Day 17

Ravensbrüeck women's concentration camp is one hour from Berlin by train, a half hour walk from the station, and a total time warp for the few who visit. 

The camp was dedicated primarily to female prisoners, which prompted interesting gender topics on top of the recurring themes of violence and human nature that we discuss at other sites. The initial reaction I had when walking up to the camp was shock. We were greeted by a sight that surprised even our professors, who are experienced with such places. The former homes of SS officers remain standing, empty, abandoned, and haunting the camp. 

You can walk right up, walk inside even. It's terrifying and fascinating at the same time. It's a money issue, of course, the politics of concentration camp budgets has not yet addressed this problem. And it is a problem, the houses don't belong to the camp, and the state has not torn them down. Ravensbrüeck brought up a lot of interesting feelings, as it was a women's camp with a lot of personal items on display, but this is what got to me most. These houses are an interesting statement on the bizarre way Germany remembers, or fails to remember.

Today we visited Sachsenhausen, another emotionally exhausting site. I could write a million things about the day, but one of the most important things I've observed during our time in Berlin is the behavior of others at memorial sites. Today we observed a group of teenagers running around loudly and disrespectfully, kicking themselves off the wall of a room that once held the corpses of murdered prisoners. Our entire group was really upset by this, and thankfully our guide, Greta, reprimanded them appropriately. Another incident was when we noticed a couple of people taking selfies of themselves standing on the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, a really touching site. We've had many discussions about how we can not let these things affect us and alter our experiences, yet I think it's important to acknowledge that it does affect how I perceive each place. It almost makes me feel protective of it and the people it represents. In this way, I'm learning about my own coping mechanisms with difficult subject matter.

After two concentration camps in two days, tomorrow's workshop on the Final Solution will provide much needed emotional distance. What a weird sentence, and what a twisted realm of history I'm currently inhabiting on a daily basis. 

The memorial site placed at Ravensbrüeck by the Soviets in the sixties looks out onto the lake directly bordering the crematorium. The lake was supposedly used to dump ashes.