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The villa
This is where we stayed for the 2 weeks of volunteering. In the summer of 2003 I spent 2 weeks doing voluntary work at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I had been struggling to decide what to do that summer, but I knew I wanted to do something different, and something positive. When I saw this chance to volunteer at a former concentration camp, it felt like the best idea so far. And so at the end of July I got a cheap Ryanair flight over to Berlin and spent the night there in the excellent Circus hostel. I went out for some cheap food and got an early night ready for my big adventure starting the next day.
The following morning I got up early, found an S-Bahn station and headed northwards, for Oranienburg. This is a small town just above Berlin. It is nice enough, with some pleasant buildings and cafes. However, it has a history which detracts from this pretiness. Oranienburg was the site of one of the first concentration camps in Germany. A couple of years later the Sachsenhausen camp was created. This covers a large area and held many 'prisoners' including Jews, homosexuals and political prisoners.
I arrived at Oranienburg station and after getting my bearings, made
Yummy, dinner!
Enjoying our evening meal outside in the Berlin heat. the 15 minute walk to the entrance to the camp. It is a strange feeling arriving at a camp like this, thinking what kind of place it was a few years ago. I went up to the security guards and explained who I was and asked where I should go for the volunteering 'workcamp'. Hmm... I thought my German was ok (or at least understandable!) but all I got from these guys were some blank looks and a relpy in German I couldn't understand! After much confusion and sign language, we eventually understood each other and I was ushered into a car. I couldn't really understand why I was going in a car to get around the camp, but this is becauseI hadn't realised just how huge this place is. I was driven around various back roads and eventually to the gates of a big house (see picture). I was very warmly greeted by some of the people who had already arrived (including the 2 Germans who were looking after us for the 2 weeks) and so the adventure began! There were to be 15 of us there in total and as the afternoon went on, everyone turned up. There
were people from lots of places, including Germany, Spain, France, Belarus, Italy, Mexico and America.
We were staying in the 'villa' which is in the grounds of the camp overall, but outside the area where prisoners lived. It was actually the home of the camp commandant. It is a strange feeling to be living in the same house as the man who would have ordered for the execution of thousands of people living only a few hundred metres away. The villa was huge, with many large bedrooms upstairs, a decent-sized kitchen and lots of dining space. There was also a massive garden and fields behind - with a great area for evening camp fires.
Our 2 weeks was mostly spent learning about Nazism in Germany (particularly with reference to concentration camps of course) as well as more recent history. We took trips to Berlin (a great city) to see a museum on Nazism, as well as parts of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. We also went to Potsdam to visit the villa that was the site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi party decided to go ahead with the 'total destruction' of the Jews. Time was
also spent in the camp itself learning in detail about its history. We were even able to meet a survivor of the concentration camp. He was a really nice old guy, who clearly found it difficult to come back to the camp. What struck me most was that he did not talk about how bitter he was. More he was keen to explain to us that nationalism (to the extreme of Nazism) is clearly a pointless thing. You can be proud to come from a country, but this does not mean you should hate other people.
My 2 weeks at Sachsenhausen were quite surreal in some ways. I met some lovely people, shared lots of jokes, had plenty of good food and drink and generally enjoyed myself. However, I also learnt a huge amount about Germany's Nazi past, met survivors of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and found myself crying at the horrors of a gas chamber. I still find it difficult to balance out these emotions, but no matter what I can certainly say that it was an experience - and one that I would recommend to anyone.
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