Finding My Fix: Chronicles of a Travel Junkie

I stared at the graffitied wall on the other side of the river. This part of the world wasn´t as grey as it seemed to be in all the movies. I had just come from Sachsenhausen, in Oranienburg outside Berlin, where it was too sunny not to squint and the clouds puffed out low above the treeline. A few scattered birch trees weeped and swayed in a breeze I couldn´t feel. It carried no odor. The world within the concrete walls and guardtowers was silent except the crunching of gravel underfoot. I was standing in a concentration camp on the same earth where 12,000 people were effectively murdered.

The Germans and the victims have worked hard not to forget the horrors of their past. I walked through the compound which is now mostly grassy fields- most of the barbed-wire and bunkhouses have long been removed. The few that remain are well kept. Arcs of numbered concrete blocks mark where the other bunkhouses used to be.

The memorial is as peaceful as a graveyard. It is a graveyard. A mass grave lies just outside its triangular walls, an execution trench and burial ground for the ashes of the victims.

Would I have ever been able to survive the humiliation of having to relieve myself in a bucket that was passed around while I was forced to stand from dawn to dusk? Could I survive on one meal of cabbage soup a day? Could I survive walking 25 miles in one day in shoes that were too small? What about the psychological devestation of having absolutely no control over anything in my life? No hope of ever seeing the outside world or my loved ones? Could I survive the diseases? Sleeping in a room with three-hundred people? Could I even survive the smell? Or would I end up in the gallows? Shot in the back of the neck? Beaten to death like so many others? Or would I be one of those who ended her own life on that electrified barbed-wire fence?

Could this, something so horrific I cannot even describe it in words, ever happen again. I hope not; with every cell in my being, I hope not. But I know it can and it does.

Tags: 4. Europe, 4H. Germany, 7A. New York City, Travel

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