Nov 23 - Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

Today I took a tour to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in an outskirt of Berlin called Oranienburg. We had a fabulous tour guide, named Finn from Belfast, who treated the entire experience with respect. The day was perfect for an experience like this: gray, overcast, and cold...I can't imagine seeing a place like this when there is blue sky and spring smells. The only photo of Flat Tony is by the sign saying where we were going.

This CC was a mens camp, but was not a "death camp". Many people died here...but it wasn't the "purpose" like at Auschwitz. This camp was used to "test" things. The gas chamber, as far as is known, was used five times - testing different gases. Mostly it was used for medical experimentation. They would try to change prisoners eye colors, or skin pigmentation, to see if they could turn people into their idea of the "perfect being".

Most of the buildings at the CC were gone...many reminders of the ugliness of Hitler were destroyed after the war. This Camp actually continued for 5 years after the war, but for those 5 years it was a Soviet Prison camp that held Soviet prisoners...some of which were the same people and I believe he said 13,000 were buried within the Camp.

There are are a few things about what was still standing that will be forever etched in my mind (beyond the obvious places, that everyone thinks of when they think of these places). There were two statues...one depicting a Russian solider saving two healthy men at the CC. Truth be known, the only men left behind when the CC was evacuated on the Death March (because they knew the Russians were coming) were those too sick to walk, so they never would have looked like this. The second statue was the reality of what was actually left in the camp and found by the Red Army. Another building still standing was the kitchen (each prisoner had two bowls of soup per day)...but there were these "happy" paintings in the eating area, that for whatever reason bothered me more than a lot of the rest. Maybe its because you go into something like this expecting one thing - but then you see what someone depicted as a "happy" thing, and it litterally makes you ill.

To end, I'm including one picture of the Israeli flag for a special friend of mine that I thought about all day today - and a quote from a survivor.

Good-night and God-bless,

from Berlin