The Concentration Camp at the Gates of My City Has Impacted My Life
I live in Hamburg, Germany. In the Neuengamme concentration camp, just outside the city, over 50,000 people died during World War II.
The purpose of this article is not to provide a historical description of Neuengamme but rather to discuss the impact this camp had on a young person like me, even though I was born almost thirty years after the camp was dismantled.
However, I recommend that everyone look into the history of Neuengamme. It is all too easy to forget that there were not only the extermination camps in Poland but also a network of concentration camps spread all over Germany, which served to terrorize and exterminate Jewish people, political opponents, dissidents, and prisoners of war.
When I was born in 1973, the Neuengamme concentration camp had been liberated only 28 years ago. I did not live in Hamburg at that time, but 112 kilometers away from it. It wasn’t until I was seven years old that my parents moved with me to the big city.
It took another seven or eight years until I visited the former concentration camp with my school class. I had already begun to take an interest in the crimes my people had committed during the war and had read a lot about…
