Easter tour Day 6 (Berlin): Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

We wake up early in the morning, so that we can set off at 8 something for a nearby town Oranienburg to visit the Sachsenhausen museum which used to be a concentration camp opened in 1936.

Our hostel!

We arrived at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp at around 10pm. Since we drove all the way there, we rented the audio tour guides because we were pretty interested in the history in germany and the concentration camps. The audio guides are super long, with supposedly 4 hours of information. In the beginning, we were really interested and since the audios were too long, we assigned each person to a different chapter on the audio and exchanged summaries of what we had heard.










Their beds

Jail



Turns out you don't really need the audio guides because many of the exhibitions have english write-ups and there was seriously an overload of information. You have more than enough information to read, although the audio-guides do give some addition information not included in the exhibits. You can probably listen to them though, as you walk between the different features of the concentration camp.

As we walk from building to building, it is a rather windy day and the ground is still barren. There is no snow so you can see the ground, but there's still no grass and its a rather depressing sight. All in all, its a depressing day to visit a depressing place. As I walk around and the wind blows, I actually feel chills down by back, I guess a combination from both the eerie stories and the horrid cold. I have no idea how we managed to spend three and a half hours at this place, probably because there was just so many things to see and so many stories to hear and read about. But seriously after a while, it kind of gets to you. Of the 3 of us, I think SC got affected the first, while I was still reading on. I remember SC re-telling me a story he heard about the burning of 10,000 Russians and I can almost feel the emotion in his voice as he tells me the story. After he tells me the story, I start feeling depressed too. When we visited this underground morgue and saw the table top where the prisoners were laid for examinations and experiments, it just felt so eerie!!... SC was like... ok, I had enough and walked out immediately and I followed after.


Windy and cold day.


Layout of camp. Designed to kill fleeing prisoners...

Actually, the whole concentration camp is seriously very interesting and there is loads to tell, but I'm getting depressed just by writing down what I've written already, so yeah... no more.. ask me when I'm feeling better.

Need break now...

Berlin day 2 part 2