Reflections on Berlin

There have been a few moments during this year that have really affected my way of thinking about the world we live in and Berlin was one of those moments. During the week I spent there I had the opportunity to visit Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. Both of these experiences made me profoundly grateful that I live in the time and place that I do and gave me a whole new appreciation and understanding of the people who had to live in the time and place where these attrocities and offenses took place.

I was prepared as I could be for my feelings during and after visiting Sachsenhausen; I knew it was going to be tough, emotionally, to be in the same place where 200,000 people lost their lives during the Holocaust, so I walked in prepared to be emotionally ovewhelmed by the time I walked out. The day we went to Sachsenhausen was cold, rainy and windy; a pretty miserable day to be outside. I was feeling pretty bad for myself having to walk around outside in that kind of weather when I realized, I was healthy and well-fed, I had a shirt, a sweater, a coat, a scarf, comfortable shoes, and an umbrella. It made me think of the people who spent years there, experiencing the same weather, with only a camp issued uniform and thread-bare blanket. Suddenly my complaints were invalid and meaningless.

 We talked a lot during the time we spend at Sachsenhausen about the people who perpetrated the violence towards the Jews. Not Hitler and his buddies, but the everyday people who worked at the camps and tortured the inhabitants. None of us could fathom how people could treat others the way the Jews and other prisoners were treated. I know that sometimes people were caught in the Catch-22 of working at the camps or being sent to one as a sympathizer, but I still can't wrap my mind around the people who willing went to work everyday and contributed to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people. As I reflected on the events during the Holocaust, I was struck with the idea that although the perpetrators tried their hardest to strip away the humanity of their victims, they ultimately failed. What they did instead was remove their own humanity. I do not believe that one person can treat another the way the SS guards did and retain a shred of their own humanity.  History has remembered the victims as the ultimate examples of humanity, bravery, and strength, while the SS guards are remembered as monsters.

I do not understand how anyone during that time thought what they were doing was helpful to their society and it made me reflect on the world we currently live in. I wonder when people are going to understand that the discrimination and degradation of groups of people are not ways to improve society. We will never move forward as a global culture until we understand that keeping certain groups of people powerless for the betterment of society is a falsehood. It is only through building everyone up and giving equal opportunities for success that we can improve and grow. I think it is disappointing we are 60 years past the Holocaust, 35 years past the removal of the the Berlin Wall, and 20+ years since the genocide in Rwanda and the end of apartheid in South Africa, and we still have ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual discrimination all over the world. Sometimes it seems as if no one learns from the errors of history.  

What I wasn't prepared for was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. I thought going in that it was going to be a small museum that focused on Checkpoint Charlie and the role it played during the Cold War. It was so much more than that. All throughout the museum there were stories of people who fought against oppression of all kinds. From Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish man who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the concentrations camps, to Ghandi, to the people involved in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 against Communism, to the people who tried to escape East Berlin and make better lives for themselves in West Berlin. What impacted me the most was the stories about people who tried to escape East Berlin. The sheer desperation evident in their various escape ideas made me reevaluate what I understood about life in East Berlin under Communism. People tried to tunnel under the wall, they tried to climb over and risk being shot, they tried to hid in hidden compartments in cars (sometimes next to the engine), they tried to fly over in homemade flying machines that they made from looking at pictures in magazines, they hid themselves and their families inside machinery and construction equipment, they folded themselves up into suitcases, they stole passports and deceived innocent people to reunite their families, and one person even hollowed out a body sized cavity in two kayaks, hid between them, and was transported to West Berlin on the top of a car. The lengths that people went to, to get out of East Berlin and away from Communism were simply mind-boggling and that spoke volumes.

Seeing both of these places made me aware, in a way I have never been fully aware of before, of my extreme luck in being born when and where I was. I have said it before in this blog, but as American's of recent generations, we are sheltered from the reality of of these events. I don't mean that as a negative at all, it is just the reality of the situation. I know people have grandparents who fought in WW2, and so they probably have a better appreciation for what happened, but at the end of the day these things didn't happen on our continent and they didn't happen to our people. Most of us don't have family members who were taken to concentration camps and never heard from again, most of us don't have family members who were separated by a wall for 25 years, nor do we have family who experienced living under Communist rule. I didn't fully appreciate this until coming here and hearing people tell me about their grandparents who were sent to the Gulag in Siberia or listening to people tell me about what it was like living under Communism. Let me give you some examples: I went with two friends and a woman from Fulbright Hungary to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. We walked in and I didn't think anything special, it was just a museum at that point to me. However, the woman from Fulbright grew up under Communist rule in Hungary and she remembered very clearly what life was like. We walked in the door and went to buy tickets and she turned to us and said "I don't think I am going to go in." When we looked at her questioningly, she continued "I just think it will bring back too many memories and be too emotional." It hit me then, what I thought of as interesting history was her life. In my life, I had never had to think of Communism as anything other than old news because by the time I was old enough to care the Berlin Wall was down and Communism was not a threat. Another example of this happened in October when we were on our way to Slovakia for a Fulbright trip. I was sitting next to this same woman on the bus and told her I was excited about getting another stamp in my passport (I know, I know, that is such an American thing to do). She reminded me we wouldn't actually be going through a border check because of the Schengen agreement within the EU, and then continued to say  "I never want another stamp in my passport again." I was a little taken aback, so she explained the trvel restrictions she experienced growing up under Communism. The freedom to travel freely between places, something I have always taken for granted, was something she never would. 

I will walk away from my week in Berlin with a new found appreciation for where and when I come from and the opportunities I have been given in my life that were not afforded to people of earlier generations. When I teach my future students, I will be able to give them a more realistic protrayal of life during these times in history instead of the watered down textbook version.

 This week also made me think about the differences I could make in the world. If and when I ever get the chance to speak up for someone, I will. I will not sit silently and watch as one or thousands of people are marginalized and told they are not worthy of living the same life I am. I will value the freedoms I have been given and never take them for granted. My friend Abby put it perfectly when she said "it isn't the fact you were born with privileges, but it is what you do with the privileges you have been given."