Never Forget
By Crystal Thornhill
Yesterday was an emotional day of learning more about the history of the Holocaust and the horrors of what happened to queer people, Jewish people and many others during that time period, specifically those people who were rounded up and put into the Sachsenhausen Labor Camp. First, two students did a site presentation about the Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals during WWII to get a better understanding of what happened to queer people during that time period. I had no idea that when the prisoners were liberated from the concentration camps that the queer people were sent to jail because their homosexuality was considered a crime still during that time period. I also learned from the presentation that the camps were segregated by gender, and that the camp we were going to visit was a camp a labor camp for men during the Holocaust.
Following the site presentation we met with our tour guide Finn Ballard at the Berlin Wall Memorial. We did not get to spend a lot of time there but he gave us some historical context of what the Potsdamer Platz square used to look like when the Berlin Wall was up compared to what it is like now. I also got to take a few pictures with a piece of the wall that had been preserved, which I thought was pretty cool, since the wall came down the year I was born and I have always wanted to see it.
After we spoke at the Berlin Wall we headed to the Nazi Labor camp on the train. When we got to off the train in Oranienburg and started the walk to Sachsenhausen, there was a heaviness during the walk as I began to reflect on the fact that this may have been the walk of many captured Jews, homosexuals, Soviets, and many others. When we arrived to the camp and started walking towards the gates, we saw the guard tower where time had stopped at 11:07, which was the time that the prisoners were freed. We also were told that the Soviets took over the camps for 5 years and imprisoned people themselves, which I did not know. The guard tower was a point where all the guards where able to see the entire camp and it gave me a feeling of entering an abandoned old prison. I also noticed the gate had the words “Albeit Macht Frei” written on it which translated to “Labor Liberates” which I found to be a sick, twisted and haunting message about how the Nazi’s say the camp and how little they cared about the people inside it.
Once we got inside the camp we were able to see how the prisoners lived and died. We saw how they were tortured daily with roll calls that would require them to stand sometimes all day. We say the barracks where 500 or more men were forced to sleep, and try to survive each day. I felt so much sadness when I walked through the gas chambers and the experimentation rooms where people were tortured and tested without their consent and often died. It was so heartbreaking to realize how systemic the torture of these people was, and how much thought was put into stripping them of their humanity as much as they could, and how disposable everyone was as well. We say the “hospital” that they built to trick the prisoners into thinking that they were getting a medical check, when in reality they were being shot in the back of the head or put in a gas chamber while they were calm and thought they were just doing a standard physical. To know that this could have been me. That I could have died along with 20 million others during this time period made me sick. I am still processing the experience to be honest. I struggled to find photos of the experience because to me, the experience was one you had to feel, not see to understand. I also found myself hoping that in the United States we are not headed towards hating any group of people this much ever again, because looking the Holocaust in the face and seeing how horrible we treated one another is shameful and something I hope we can learn from during these troubling political times.
As we walked past the barbed wire on our way out of the camp I felt a sense of relief. I wish we had more time to process the experience as a group, but that evening many of us got together and it was nice to reconnect and check in with one another. I am glad I was able to see the camp, I will never forget it and I hope that I can continue to learn from all the things I saw, to make sure I can educate others about the torture queer people, and many others have endured just for being who they are.