All posts by Yvonne M Pitts

A Day To Remember

By Nate Albrecht

10th June, 2016

Plaque to the Martyrs of the Deportation
The Garden with a small plaque which cannot be read behind the fence

Today as we continue our adventures in Paris, we visited two memorials. The first is the memorial to the deported people of France in occupied France, and the second is the Memorial to the Shoah. Unfortunately, we were unable to go inside the Deportation Memorial because it has been flooded by Seine River. I can however tell you that we talked about the collaboration of the Vichy Regime in the deportation of thousands of men, women, and children (especially Jews) to concentration camps, many of whom would not survive. The Garden above the memorial is simple yet dissatisfying in acknowledging the complicity of the French people during this time. The Nazis did not ask for any Jews under age 18 to be deported; however, the French willingly sent what we now know to be about 13,000 children under age 18 to the concentration camps. This memorial spoke to the importance of remembering the complicity of many parts of Europe during World War II that allowed the Holocaust to progress to the extremes that it did. The memorial itself sits behind Notre Dame which is a popular tourist site. This placement (directly behind Notre Dame) is important as is the language in the lack of accountability of the French to claim responsibility for their own complicity in the actions that led to the deaths of millions of people as well as the scars collectively France still caries as a nation over their own contradiction in belief of a universal citizenship where all are treated equally (idealized in the motto “Death to the Republic, Long live the Universe”) and their own willingness to comply with Nazi demands.

This leads us into the Memorial to the Shoah, where I will start by explaining the term Shoah to those who may be unfamiliar with its meaning. Shoah is the Jewish word for Holocaust or martyr, it can also be a term used for a great catastrophe. Shoah also has a biblical meaning of Destruction. Shoah as Holocaust can also mean death by fire. I believe this is important to remember when thinking of the Holocaust because people should be responsible for understanding the language of the people who are experts on what happened to Jews in concentration camps – themselves. Jewish survivors themselves are the experts on this topic.

The memorial itself has the tightest security I have thus encountered in Paris which speaks to its importance to the memory of the French people. Set in the heart of the Marais, the memorial sits in the oldest and most beautiful part of Paris. Walking to the memorial, we passed buildings that were 500-700 years old.

This building is 700 years old! This is what Paris would have looked like in 1300!!

After entering you come into a courtyard with a circular memorial to the places the Jews were sent to be exterminated. As you walk down the steps from the courtyard to enter the museum and memorial, you find walls of names of those deported from 1942-45. There are walls 8-10 feet high by 20-40 feet long of name after name of Jewish person who was killed. After you enter the museum, you go down one flight of stairs and can see women who were resistance fighters and continuing forward you go down a few steps and you can see the memorial to the murdered Jews. The final resting place for the ashes of Jewish people in a black granite and marble room with a large black marble Star of David in the center above is glass circles in the shape of the Star of David as well, which provides a soft light over the marble memorial. As you approach, you can hear every footfall, every swish of the fabric of your pants, every intake and exhale of breath and you know you are in a sacred place to be revered. The room is quiet and reverence hangs in the air. You almost get the feeling that dust even wouldn’t dare to settle here. Because of the impossibility of identifying millions of peoples’ ashes, they were buried there in soil brought from Israel on February 24, 1957. I apologize for the deep descriptions, but I feel that photos of this place are inappropriate to the justice of the individuals who died under Nazi persecution, not that a photograph could ever do this place justice. Upstairs from the memorial on the 2nd through 4th floors are artifacts and information about victims of the

Packs from the red cross given to survivors with blankets, food, etc.
Nazi records on French Jewish populations

Holocaust. It was interesting to think about the people who survived the Holocaust and to know that not everyone received reparations and that many people were displaced and moved through displaced persons’ camps which in some cases were just as bad for these survivors as the concentration camps themselves. There unfortunately was not enough time to look at everything in the collection, but what I did see was fascinating. There was even a section on memorializing the Shoah as to prevent history from repeating itself. This was a horrific period of history and if we as a society and generation refuse to memorialize all parts and pieces of it, we are doomed to repeat it because history is doomed to repeat itself. In far too many places, the holocaust is a distant memory in a time long ago and a land far away, but that time was not so long ago and land was not so far away when one can stand on the ground where victims stood and take in the sights they saw and remember that these are people too.

