This past weekend we went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp for a day. We got to walk around the camp and read/listen to a lot of the stories from the victims held there. It was completely horrific and astonishing that an event this demonic could take place in the world.
The camp itself was very large, but when you think about the thousands of people who were held here, it was very cramped. We saw the gas chamber that people were taken to, the murder pit where the firing squad would shoot hundreds of Jews at a time, the barracks they were living in, the towers where the guards would watch and shoot people at random, the ovens where the dead were burned, and the mass graves where the bodies were dumped if not already burned. We read about the conditions they were living in, the abrupt and brutal, if not fatal, beatings they would receive with no reason, and the absurd punishments they would get if they did not stand correctly, or were not fully clean by the time they reported for roll call. It was not uncommon for a prisoner to run into the barbed wire electric fence just to end their misery. We learned that a lot of kids and women were killed first since they were too small to work or be of any help to the soldiers. If a prisoner was unfit to work, they would be killed instantly. If they were late to roll call, they would be killed. If they did anything wrong, they were killed. The soldiers enjoyed beating and killing the prisoners, so much so that in a letter written by a soldier to his family, he told them that he didn’t want to come home because of how spoiled and rewarded he was getting out of this. It makes you think about how screwed up that time must have been for human beings to be okay with doing this to their friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens.
Germany has come a very long way since then, and choose to remember the victims and the horrors of that time with memorials, burials, and other historical monuments, to ensure that nothing like this every happens again.