scc

We didn't go into Germany knowing we would do this, but we spent Thursday afternoon at the former concentration camp, Sachsenhausen.

Ann and I had reservations about going. It seemed improper. It seemed like morbid voyeurism tourism. It seemed cliche, and debasing to the victims. It seemed wrong.

But it also seemed unavoidable. It was so close to us. A 45 minute train ride from Berlin (which only added to the horror and disbelief. It's suburban. There are houses next door. Lots of houses. Lots of next doors. A whole town literally just down the road - a road lined full with houses.)

But we went. It seemed like we were damned if we did and damned if we didn't, but "did" ultimately prevailed and we got on the light rail and headed north.

An hour later, we were sick to our stomachs. Being in the place and seeing the all-too-well preserved buildings of torture, terror and murder for so many people was even more shocking and disturbing than one might imagine or predict.

The thing that hit me most were how recent it all seemed. These are no Roman ruins or decaying, long-dormant ancient sites a contemporary viewer can choose to never engage with or decide to quickly detach from because they don't look anything like the places they encounter in their everyday lives. Take, for instance, the Tower of London. It feels old. The people who were tortured or killed there seem long ago and far away. That sort of deadens one's reaction to the place. You don't immediately think, "Man, those old Brits sure were monsters." You think, "Ye olde days were sorta barbaric, eh? Hey, look, fuzzy-hatted funny guardsmen!"

But the concentration camp - it looks like the buildings could be in use today. I've been to plenty of apartments and art galleries in far worse condition housed in buildings that are *far, far* older. The concentration camp's medical torture and experimentation rooms, with all their creepy white tile and ominous floor drains, seemed no more disused than the locker room at most American high schools currently in use. The bunk rooms and prison buildings, they could have been the outbuildings for any averagely-maintained summer camp in any Up North (Michigan) resort town - present day.

It was startlingly new. Devastatingly recent.

During the "should we go? is it wrong? or is it wrong *not* to go?" pre-trip debate, we both expressed dread at the thought of seeing tourists posing next to camp fixtures and taking digital snapshots like they were at a normal tourist destination. Thankfully, we didn't see any of that at Sachsenhausen. That we arrived an hour before closing on a grey, cold afternoon augmented by frequent periods of abrasively cold mist/rain likely helped temper the crowd size and mood. There was hardly a crowd to speak of. We were nearly alone in the camp, which felt, eventually, in some ways, even more wrong.

By the end, we started to wonder if maybe everyone shouldn't see the place - though I am still not certain of this. I'm not sure carefully preserving and protecting buildings and instruments of total evil are, even when used as "memorials" to the deceased, necessary to the mission. Educate about the events, to be sure. Remember the victims, absolutely. Meticulously preserve and guard the places where they were tortured and killed? That's a grey area to me, still. I might propose destroying all that evil and making the areas nature preserves with monuments to the deceased. Or something like that.

I was trying to think about what I would have wanted done with the place had I been tortured, kept or killed there, and I would - from this theoretical vantage point - want the whole thing burned to the ground and then rebuilt as a park or public space or some such thing.

We left Berlin on Saturday and headed to see Ann's friend at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Buchenwald concentration camp is a few miles away from this idyllic little town. Few people seem to notice or care. It's the giant metaphorical elephant in the woods that no one really mentions.

But the history lives on - and in a small way, it seems, repeats itself.
-k