Happy New Year, and welcome back to my journals about my journey to Germany. My nephew (a college sophomore) visited me over the break and together we celebrated the holidays and explored parts of Germany that I didn’t previously have an opportunity to visit, such as the cities of Erfurt and Weimar, as well as Europe’s largest indoor waterpark near Berlin. Besides visiting these fun places, I felt it was important to also visit a more somber place – a concentration camp located on the outskirts of Berlin called Sachsenhausen. The reality of Germany is that this country has lived through many tragedies, from being at the center of two world wars to the Berlin Wall and the Holocaust, making it impossible to talk about my experience here without mentioning the impact of these traumatic events. Today I will talk about a few ways that Germany remembers and memorializes its troubled past.
Sachsenhausen is located less than an hour’s train ride from Berlin. It is now a memorial that allows visitors to see the remaining buildings of one of the first concentration camps opened by the Nazis in 1936. The camp served as a ‘model’ for the many other camps that were built across Nazi Germany and its occupied territories in the following years.
