Writing in cinnabar red ink

We arrived by train at the station in Oranienburg, the self-same station that the inmates of this concentration camp arrived in. They would have been met by SS and marched to the camp, a distance of just over 1 km. The houses along the road are detached dormer-type homes with shiny glazed roofs. The gardens, all well kept. The SS guards lived in these houses apparently the design exactly the same as in Dachau and Buchenwald.

At the main entrance, Tower A. The gate has the grotesque and dishonest maxim ‘Work will set free!’. Work in this setting would never have set anyone free.

In this camp perhaps 250,000 passed through and between 60-70,000 were systematically murdered.

A tract of land excluded from the neighbouring town by the erection of a wall where more than death was planned and executed. A grand, terrifying scheme of torture, debasement and degradation was meted out here. Even the naming of the towers from A to Station Zed, the chamber of death was macabre. Terms like ‘execution trench’, ‘gas chamber’, and innocuous terms like ‘barrack’, ‘kitchen’, hospital’ were not and never were innocent or ordinary terms in this setting.

The so called hospital where no Jew or gypsy was ever treated, served as the centre for experimentation on living human beings to intentionally and ruthlessly inject with disease whilst studying the nature of disease progression and testing for the elusive cure. How many people were subjected to this inhumane treatment and suffered and died too? A misuse of a dissecting table.

And there was a prison too, a prison in a concentration camp! The hierarchy of defilement meant that criminals, petty criminals were more valued as human beings and better treated and dealt less contumely than the true innocents- this was an unimaginable space of desecration of values- whatever hell is or the realm of perfidy, this place was it.

Our guide, Pietro, a young Italian talked about Himmler, a vegetarian who was said to faint or puke at the sight of blood- yet, invented and elaborated an industrial system of murder. The system for murdering Russian soldiers was callous and cunning. First you deceive them to believe they are about to be released, next you spruce them up in a bath and shower and then ask them to stand against a wall to be measured for your new uniform but your killer fits a gun in a hole behind the base of your skull and fires to kill.

It was an ordinary day here at Sachsenhausen. The sky was blue and flawless. The sun was out and there was a gentle breeze. But in 1941, it was anything but. If you were not being punished, you were being tortured, or working or underfed, or sick, or being experimented upon. The odds were your life was at grave risk. Simply put you were likely to be willfully murdered by the SS.

It was the most dispiriting outing of my life. This is what we are capable of, us human beings.

In the evening we went to a jazz concert at B flat club. A trio led by a Russian guitarist, a student in Cologne was playing. It was very delicate music, not raucous, not introspective either. But, balanced and poised as if each note was a trapeze artist on the rope and the tension bobbed the wire up and down and steadied the next note. I had a glass of Portuguese red that I nursed all night long. Outside, when we came out, was still cool, even.