through a glass dimly

Sometimes it seems like an injustice to an experience to try and reduce it to a short, few hundred word blog post. In this case I find that to be especially true. Just a few hours ago I returned from a weekend in Hamburg, Germany with my Holocaust and Genocide course; I don't need to elaborate any more on the purpose of the trip. 

The first place we visited was Bullenhuser Damm, where 20 Jewish children ages 5-12 and their caretakers were brought to be murdered after having been part of medical experimentation. Today the building houses both a kindergarten and a therapy center in addition to a memorial museum. The upper floor of the museum has the history of each victim and his/her picture. The bottom floor is the basement where the actual crime took place; the image of its cold, white-washed walls will stay with me for a long time. On the wall was a quotation from one of the men who did the deed: "I asked Trzebinski if this had to be done, and he said orders are orders." Chilling. Outside is a memorial rose garden, a very personal way of remembering the lives of these children, as opposed to a colossal bronze monument. Separated by just a row of bushes is a playground for the kindergarten: the hope of lives now lived and the remembrance of lives lost all too young, right next door to each other.   

Bullenhuser Damm 

The second site we visited was St. Nikolai Kirke. When the Allied forces fire-bombed Hamburg (it was an important port city and the second largest city in Germany) in the 1943 "Operation Gomorrah," the spire of St. Nikolai was one of the only things to survive; the entire city otherwise was in ruins, and thousands of Germans lost their lives. One of the memorial statues in front of the church reads "No man in the whole world can change the truth. One can only look for the truth, find it, and serve it. The truth is in all places." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer   

St. Nikolai Kirke

The third site we visited was the former location of the Neuengamme concentration camp outside of Hamburg. Over 100,000 people entered the gates of this camp; only half ever walked out. Many of those sent to this camp were political prisoners and were Russian, Polish, Norwegian, and Danish (the Danes who were there were resistance fighters). An eerie reality to this camp's location is that it was near enough to a residential area that people would walk past it in plain view while enjoying a nice Sunday stroll. The camp was  large, too; we walked around only part of it and still had covered a lot of ground. There were also memorial museum exhibits where, in as many cases as possible, the imprisoned were remembered individually through pictures, stories, and quotations. There's something to remembering the past in an individualized way; it helps you put a faces to the mass atrocities.  

former site of Neuengamme

What was going through my head during the weekend? On one level I was thinking about how you can read countless books and watch countless movies about the Holocaust but to actually visit places where those things you read about took place brings a whole new level of meaning. The rest was mainly a lot of questions: a lot of wondering why and how something that horrific could happen, how the value of a human life could be so diminished that millions could be taken without a second thought. There are so many factors involved that influenced the perpetrators and so many theories from researchers trying to make sense of them all (and I should know since I'm researching them for my final paper for this course). But at the end of the day no simple solution can be found and no explanation can suffice. Try as I may, I don't think I'll ever come to grips with why it happened. 

Or why brutal atrocities of any kind happen... which brings my thoughts quickly from the past to the present. Human lives are being trivialized, people are being abused, exploited, and killed. Now. Right now as I write this. Right now as you read this. It's too late to do anything about what happened in the '40s, but there's a lot going on in 2012, too. I hesitate to go off on an advocacy rant because whatever I tell anyone else to do I better be doing myself. 

But I think that the best way to remember those lives lost in the past is to do everything in our power to stop the cycles of destruction that are going on right now. At the root of these horrific events is the devaluing of a human life and the elevating of one life above another. That's where the problem starts. And we've seen where the problem ends... 

Whenever we look into the eyes of another human being, may we always see him or her as such, may we always give the dignity and respect that is deserving of a human life, and in doing so may we always remember that we are no more, nor no less, valuable than they.