Hamburg, Germany and Amsterdam, Netherlands
30 november 2004
london, england

Hamburg, Germany and Amsterdam (Nov. 15 - 20)

I went to visit Neuengamme, the concentration camp near Hamburg. Taking the bus
out through the countryside to Neuengamme, I wondered which of the trees,
streams, fields would have been there fifty years ago.....what did the
prisoners see as they were shipped to this place of starvation and
death......did they think they would come out of it alive? And as I passed the
quiet country towns I remembered something my German friend in Hamburg had told
me -- that during WWII, many small farmers received several workers (slaves)
from the concentration camps.....all over the countryside, this happened, so
for them to argue afterwards that they 'didn't know' what was going on is
absurd. They knew, they must have known -- maybe they didn't realize the
_extent_ of the holocaust, but they had to know that something horrible was
happening in that prisoner camp over the hill, with its tall smokestacks and
its grey factories and buildings, and its razorwire fence. it's so peaceful in
the area around there -- so quiet....I wondered to myself, is this what it was
like back then? A quiet countryside where people simply _didn't_ _talk_ about
certain subjects. The Neuengamme camp, among other things, was one of the
taboo topics.

I got off the bus at Neuengamme alone, and began walking toward what looked like
the most likely building to be memorializing the concentration camp ....
surrounded by razor wire, tall walls, and concrete, it looked so menacing --
like an actual prison........as I got closer, I realized.....it WAS an actual
prison. I saw a prisoner being released from the huge metal gate that slid
open mechanically just a crack to let the man out with his clear plastic bag
full of his belongings and his bus fare....he squinted into the sunlight,
glanced my way briefly, and walked off toward the bus stop. I must have looked
astonished, to see an actual prison on the site of a former concentration camp,
because when I asked some men digging a ditch nearby about it, they laughed and
said yes, it's a prison.....to get to the museum I would have to go back out to
the road, turn left, and then go _upstairs_ .... one of the ditch-diggers was
very insistent, as he pointed off to the left, across a field of gravel and
several one-story buildings, that I would have to go 'upstairs' to find the
museum and memorial. I mean, obviously it was the translation (none of them
spoke english well), but still, I felt myself being brought further and further
into an ionesco-like absurdity, with no one else sharing my feeling that
something was terribly, terribly wrong.

I finally found the and the memorial to the victims of Neuengamme (no stairs
involved whatsoever).....I asked at the desk about the prison, and they said
that, yes, it was rather strange that there was a prison there, and the mayor
of Hamburg in the 1990s had made a statement about how insulting it was to the
victims of Neuengamme, and how he would have the prison moved to another
location....but he never did.

In the museum, I found myself drawn to the photographs of both the victims and
the guards -- staring deep into their eyes, trying to understand what they were
thinking at the time. in the early photos (1937-8) the victims were hopeful, some were even smiling....conditions were overcrowded, dirty, but they still thought they were going to get out of there alive. but after 1942, there was this hopeless, vacant stare in so many of their eyes -- as if they had completely given up hope. one of the people who shared anne frank's family's hiding place ended up at this camp, i found out when i later went to amsterdam. it was a work camp, with a factory on site (the Walther-Werke weapons factory), and hundreds of off-site 'satellite camps' where prisoners would be sent to work. 40,000 of the 100,000 prisoners held at neuengamme worked at one of these work camps, which included the factory run by Schindler (featured in the movie 'Schindler's List'). Schindler managed to save several hundred people's lives by pretending he was a Nazi, joining the Nazi party, and then bringing jews to work for him so they wouldn't be killed in the extermination camps (the most famous of which were Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen). But most of the 'satellite camps' of Neuengamme were not like Schindler's. The one in which Anne Frank's family friend died was known as the 'Elbo Brigade', which was a satellite work camp ostensibly set up to _move_ the Elbo river (ie. dig a new path for a branch of the river that had been deemed to be in the way of progress). The Elbo Brigade was infamous among prisoners for its work conditions, and prisoners on this brigade occupied the lowest rung of the prison hierarchy (jews, russians, ukrainians and poles) -- they were usually worked to death.

the nazis had everything very well-organized. they kept records of
every prisoner, every death (although the cause of death they listed was often rather suspect -- ie. heart aneurisms in 20-year olds etc.)
Neuengamme started out holding mainly political prisoners who were part of the resistance in Hamburg and elsewhere. Many soviet prisoners arrived in 1941, as well as french and polish political prisoners. it was only after 1942 that the waves of victims of directly racial and ethnic persecution began to flow into the camp. by the end (1945), there were 13,000 jews held in neuengamme, 28,000 soviet prisoners, 17,000 polish, 11,000 french, 500 roma gypsies, and varying numbers of homosexuals, jehovah's witnesses, "anti-social elements" and resistance fighters from all over europe, all labelled with patches in the shape of an inverted triangle (or a six-pointed star for jews) in different colors to indicate one's category in the hierarchy. the first victims of en-masse death by zyklon-b gas in this particular camp were about 500 soviet prisoners gassed in the hallway of the barracks in late 1942. and that same year, over 1000 prisoners died from a typhus outbreak. after 1942, things just got worse and worse.....the cycle spiralled downward......prisoners and guards alike beginning to consider these miserable conditions to be simply 'the status quo', and as such, allowing things to deteriorate until the end finally came in 1945.

