Germany

Dear Aunt Karen,

I was so pleased to receive your email and hear your thoughts about the blog! I actually sent you a postcard from Germany (oops, I spoiled the surprise), so it should be there soon! In the meantime, I would love to share some thoughts about my experience there.

I've been fighting myself for a couple of days now. I know I need to write about Germany and process my time there before entering Belgium tomorrow. On the other hand, every time I lift a pen to paper to draft a blog post, my hand freezes and I can't continue. It is as though I'm paralyzed. In Germany, I visited a concentration camp.

I want to offer a warning in advance: this post is about feelings. If feelings make you squeamish, know that I enjoyed Germany and apart from the concentration camp did a number of fun things there. I ate bratwurst, tackled the language barrier, and spoke to some locals in Rostock. I went to Berlin, ate German pastries, and strolled through the seaside town of Warnemunde. If you want, you can stop reading here.

Sachsenhausen

The camp I went to is about an hour away from Berlin, and is called Sachsenhausen. As opposed to a death camp where prisoners were essentially sent to die, Sachsenhausen is a labor camp where prisoners were forced to perform grueling work that likely led to death. The camp was open from 1936-1945 and housed male political prisoners, Roma, homosexuals, and some Jewish people (about 20% of the camp was Jewish. If you had gone in believing that only Jewish people were imprisoned, Sachsenhausen may surprise you). It is also the first place that gas chambers were tested as an "effective" method of killing large numbers of people.

I call this a post about feelings, but more accurately I could call this a post about un-feeling, which is the only word I can think of to describe my experience.

In Poland, I visited the site of the first battle of World War II. I stood in the remains of a bunker that was blown to bits, killing many of the soldiers there. At the concentration camp, I stood in the very same spot where Jewish prisoners were cramped three to a bed; I gazed at the closet where soldiers would beat prisoners and leave them to die... I was there. And I didn't have the moment I thought I would have.

I felt sad, of course. I felt disgusted, and horrified, and angry, and at some points nauseous. But when I went to these places, I expected some sort of transcendent experience that would make my hair stand on end, my heart stop, and a chill run through my body. I expected the world to disappear and to suddenly, personally, comprehend the horrors the victims were forced to endure. I thought my heart would feel heavy and I would leave changed, with a deeper connection to this world.

That didn't happen to me.

I call this a post about un-feeling because while I felt all those understandable, upsetting emotions, I never got that moment -  deep, physical, intense - that I was anticipating. How could I, this introspective American student who had entered the camp so open to a deeper connection to the universe leave without this transcendent experience? Was there something wrong with me?

The answer, as you may expect, is no. There is nothing wrong with me. The feeling I was searching for is rare, and fleeting, and can for many be disturbing. You don't have to have an out of body experience to understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

I am on the trip of a lifetime with the opportunity to embrace history, culture, beauty, and also the atrocities of this world. There are some days when I feel as though its real, and that I really am in these incredible places. Sometimes I need to close my eyes, because the immensity of it all overwhelms me. There are moments that are mundane, and some that have felt life-changing. It's a combination of those things that make the experience what it is.

Sometimes you feel things, and that's good. Sometimes you don't feel what you thought you would, and that's okay too.



Sorry, Aunt Karen, that you got a post that was sort of heavy. Maybe the postcard can make up for it.

Tomorrow, to Belgium! (and the Netherlands, and France)...

Love,

Nicole