as we can from the heat of only twenty percent
Of the number of people who scraped out some life here, who slept here,
Until times got worse and the population trebled. The barracks smell like
Ashes, like a threat of stinking death that would hang over our every effort of
Survival.
Outside, a fresh wind whispers secrets into the trees; perhaps reporting
Offenses to the Kapos, perhaps forming lies to incriminate me; it would
Not be hard here to turn paranoid, to hide in fear from every direction,
To listen for sounds from Zed’s death rooms; to lose the strength of
Survival.
Today I think of my friend, the survivor who beat Auschwitz long ago,
The woman too tough for the nameless Nazi to be able to kill or to
Take away her name. Before I leave I place a stone on a monument, look
Heavenward and think of her, and tonight I will drink a toast to Elaine:
L’Chaim, Elaine, To Life, L’Chaim.

And so I finish my 200th post. The next post will be in Stockholm.

Barracks & Soviet Memorial

We visited one of the barracks at Sachsenhausen on a hot July Monday. Our tour guide mentioned that the 50 of us filled the room and the air was stifling. Then he pointed out that as many as 250 prisoners were housed in the small area. It was quite powerful.

Leaving the barracks area we saw a Soviet monument to the liberation of the concentration camps. Sachsenhausen was in East Germany, of course, and was actually a Soviet Army camp for several years. The somber statue depicts a Russian soldier protecting the victims.

Next post is at Station Zed.

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.

Berlin Synagogue

Seeing the spires of the Berlin Synagogue was not among the highlights most of us noted; it seemed more to be an interesting sidelight. But when we got there, when we found that as many as 3,000 persons attended services in the massive building during the 1930s, and when we saw the significant security force provided by the Berlin Police, we were glad we had seen it.

The congregation was wiped out, of course, during the Holocaust, and the Synagogue is now a memorial, not a place of worship, but certainly a worthwhile stop during a tour of Berlin.

The final stop on the tour was outside Berlin, in Oranienburg. Students of the Holocaust will no doubt recall that this was the location of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the subject of the next post.

Empty Library

On the site of the public square where the most famed book burning of the Twentieth Century took place, a powerful work of art acts as memorial. The Empty Library is not at all photogenic, as the form is a pit in the ground, filled with library shelves, all of course empty. While it is quite powerful to look at, the plexiglass that covers the work is open to the weather and to foot traffic, and it becomes quite scuffed and difficult to see into. But as a work of art, that difficulty does not detract from it, it enhances it.

The plaque with the quote from poet Heinrich Heine is often used to suggest his work on power predicted the burning of the books in an attempt to control thought. The picture of the plexiglass works for me, as our tour guide was pointing out buildings in the next block as I snapped his silhouette, but it looks for all the world as though he is giving a fiery speech on freedom.

If the two posts today cover some heavy ground, the next post will visit the surviving synagogue and then proceed to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

Holocaust Memorial

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is controversial, a stark city block filled with granite stones, well over 2,000 of them, standing in stark remembrance of the Nazi atrocities. The picture that includes a skyline shows the Reichstag in the distance and the United States Embassy directly across the street from the Memorial. The Brandenburg Gate is on the other side of the Embassy, not visible here.

Our tour guide for one does not like the Memorial, saying that children come here and play hide-and-seek among the stones, which are taller in the center due to an intentional slope of the ground. Others complain because there are no lists of names, or because the arbitrary number of stones has no relation to the millions of victims.

I was touched by it. I have no objection to children playing here, full of life, any more than I object to a picnic in a cemetery with the relatives feeling close to the deceased. And I was not bothered by the lack of number relationship, since the Nazis apparently killed as many as they could in the time they had, just as the memorial has as many stones as space allowed. To insist on number logic would apply a logic that does not compute when considering the massive scope of the Holocaust. And the absence of names is another factor that fits with what we are remembering here -- genocide, where all names would be taken away, replaced with numbers, and then forgotten.

A nearby memorial will be visited in the next post.

Memorable Buildings

Not much graffiti surrounds the most memorable buildings of Berlin, fortunately. We visited the Reichstag from the outside only, and we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, located right next to the American Embassy. Both edifices were as impressive as I expected, quite popular on a sunny July Monday.

Next post visits the neighboring Holocaust Memorial.

Cold War Tidbits

The day after we departed from Denmark, we arrived in Warnemunde, a seaport in Germany, and boarded a train for Berlin. All the cities previously visited had been amazing and interesting, but to a sixty-something American, this was over the line into unbelievable. I was in the 8th grade when a hit song was "West of the Wall," and my large iPod has a comedy "song" on it called "The Berlin Top Ten." I find it hard to believe that the Berlin Wall has been down for nearly twenty years, and here I was.

The first highlight of the visit was to a location that is now in the middle of a street in Berlin, but which was for decades on the border between East Berlin and West Berlin. The only American "checkpoint" in Berlin, it was the focal point for the existence of the Berlin Wall as well as the focal point for East Germans trying to escape to freedom. Now a historical location, the small building is there along with a short stack of sandbags. Men in U.S. and French uniforms are willing to pose with tourists for only a couple of Euros. And a very enterprising stand has old Passport stamps, and for only 10 Euros, a visitor can have seven Berlin checkpoint stamps posted into his or her passport. It looks as if I traveled back and forth between the Russian and the American and the British and the French Zones. A nice souvenir.

Higher in the air is a great Cold War souvenir. A communications tower was built in East Berlin, with television and other broadcast media, and the Communist regime was forced to contract with the West for the communications hardware. They received a successful communications core, constructed the tower and placed the mirror-surfaced unit where it belonged. And shortly thereafter, members of the officially-atheist government noticed the headache that had been slipped over the wall and into the East Berlin skyline.

They even tried scuffing the surface to try to remove the symbol, but of course it was futile. You do see the cross glinting in the Berlin sun, don't you?

More from Berlin in the next post.