but just before liberation, the nazis evacuated the camp, marching the exhausted and starving prisoners to Sandbostel, where they were
abandoned without food or water, fighting each other over every crumb
they could find. this is the condition in which they were found by the British and US troops who eventually arrived to rescue those who
remained alive.

7000 prisoners from Neuengamme died on board three ships that the nazis had crammed them onto during the evacuation of the camp in 1945 -- the british mistook these prison ships for german army transport ships, and bombed them from airplanes.

it's all so hard to take in......the way that war brings out the very
worst, and also the very best in people....
when i visited amsterdam, and went through the house where anne frank
and her family hid for three years from the nazis (before being discovered and shipped to concentration camps), i could see the best in people -- the courage of the people who hid the frank family, at great risk to themselves.....the patience and caution of these exuberant teenage sisters, who held in their tantrums and cut short their songs so they could survive through this time....and the story told by anne's childhood friend, who encountered anne in 1945 in the auschwitz camp and managed to give her some food and clothes when anne had lost everything and everyone who was dear to her in the world (anne died soon after, just a month before the liberation of auschwitz, without knowing that her father was still alive).

and the worst of people....
the way the nazi regime was able to commit the most heinous atrocities thanks to the complacency, apathy and complicity of the german population.....some resisted, but most were taken in by hitler's appeal to the 'common german', who felt oppressed and victimized by the unfair conditions imposed by the treaty of versailles after the first world war. in many ways, the two wars are
really one war....the rise of fascism directly following the effects of world war one....

but i still couldn't really understand, no matter how deeply i looked
into their photos, just _what_ was in the minds of those nazi soldiers that guarded the camp. there was definitely fear, fear of being pointed out and picked upon and called out as 'the other', and being on the other side of the fence. there was this definite feeling in their eyes that they _had_ to do this, or be kiled themselves. but again, it's so hard to decipher....when a man becomes a soldier, he stops thinking. the military is organized as a hierarchy, so the soldiers at the bottom _depend_ on the integrity of the rule at the top. they put their whole faith in their leaders, because if they began to question authority, the whole structure would break down. and this is true of any military .....I just read _the red badge of courage_ about a soldier in the US civil war, who joins up with idealism and courage, and soon finds out he is part of a unit that is expected to _die_ -- to charge into impossible odds, and to die, with courage and selflessness, because it will serve
the larger strategy of the battle. to do this they must believe with
all their hearts that their leaders know best, or they would all
certainly run away. and that struggle is the real battle of war, the
battle to keep the footsoldiers from running away. for they act as a
group, and once some start running, there becomes a mob, for those who remain know that the odds of their winning the battle, small enough to begin with, grow smaller with each soldier that runs away.

the problem is not just that there is a horrible leader. the problem is the 'groupthink' that makes mass numbers of people follow this leader because they are afraid. the problem is the structure that _requires_ complete faith in leadership. if people started taking responsibility for their own actions -- every one of their actions, instead of appealling to a chain-of-command to claim responsibility for them, then maybe things like this wouldn't happen. to
me that is the most important thing to come out of the horror of the
holocaust -- the nuremberg judgment which ruled that soldiers have a
right and a _duty_ to disobey orders which are morally repugnant.
so why do we still have abuses like those at abu-ghraib prison in
iraq?? the nagging question persists at the back of my head -- and the answer, that the real problem is the _structure_ _itself_, keeps poking into my subconscious thought......perhaps it is this hierarchy that is the problem.

at the end of his book _peace_eyes_, my late mentor father mcsorley had visited five continents, and hundreds of activists and groups working for peace, and he had questioned all of them on the causes of war and how it could be prevented. his encounters and experiences brought him to the realities of injustice, the growing gap between the rich and poor, the division of people into 'highers' and 'lowers' that created the resentments that would lead people to war. and the continual theft of resources by the rich -- the violence of colonialism -- has led to a modern world that cannot seem to reconcile itself to this reality ....
the rich remain fiercely oblivious to the theft of land and resources, the killing and the pillaging being done in their name, while the poor remain powerless and resentful. this combination can only lead to violence -- and it is only by recognizing and changing their lifestyle that the rich can really hope to curb the attacks against them that will invariably result from this structure.

well....I haven't even talked about England....but I'll be back there in January, maybe I can sum it up then....
For now, I am off to the turbulent Holy Land.

love
jenka