Sachsenhausen

Dear reader(s),

I know I haven't updated for a couple days. We've done of cool things and I've been trying to spend as much time as possible in the city and not on my computer. But I am alive and well, so no worries there.

My intention was to catch you all up on the events I haven't written about in here but I'm pretty tired and honestly, the events of today pretty much trump everything else, at least in the forefront of my mind, at this moment.

Today we went to a concentration camp, called Sachsenhausen, in a little suburb of Berlin called Oranienburg. I could go on and on about how horrifying and morbid and creepy and sad and thought-provoking it was, but there are really no words that can do it justice. I don't have any pictures of it either, partly because I left my SD card at the hotel again and partly because images couldn't really represent it any better than writing could. The feeling of walking around a place where over a hundred thousand people died is impossible to convey. And I don't feel like I need pictures for myself; there's no way I'm ever going to forget the experience whether I want to or not.

The big question I keep running into in Germany involves whether parts of the past should be memorialized and remembered or if people should try to move on with their lives and, in many instances, not re-create something that was destroyed and is really irreplaceable (for example, the old palace that used to be in the center of Berlin). There are apartments - with people living in them - literally looking out onto the stone walls topped with barbed wire that ring the concentration camp. People in Oranienburg must see it every day. Someone in our class wondered out loud what it would be like to live next to a concentration camp, and our professor gave them an interesting reply. He said, "Well, really everyone here lives next to a concentration camp." Everyone knows someone who fought in the war or was sent to a Nazi prison - sort of the same way everyone in America has a 9/11 story. Here in Berlin everyone sort of lives next to a concentration camp. They still have to see and think about this stuff all the time; they can't escape it. And really, what can they do besides keep on living?

So that's the big question of the week, really. I'm still trying to work through it in my head. Tomorrow we'll visit the former Berlin Wall, which is sure to raise all sorts of similar questions, so stay tuned.

Tschuss,

Anna