Stepping into the Horrors of the Past

At the gate of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which translates to “work makes one free”, is spelled out on the gate.

Back in Ms. Gerard’s world history class at my Santa Ana, California high school, I studied World War II and the horrors of the Third Reich. Reading a textbook made events like the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom that preceded it, feel unreal. The text couldn’t reflect the feelings of the past.

Then, last weekend, I found myself standing in the blistering heat at the entrance to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and that history came to life. I stared at the gate that says “Arbeit Macht Frei” which translates to “work makes one free,” and I was instantly met with a lie that filled me with sympathy for Hitler’s victims, who were imprisoned and murdered at this place, less than an hour’s train ride from Berlin.

A wall, fence, and barbed wire surround the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. A wooden sign with a skull sits near the entrance.

Passing the gate, the barbed wire gave me chills and I felt uneasy. As I moved toward a set of buildings on the left, the inadequate lessons I learned from high school history flickered through my memory at this actual site of racism and persecution.

Prior to visiting Sachsenhausen, my Berlin reporting team and I had visited the Platform 17 memorial at Gruenewald Station in western Berlin. The Deutsche Bahn (German Railway) memorial marks the deportation of more than 50,000 Jews from Berlin to various concentration camps in Europe, as many as 17,000 from this station alone.

As I walked along the platform, I witnessed the numbers grow from double digits to hundred and reaching the thousands on the steel plates embedded on the platform that documented each major transport. It was disheartening. The memorial honored the Jewish Berliners that were displaced from their home — 160,000 had lived in the city prior to the war — and I wanted to pay my respects to those who were persecuted, while I was still in Berlin.

The “Memory Void” installation at the Jewish Museum of Berlin

So I also visited the Jewish Museum of Berlin, a dramatic building by architect Daniel Libeskind, the day prior to my visit to Sachsenhausen. The building physically creates a void and feeling of dislocation that symbolizes the absence of Jewish life from Berlin after World War II. The installation, “Fallen Leave” by artist Menashe Kadishman, put 10,000 metal plates of faces on the ground in the Memory Void to memorialize Jews killed during WWII. The installation permits the public to walk on the face-shaped metal plates, and the sound was upsetting to me as they scraped against each other and clanged as I stepped on them.

A day later, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp overwhelmed me with emotions, as I saw the living conditions of prisoners, dissection tables for human experiments, and mass graves for the innocent victims near the barracks.

Hundreds of prisoners were crammed into the prison where Jews, the Roma people, and other persecuted groups were experimented upon. Nazi doctors infected child prisoners with hepatitis to test immunization methods, and they measured the facial shape of the Roma people. Innocent people lived in inhumane conditions, and were desensitized to death as they witnessed friends and family dying before their eyes.

The horror that people can put other humans through without any empathy terrifies me — particularly because I come from an immigrant minority family living in America.

The basement of the infirmary room is empty but pipes and lights that surround the walls

I went down a flight of stairs in the isolated infirmary barracks at Sachsenhausen. It was ominous. Each footstep on the concrete stairs, echoed through the descent. Alone in the basement, the silence overwhelmed me, and the humming sound of the lightbulb made me feel anxious. I walked to a fenced off area, and look into the isolated room that seemed so decrepit. Then I stepped into a connecting room, and instantly felt all color drain away. It was empty, but a network of pipes circled the room with the lights attached to the pipes, and at the end was a large, enforced cast iron. I didn’t know exactly what the room was used for, but it didn’t feel right.

I visited the barracks, the Nazi kommandant’s house, and the rest of the camp. The power of a xenophobic, nationalist party blaming a minority community for their grievances didn’t sit right with me. Hitler blamed the Jews for the post World War I economic depression and his ideals of a perfect Aryan race led to the killing of innocent ethnic groups, disabled people, and homosexuals.

This concentration camp was one of the many places that fulfilled Hitler’s disgusting ideology.

In America too, I see the manifestation of discrimination and overt racism on the rise and it scares me. Kanye West’s anti-Semitic comment resonated with countless Americans. Donald Trump’s populist campaigns mobilize the working class against immigrants and minority communities, who become targets of because of their grievances. I worried for my family during Trump’s presidency and I still do in his re-run for the 2024 presidency.

A photo of the Memorial Statue dedicated to the Soviet Liberation of Sachsenhausen with the obelisk stand behind it to honor the victims

But I know there is still hope and good in people. At the center of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp lies a memorial that stands taller than any of the other exhibits. It is a statue of the Soviet soldiers who liberated Sachsenhausen in 1945. The memorial obelisk honors the victims who were imprisoned and murdered during the Nazis regime, and stands tall — reminding us to rise above the horrors of the past and to do better in the future.

Bruce Espino recently graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara. He is reporting from Berlin this summer as part of ieiMedia’s “Berlin Beyond Borders” editorial team.