Let us not be afraid of memory, let us revere it and celebrate what should be celebrated, cry over what must be cried about, and never forget the joy or tragedy of the past which can help us to inform the next generation about how to live. I was inspired today not only by memories of perseverance, memories of sadness, and memories of bravery and courage, and I would like to end on a note where I find great courage. As we walked by a particular house, we saw a plaque which was dedicated to a mother and her three sons. This mother had sons in the French resistance who were fighting against the German occupation as well as French compliance. As we know the Gestapo did not take too kindly to French Resistance members and found out who these men were and stopped by their house looking for them, where the gestapo found the mother of the young men whom they were looking for. The gestapo asked her where are your sons and she refused to tell them… even under torture she refused to tell them. The Gestapo killed her. In this action of love, I find bravery and courage to remind us all not only to not forget, but to stand tall for our beliefs and to be kind to one another even in the face of great danger or death. Reflecting on this day has been difficult and while the language to describe the events of the holocaust and the outcome – the death, and destruction – while I find myself thinking impossible or unbelievable, I know that those are not words I can use to describe the Holocaust. I find the word Shoah to be the most useful as well as horrific, traumatizing, and memory. My generation is the last to meet survivors – many who were adults are gone, and those who were children are quickly disappearing. It is up to my generation – it is up to ALL of us to remember this and educate others on the Holocaust the impact it had on communities including Jews, Homosexuals, and the Roma people. We must never forget the atrocities and we must never forget the most important part of life, which is to love one another and not to dwell on fear and hate.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

By: Erin Osborn

Day two in Berlin brought our group to the most emotionally challenging part of our trip yet. Today we visited Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. On the way there we met our guide Finn, who proved to be very knowledgeable and informative, yet appropriately personable. We boarded a train from Berlin to the town that the camp is located in, and we walked the same two-mile trek that the prisoners marched. Finn mentioned that yes there are new buildings, but for the most part the architecture that we saw throughout the town was the very same that the prisoners had seen. What immediately stuck out to me was how pretty and quiet the streets are, and just imagining the numerous victims trudging through them didn’t make sense. How could the people of the town stand to see this? After all, the camp was not isolated. In fact, it was practically in their backyards.

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In the far background of this picture, the gate is the entrance to the camp site right next to the house.

 

Upon our arrival, we learned that Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 and it was the first camp to be built. Finn pointed out a building that he said was probably one of the most important buildings of the time. This was where new concentration camps were planned.

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After a bathroom break and a brief overview of German history, we finally walked through the gate leading into the camp. Finn mentioned that there was only one addition to the gate – the clock on top.

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The clock was permanently set to 11:07 to commemorate the exact time the Soviets arrived and liberated the camp in 1945. Most of the 35,000 prisoners had already been evacuated on a death march by this time, but about 3,000 were too sick to walk and they were left behind. There are six mass graves just inside the camp to the side, and each holds around 50 bodies of these 3,000. I have a picture of one of these graves but the file size is too large to upload.

 

We toured the central watchtower above the gates, and through the windows every part of the camp was visible. Sachsenhausen was built in the shape of a triangle for maximum visibility by the guards. This watchtower along with several smaller ones positioned along the walls ensured nothing in the camp was out of sight. Again, I have a panoramic video of the view from the watch tower, but sadly the file is too large to upload.

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This is the layout of the camp. The black box on the right side is the central watch tower.

Sachenhausen wasn’t a death camp, but this does not mean that killings did not take place. In fact, it was actually one of the first places to experiment with fixed gas chambers. As we passed by a pit where prisoners were taken to be shot and as we walked through the foundation of what was once a gas chamber and a furnace where the victims’ bodies were cremated, many in the group were moved to tears.

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This is the pit where prisoners were taken to be shot.
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This is the foundation of the gas chamber.

Something Finn talked about particularly made me sick: the manner in which the ash was disposed of. There was so much ash from the bodies of the prisoners that it was sold to construction companies to make concrete. It was also sold to families of victims under the falsehood that it was the ash of their loved one. As if torturing and working countless people to death weren’t enough, the Nazis made a profit from the dead bodies…from the loved ones of those directly affected.

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This is one of the four furnaces.

Toward the back of the camp there is a memorial dedicated to the communists. This memorial has the trademark red Communist triangles on the top, and below there is a statue depicting the Soviets freeing the German communist prisoners. This is a tribute to the liberation from fascism and it shows the communists as victims. What is interesting is that the statue originally showed the German communists as healthy and robust as the Soviets. This wasn’t accurate, and the statue was redone three times in order to paint a more “accurate” picture.

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At the close of our tour, we saw the foundations of the prison within the camp. Located here was also a memorial to the homosexuals who were victimized. The plaque reads “Beaten to death, Silenced to death. In memory of the homosexual victims of National Socialism.”

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Hearts were heavy as we walked out of the camp, and as we all needed time to process what we had just experienced we were released for the rest of the afternoon. To me this was the most educational and fascinating part of our journey so far. It was a very hard day, but it was necessary not only to our knowledge of the treatment of homosexuals but in opening our eyes to the mistreatment of a wide range of people.

Welcome to Sex, History, and the Cities!!

Welcome to the class blog and information pages for Purdue University’s Study Abroad course, “Sex, History, and the Cities.”

Thirteen undergraduate students, led by Professor Yvonne Pitts and Lowell Kane, Director of the LGBTQ Center, will explore gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history and culture from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in New York City, Berlin, Germany, and Paris, France. These cities have a rich history of vibrant sexual subcultures and simultaneously have been the sites of some of the most violent repressions of LGBTQ people.

Our course integrates service learning and social justice work. Keep coming back to see where our adventures take us!