emily haunted

The weekend following the Berlin trip, I had the opportunity to visit Neuengamme, a former concentration camp fairly close to Hamburg.  The experience was haunting but definitely something in which I'm glad I chose to participate.

The concentration camp was fairly well preserved, with the exception of its rows of wooden barracks.  In place of these stood rows of rock piles to indicate previous placement.  I couldn't get a photo capturing the entire courtyard; it was just too big.  But this is a representation of a small part of it.

Once inside the museum, we learned about the living conditions of the prisoners at Neuengamme.  They were entirely men, and, as most history books will say, underfed and overpacked.  Our guide explained that five men would sleep in each of the beds.  Not five per 3-tiered bunk, five per tier.  Fifteen per 3-tiered bunk.  Yet, each of the beds was smaller than a normal twin sized bed found in world's worst freshman dormitory.

Neuengamme wasn't a death camp in the way that Auschwitz or Dachau were.  Prisoners were not sent to Neuengamme to be exterminated.  It was primarily a work camp, serving as a brick factory for the German war effort.  Yet the average life expectancy of a Neuengamme prisoner was only 90 days.  After 90 days, a prisoner was either dead from exposure and exhaustion or completely unable to work, at which point they would be shipped to Bergen-Belsen.

This picture shows the brick factory, the largest and one of the best preserved buildings on the site.  This, the factory floor, is an extremely spacious room, yet it only shows one small part of the entire operation.

The Neuengamme tour was an intense experience for me.  The area that was once the home to thousands of men being forced into hard labor because of something as simple as religion or race is now quiet and relatively serene.  The late fall weather blew orange leaves across green grass around brick buildings reminded me almost of Moscow at this time of year.  But it's all too easy to imagine the horror that was there sixty years ago.

It's so easy for people to say the Holocaust never happened, that the atrocities committed in Germany, Austria, Poland and elsewhere were lies fabricated by allied forces.  Yet, as I walked across those grounds, it was all too easy to tell that while the people are gone, the buildings, the stories, and the ghosts remain.