“And here’s where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
And it’s so sad to see the world agree
That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes”
—from the song “Holland, 1945″ by Neutral Milk Hotel
I don’t know. I’m in a mood, I suppose. I’ve grown up in relative comfort and even now, as broke as I am, there is still a certain level of comfort. I pay my bills on time, I have food, and I have books and some entertainment. I have friends. Even now, the struggles that I’m facing don’t seem all that dire. I don’t have a sense of permanence in this situation. That’s not to say that I take the status of my life for granted. I do not. I know that it could be a lot worse. I’ve seen places in which circumstances were much worse.
I was listening to the album In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel a couple of days ago. I have been listening to it this morning as well. The album is beautiful and noisy and plaintive. And it is very, very good. And the album, by many fans’ accounts, is loosely based around Anne Frank. Jeff Mangum, the creative force behind the record, has never denied this and has gone so far as to talk about how much of the album was inspired by recurring dreams he had about a Jewish family during World War II.
I don’t know if I chose this record to listen to this week because I hadn’t heard “King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1″ in a while, or if it was influenced by the fact that I recently looked over the photos I took while studying in Europe a few years back. Maybe it was a little of column A and a little of column B. Who knows? I do know that while listening to the album, my thoughts did turn to the speculative inspiration for it.
I thought about the concentration camp that I had visited. The visit to the camp was strange and surreal. We boarded a bus outside of Berlin that took us to our destination. The driver, who spoke very good English, announced that “Final stop! Concentration camp. Exit, please, to your right.”
After the war, the camp, Sachsenhausen, had been co-opted by the GDR as a monument to the “persecuted communists” and the “heroic Soviet liberators.” The GDR had tried to distance itself from the Nazis while simultaneously suggesting that the true inheritors of the national socialism ethos were the West Germans. One of the ways in which they attempted to do this was by re-imagining the entire history of the camp. There was a large stain-glass window depicting a soldier and the people he rescued. Apparently, the GDR minimized the types of other victims who were interned at the camp while focusing mostly on the Communists. However, there were Jewish prisoners there. And educators. And homosexuals. And children. All of them were victims, and none of them should have been marginalized in memorialization. However, when a new government, aligned with the growing factions of the Communist Eastern Bloc, needed a sort of founding myth, those individuals who did not fit into that myth were pushed to the sides.
Now the camp sits, partly as a memorial to the past political battles of post World War II Germany and partly as a memorial to all of the victims of the attrocities witnessed on the camp’s grounds. The yard of the camp began at the point of a watchtower and fanned out in a triangle shape so that the guards could shoot down anyone who may have fallen out of line. There are recreations of the bunk houses. The watchtowers and the walls of the yard still stand. The gate outside still spells out “Arbeit macht frei,” and it is every bit as ominous as you can imagine. And yet, these are not the parts of the camp that bothered me.
I remember walking along the wall of the yard with my group, all of us students from the University of Washington. I was quiet, respectful, and a bit contemplative. However, I didn’t have any sort of emotional reaction until we walked around the corner of the wall and lying before us was the execution trench. Instantly, my stomach sank and the tight, burning knot of tears lodged itself in my throat. My legs were weak as we walked toward and then around it. I didn’t dare step foot in the trench, although you could if you wanted to do so.
In the distance, about a hundred yards away was a white awning. Our teacher and guide lead us toward it, and I slowed my pace. It was impossible to hold back tears, so a few escaped. It was cold that day, bitterly so. It was spitting snow. My cheeks were red and hardened by the cold, causing my tears to freeze for a few seconds.
We stopped underneath the awning, which covered the foundation and the partially standing walls of a building. At their highest point, the walls were maybe two-feel tall. But for the most part, they only stood a couple of inches, just enough to serve as the outlines for the rooms. Our teacher described to us each of the rooms: one into which the victims were brought, one in which the victims’ height was taken before being shot in the back of the neck with a gun, one in which the victims’ bodies were taken and the gold fillings extracted from their teeth. To the right were the ovens…and the ovens were still standing. It was at this point that I lost all control and began sobbing uncontrollably. I was only able to breath enough to keep myself standing, and I was only able to muster enough strength to repeat “It’s not right. It’s not fucking right.”
I don’t remember much after that. I remember we walked back to the information area and book shop, and that once the class had gathered together, I left to walk back to our bus alone. I sat there by myself for about half an hour or so. When I got back to my apartment in Berlin, I started an instant message conversation with a friend back in Seattle describing what had happened to me. “Don’t go to Dachau or Auschwitz,” he said. “Don’t go to where they got shit done.” Later in the conversation he said, “My advice? Get out of that city for a while. Travel. Go to Paris. You need to go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower and the art that’s there.” By the end of the conversation, I had purchased a ticket to Paris and had booked a week-long stay in a hostel in the Latin Quarter.
However, it is impossible to get away from memorialization in places like Europe, especially in Germany. I have never been to a place that wears such recent history so openly on its sleeve. I was always kind of amazed. The Nazis forced Jewish people, Communists, and homosexuals to wear badges of fabric to show to the rest of the camp and the soldiers why these people were interned. Now, nearly seventy years later, the citizens of Germany walk around in cities that bare the scars of war. They visit libraries, the outer walls of which are riddled with bullet holes. They keep parks, host memorial monuments, and hold services in churches with bombed-out sanctuaries. Single pavement stones have been removed from the sidewalks outside of houses in which Jewish people who were interned once lived. These stones have been replaced with brass “stumbling blocks” that show the names and information for these individuals, when they were born, where they were sent, and the dated that they died if they, in fact, did die while in camp. Klara Winkler. That’s the name on the first stumbling block that I came across. She lived not too far from where I lived. She died in Auschwitz years before I was born. However, the stone didn’t say that she died. The stone said “ermordet,” the German word for “murdered.”
I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam while I was there. I walked through the Secret Annex. I looked out of the windows and could not possibly fathom hiding in secret, hesitating to breath too deeply or walk too heaviliy for two years. I have never known true oppression. Nor have I known even the basest fear. I hope to never know these things. To me, they are the absolute truest evil that humankind possesses and its most helpless emotion. I suppose that this is the reason why I am not too phased by the news regarding things like our nation’s credit rating downgrade or any of the things that most of the politicians in our country use to divide us. Sure, those things breed frustration and impotence. However, it shouldn’t make us feel helpless. All we need is perspective.
