Concentration Camp

[stevenpiziks]

 

 

While in Berlin, we visited the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp  It was one of the bigger camps, though unlike many other camps, the main point wasn’t extermination (though over 10,000 people were murdered there). No, the point of this camp was work people to death.

Inmates were used for slave labor, especially in the brick factory, where conditions were the harshest. They were used as subjects in medical experiments, and more experiments were performed on their corpses. They were injected with cocaine and forced to run mile after mile after mile to test army boots. They were told to stand still to be measured for uniforms, then shot in the back of the neck. And more horrifying atrocities were visited on them.

The camp was also a major end point for gay men. This fact grabbed my attention more than anything else. 

The camp is a thousand-acre triangle, with some of the original buildings still standing and other buildings shown as outlines on the ground. It’s like walking through a park, except you keep finding reminders that thousands of people were tortured to death there.

I found on one wall set of photographs and stories about the gay men who were murdered there. One was a famous dancer. Another liked to dress in drag. Yet another had just met a boyfriend and was arrested moments later. It made me teary and angry and deeply mournful all at once. These were my brothers, and they had been tortured to death. More of them went to the brick factory than any other group.

The students had brought roses to place on one of the memorials by the ruins of the crematorium. I pulled from my backpack some chocolate—the most valuable substance in a concentration camp. Scattered about the lawn were huge ash trees, ones clearly far older than the camp itself. They must have witnessed everything. I put pieces of chocolate among the roots of one tree as an offering to my dead brothers and cried over them.