Sachsenhausen

Sunday, August 24, 2014
Day 12—Sachsenhausen

This might be a shorter journal, because today we went to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. We woke up early and had to meet our tour group at 9am. We all traveled to the camp, by train, together. Our guide, a Manchester born Brit named Rob, gave us a very comprehensive background about concentration camps and how they began before we started the tour, and as a result, I learned so much that I hadn’t previously known.

This isn't a very fun blog post, so I thought
I'd spice it up a bit! Aren't we beautiful?

I knew about how Hitler tried to rise to power preying on the economic problems caused by the Treaty of Versailles. He had claimed that Germany had not lost the war and that the communists had signed a treaty that forced the people to suffer economic lows and unemployment. When the U.S. gave Germany a huge loan, people no longer needed Hitler’s crazy ideals, so he was imprisoned. It was in prison that he wrote, “My Struggle.” It was later, when the great depression hit, and everyone was starving again and in need of a leader, that Hitler rose in popularity. The current democracy in place had a choice, appoint Hitler as Chancellor or appoint one of the men from the communist party. They choice to appoint what they thought was the lesser of two evils, and suddenly Hitler was the Chancellor. As Chancellor, Hitler began imprisoning people from the communist party, because they were a threat to his power. Most of that, I already knew. What I didn’t know was that the camps began in response to the 1936 Olympic Games held that year in Berlin. Our guide told us that historically the host city cleans the streets up, imprisoning the “good for nothings.” This would have included, the Jews, the homosexuals, the gypsies, the homeless, all the people that the city would not have wanted visitors to see. It all progressed from there. I also didn’t know that starting in 1933, around the time of the book burning, all of Germany’s schools were required to immerse the children in propaganda. From a young age, the kids were taught that certain people were lesser, they were more equivalent to animals than they were to humans. Ten years later, in 1943 at the height of the Nazi Regime, many of the soldiers had lived through ten years of brainwashing and propaganda, trained to kill Jews.

We toured the whole camp, and our guide continued to provide us with in-depth history lessons that helped us to understand how this whole thing came to be. I’m not going to write much in this blog about the camp, because honestly, it was everything that you would expect it to be, somber, emotional, and sad. Everywhere I walked at that camp was hallowed ground. I learned so much, just by being there, but it doesn’t feel right to describe it in detail on my blog. If you ever want to know about it, I have lots of pictures and I can tell you all about it. But for right now, while it is still raw for me, let me leave you with the quote from our very own Martin Luther King Jr. that our guide used to end the tour, “It is often not the words spoken to us by our enemies that hurt the worst, but the silence of our friends.”

When we got back from the tour, we were starving, so we got another currywurst, once again, it was delicious (even though it sounds gross). We walked around the city looking for and H&M because Mo needed some new clothes. We couldn’t find one though, because it it’s Sunday, and everything was closed. So we went back to the flat, where our stuff was packed up and ready to go. On Our way to the flat we saw the most beautiful double rainbow, like literally, I have never seen a more vivid rainbow in my life, it was absolutely gorgeous! We did eventually make it back to the flat (after taking pictures and staring at the full double rainbow), where we changed into some comfy clothes in preparation for another long night of sleeping on the rails. We thanked Tarik for letting us stay with him, and then we all became friends on Facebook. So the stranger became our friend. But I mean really, all strangers are friends we haven’t met yet, aren’t they? We said goodbye and headed for the train station.

Riding with the bikes on the
floor of the train #lovingit

We were a bit early for our train so we bought some pretzels (before you get judgmental about how predictable we are, just a warning, there are a LOT more pretzels in the future of this blog). With snacks in hand, and by snacks I mean pretzels, and yes that’s plural, we both had more than one (they’re just SO good, and cheap, our two favorite things)…with snacks in hand we boarded the train. The first train was only a couple hours, and before we knew it we were on to the next one. And that’s when the train wreck happened. Okay wait, I guess you can’t use that figure of speech when referring to trains, this is where the hot mess began, better? Just so we’re clear, we did not get in a train accident. However, we did get on a train that had ZERO, and I mean ZERO, available seats left. And we were going to be on it for about 6 hours. Oh boy. We found a place in the bike room where we could lay down and sleep. So we did. I slept on the floor of a train surrounded by bikes, quite soundly I might add for about 2 hours. Then I woke up freezing, got some stuff out of my bag, and by the end of it I was wearing three pairs of pants, a shirt, a flannel, a sweatshirt, and a North Face rain jacket. I slept a little longer, and then a man came, tapped on my shoulder and informed me that he was moving us to a seat (a few seats had become available at the last stop) even though we didn’t have a reservation, because we were in the way. LOLZ. They didn’t care about us until people couldn’t get their bikes out. Anyways, they moved us to a seat, and to be honest, I slept better on the floor. Although I did still sleep. It was another wonderful adventure to say the least. At some point on that train ride, we rode out of Germany and into the beautiful Austria, and that is where this blog stops, because this was a Berlin day, and we are gone from Berlin. Told you it would be short. Auf Wiedersehen.