June 6, 2010
En route to Prague.
Leaving Berlin is bittersweet. I pretty much fell in love with that city. The last couple of days have been packed with exploration and drinking beer.
On a serious note, we decided not to go to Ravensbruck because Sachsenhausen was closer and had a much more thorough tour, says our tour guide, Dov. Sachsenhausen was a labor/ death camp that also held the Pathology Building and Cellar Mortuary, in which various medical experiments were done on prisoners. This is also where the Death March started, which ended the lives of about 6,000 people at the end of the war. They were literally marched to death over 100K. As expected, this was a powerful experience. Walking through the main gate, I would not have guessed that this was a site of torture and mass murder. Like, it just felt so quiet. The remains of the camp held evidence to the contrary, telling the story of some of the most inhumane treatment of concentration camp prisoners.
Some things that got to me:
The accounts of medical experimentation on human beings, especially children.
The execution trench where prisoners where shot and hanged then bright directly to the crematorium across the way.
The crematorium and gas chamber remains.
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