After the information centre you walk down a road for a couple of hundred metres, with a high concrete wall on one side and old buildings, some in ruins, some in great shape, on the right or southern side. If you look at your map you will see that these were the SS troop quarters. Then you turn left into the camp proper. The first section is a perimeter zone, which has been planted with tress and memorials. On the right is the museum, which today is shut ‘for technical reasons’.
Straight ahead is the camp entrance, Tower A, a guardhouse with a gate bearing the notorious ‘Arbeit macht frei’. There is an odd feeling. I know what that sign means, literally and figuratively, yet I feel a barrier go up between me and its real significance. In places like this, with the perpetrators and victims long gone and only relics to testify to their experience, we are removed from the reality. Our imaginations and hearts can bridge the distance only so far, and our minds give us other levels of protection too. I can only wonder what the locals felt when the Allies forced them to tour the concentration camps by the busload, and whether this same distance was possible with the smell still in the air.
We are thankful for our coats and scarves and umbrellas as we walk through the gate, because the weather is bitter. The Soviets reconstructed some of the barracks from original materials in the late 1950s as a memorial against fascism (!), and in spite of arson attacks by right-wingers they are still in good condition. Barracks 38 and 39 lie in the ‘small camp’ to the south east of the triangle of the main camp. These two barracks were the home of many Jewish prisoners in the late pre-war period, and contain displays on the treatment of Jewish prisoners. They are the only buildings here now, but there were many others, each now marked by a concrete block with a number on it. It was here in the small camp that the Nazis placed special prisoners who had skills the Reich needed, such as counterfeiting and forgery. The German film ‘The Counterfeiters’ tells the story of some of these prisoners. I was glad that we had seen it a few months ago on tv, as it gave us some hooks to hang our ideas on.
Just north of these barracks is the prison, where the Nazis held people for special treatment, political enemies like Hans von Dohnanyi. One of the leaders of the military conspiracy against Hitler, he was held, tortured and eventually executed here, on the same day as his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The prison is one of the few original buildings left, and the huge stretch of empty ground looks ominous. When it was full of barracks it would have looked less forbidding, in spite of the brutality. You can see what’s left of the ‘Shoe-testing Track’, where prisoners were forced to jog for hours ‘testing shoes’. Whoever thought of that was truly evil.
We walk across the rainswept ground to the other side of the triangle, to Station Z, where prisoners were forced to run down into a trench and were then shot. Next to that is what is left of the crematorium, including three or four ovens. To the west is a large gravelled area marking the pit where the ashes were disposed of (‘buried’ seems too deliberate and careful an act).
Even though we haven’t seen the Pathology Building and the Soviet camp, an hour and a half in the cold and wet is enough. We trudge back through the mud to find somewhere in Oranienburg that sells hot chocolate. It’s only when we are sitting in the warmth of the café waiting for our order that I realise I am utterly weary, not just from fighting the cold but from keeping the emotion in check underneath the analytical eye and the questioning mind.
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