Within These Walls: Visiting Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Outside of Berlin

The first thing we encounter as we pull into the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is the parking lot. Ironic, a parking lot on the grounds of a concentration camp. Surely it has been paved and modernized since the place became a museum, like the smooth stone walls with the its name prominently displayed in white, but even when the camp served the purpose for which it was designed, it must have had a parking lot, a place for the workers and occasional business visitors to stow their vehicles. It's strange, since concentration camp dwellers spent day and night thinking of nothing but the outside world, for the camp to contain such a place, with its obvious connotations of mobility.

We file off the bus, this group of us, all Anglos, 43 privileged students, privileged enough not only to be attending college, but to be able to afford this trip, at $3,000 a person. And we're snapping photos like tourists do, though we seem to be a bit artier than most, snapping angle shots and close ups, poetic art, instead of plastering our faces in front of every landmark. I'm wondering why we want to take pictures. This is a place of death and dying, a place of cruelty and awkwardness, but we continue to snap photos, my husband among the throngs. We enter a newer, or at least well-reconstructed, building advertising, thankfully, a free restroom. My husband and I each take turns freshening up from the long bus ride. Here, in a concentration camp, in the outskirts of Berlin, where thousands were given less than 2 minutes to clean themselves daily, where some were drown in foot baths, where cleanliness was not fathomable, and where disease and insanitary life was more the mode; Here, in the basement of what I can only assume is a modified guard building, I brush my hair and check my makeup.

Resulting from the great deal of time we have spent on grooming, my husband and I are last to enter the camp, and we have problems with the automatic door that is supposed to release, allowing paying tourists to enter the actual camp site. An attendant, tries to convey in muddled English, that there is nothing wrong with the door, so finally, frustrated, we climb over a short concrete wall to enter. This entrance is appropriate in an ironic sense. We break into a place where many dreamed only of leaving for years.

The walk to the camp from the guard house is long, and my first glimpse of life in a concentration camp are the high, barbed wire walls that run the length of the path, but I'm actually more infatuated by the house next to the camp, which has been left to disrepair and is falling to pieces before my eyes, a statement that speaks greatly of entropy. We come upon the camp or the entrance at least, characterized by two large stone gates and a no-man's-land in between. As I walk through the first set of gates, and stare across the brick courtyard to the second set, I cannot help but think of the trucks that rolled in, carrying throngs of people stuffed together like animals, the air smelling of odor and prayer. I can imagine the guards lifting the rails, and admitting the prisoners.

As we walk through the second set of gates, the weather that had trouble deciding between sun and storm. The clouds become darker, and the threat of rain is immanent. As rain pours down, I found myself struggling to walk through mud, shielding myself against the wind, and attempting to find shelter. I duck inside one of the rickety dorms, only to be greeted with a rank room filled with rusted toilets from wall to wall. A glance to a plaque mounted on the wall confirms my suspicion. Though the room was reconstructed, the toilets, little crusted bowls near the floors, are the originals. Across the hall lies a similar room, containing the same crusty sinks in which prisoners were expected to wash. A plaque here notes that several met their ends in this room, as guards drown them.

A flimsy wall separates the toilets from the bunks, which slept 3 or 4. Even now the place has an odd and unpleasant smell. The odor that plagued the men and women each day, even as they slept, must have been nearly unbearable, although the view was worse. Small rickety windows that creaked and rattled with each gust of wind and each sheet of rain looked out on a wall, a wall over which can be seen nothing but sky. How maddening it must have been to look at the wall each day, wanting nothing more than to be the air, ascending the barrier.

As my husband and I walk silently down the long path that leads to the parking lot, the rain becomes lighter and lighter until it stops completely. It almost seems that the rain hovers only over the camp, that the camp is a separate world, and in a way it is. For the prisoners, it was the only world they knew for days, weeks, months, and years, a world where they were confined, both by the walls that surrounded them and by the people that discriminated against them, from taking their rightful places in the world. It was a place where birth, life, and death occurred, despite the infamies that it was only a place for the latter. Though through the falling rain my husband offered me an umbrella, I refused, and let the rain soak through my clothes. This was the least I could do to let myself feel an iota of what these prisoners had felt. As we filed onto the bus, there was no mistaking the reverent atmosphere that moved among us. I cried my tears there on the bus, but when I got off I was resolved to make something more of my experience, to let it change the way I live my life, to let it change the way I think about places like Darfur.