Lying at the edge of tariff zone C, Oranienburg is the terminus of the S-Bahn line S1, and regional trains RE5 and RB12 also pass on their way along the Nordbahn. The nearest station to the camp is, unsurprisingly, Sachsenhausen (Nordb.), but the only train that stops there is the hourly RB12. If you do get there, to get to the camp, take a right from the station platform and turn right again onto the footpath, following backward alongside the tracks. After about a kilometer you will reach a road called Straße der Nationen, marked with a death march memorial; turn left here and walk for a few hundred meters to the camp.
The other (slightly longer) way is to walk directly from Oranienburg station. Take the left exit, turn right and follow the scattered Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen (memorial site) signs to the camp. To get from KZ Sachsenhausen to Oranienburg, you can walk back on Straße der Nationen, cross the street and keep going until you reach the tracks, then turn left and follow them until Oranienburg station.
Despite the lack of advertising, the camp itself is quite nicely presented with a number of excellent exhibits, especially the newer post-DDR sections. Some of the older exhibits, however, are only in German (and occasionally Russian!). Nearly all the buildings on the site are authentic-looking reconstructions, many old building sites are only marked by stones. The iron gate, emblazoned with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei slogan, still stands. Entrance is free, and pamphlets in a number of languages explaining most aspects of the site can be picked up for 50 pfennigs (about $0.25) at the bookshop.
As the Red Army approached in 1945, the prisoners were marched off towards the North Sea in a death march that claimed over 6000 lives. After the camp's capture (and inclusion in the DDR), the Soviets immediately turned the tables and interned suspected Nazi functionaries in what now became Special Camp No. 7, killing another 12000 before the camp was closed in 1950.
Neglected for several decades afterward, in the 1960s the camp was refitted by the Communists and opened as a museum commemorating Anti-Fascistic Struggle, entirely neglecting all non-Communist victims. Israel protested sufficiently loudly that a Jewish Museum was soon opened on the grounds. After the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet-era camp was rediscovered, documented and added to the exhibits. Israel's prime minister Yitchak Rabin visited in 1992; several weeks afterward the Jewish Barracks were hit in an arson attack by neo-Nazis. At time of writing, construction of a new building devoted to the Soviet camp as well as the reconstruction of the gas chamber complex and the Klinkerwerk satellite camp (about 2 km NE of Sachsenhausen) is under way.
Prison regulations extensively detailed permissible methods of torture; quite a few of the exhibit texts seem to be more annoyed by the fact that the guards occasionally exceeded the rules than by the fact that they were using torture in the first place. Official favorites included suspension from poles (resulting in bone dislocation and a slow, painful death), beating with iron truncheons and whipping (not allowed on bare buttocks until the regulations were amended in 1942).
At time of writing, only the ruins of Station Z are left, and since the ground underneath them is subsiding the area is roped off. A reconstruction of the area is in the works.
I was visiting Berlin on a five-day school trip. On perhaps our third day there, we took a coach out to Sachsenhausen. The others were loud, but they soon quietened down once we'd driven into the car-park and it hit us, really slapped us in the face, exactly where we were.
We split up into groups. I don't remember who I was with; I suspect I spent most of it alone. I certainly remember wandering around the concentration camp in a sort of sick trance. It was the sunlight that got to me the most. It didn't seem right. It was October, and the light was that sort of honey-soakedglaze that one often sees in Europe in the autumn. I couldn't tell you, now, any of the facts I learnt while I was there; I couldn't describe any of the photos of exhibits I saw. It's not something I've thought about a lot. What I can tell you about is the sunlight, and the dank smell of the chambers where they shot human beings, and, finally, the one sight that made me want to vomit and scream and cry, one broken quivering human mass in the middle of the camp.
It was huge. Like the grounds of some stately home, there were miles between buildings, and around every corner there was some new sight. I think what I remember best are the ovens. They were in a sort of low, new-looking building, which served to cover over the remains of the cremation ovens. They were foul. No smell, of course, or no more than a damp odour that was in any case perfectly natural; but you could feel it in the air, and in the way people were silent and refused to meet each other's eyes. This, this is where the bodies were burnt, and we knew it. Oh, we knew it. There were other sights, too. The pit where people were shot, flowers and ribbons pinned up on the wooden slats that served for walls. The gas chamber. Disguised as a shower room. Tiny. Monstrous.
But I am a resiliant person, and while these took the wind out of my sails for a time, it was the final experience at Sachsenhausen that made me feel sick for a long time afterwards- and even now, writing about it more than a year on, I am still shocked. I shouldn't be. It was to be expected. It was a natural reaction, to all that dulled horror: a natural reaction, to try and expunge the ghosts of the all-too-present past.
I came out of one of the guard towers and crossed the pristine lawns to the centre, where a memorial rises from the ground, a huge, curved wooden block with red triangles dripping down from the pinnacle. In honour of the political prisoners who resided there. In front of this was a sort of- three-sided wall, I suppose, is the best way of describing it. My classmates thronged the walls. They were talking. Laughing. Singing.
Now that I come to write it, it doesn't disgust me quite so much. Perhaps it is better that the dead should be remembered with all the vibrancy of life, and not the quiet reverance displayed by so many. But with these girls, I didn't quite get the impression that they were in any way honouring the dead. Poetry, hymns, a show of sombre beauty lighting up the air with emotion- yes! a thousand times yes; pop songs, little dizzy tunes about lust and breaking up and matters that seemed trivial in the face of Sachsenhausen- no. No, never. I couldn't stand it. I sat among them and said nothing for a time. I spoke up, eventually, a gentle reminder of where we were, and they stopped- but the damage was done. Their thin songs and the endless, endless sunlight had affected something deep inside of me, so that even now, a year on, I remember the image with clarity and resentment.
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