There can be no poetry after Ravensbruck

It’s easy to see why Berlin attracts enthusiastic visitors from around the globe. It’s an exciting, dynamic city with museums, galleries, and monuments – that together make for one of the world’s most compelling cultural ensemble. But that’s only three-quarters the reason why Berlin is on everybody’s mind.

This city, which harboured an exceptionally large and vibrant Jewish community, will always be remembered as the place from where the extermination of European Jews was planned and directed. Now so many years later, in memory of Hitler’s victims, Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials have been erected around the city. History has been turned successfully into an exhibit, pacified into culture.

When I display a keenness to visit the concentration camp of Ravensbruck, a notorious woman’s camp during World War II, which sits just 90 kilometres north of Berlin, my German host shudders slightly. She says: “Why do you want to see Ravensbruck? You’ve already seen the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe and the Jewish Museum right here in Berlin?” As if she would prefer that peripheral glimpse, but not a look too deep into the troubled course of German-Jewish history.

I want to respond in the words of Gertrud Muller, a prisoner at Ravensbruck, who wrote in her foreword to a book about this camp: “I hope this tour will help me comprehend the scope of the crimes committed here out of racial hatred and anti-semitism and that the terrible suffering I witness will encourage me to join the struggle for inalienable human rights and a just world order.”

But no words come. Perhaps my German host thinks I’m just another tourist with a morbid interest for delving into the criminal depths of humankind, with this visit being one more stop to sandwich between an art-gallery visit and a beer-drinking session. Given the travellers that pour in just to check off yet another box in their travel guides, who can blame her?

On the train that takes us to Ravensbruck, a fellow-passenger overhears us discussing the place and warns in ominous tone: “Use your map and follow the signposts on the street. Try not to ask for directions to the camp. The camps are not discussed. We’ve moved away from all that.”

Ravensbruck itself is a ghost town; a town of unquiet shades, a speechless sermon on the Mount. There’s no taxi at the station. Not a soul in sight. So we set off along a sign-posted route, past neat homes with clipped lawns and white picket fences. Slowly a marzipan-like quality blossoms – we pass through a rustic wood and by a lake upon which ducks float wordlessly.

We arrive at Ravensbruck. Now no more than a shadow of concrete and horror. Everything prepared us for this – years of films, newsreel and photographs. Yet nothing shields us from the scale of the horror.

As we walk from the visitor’s centre to the SS headquarters – the administration centre of the concentration camp that now serves as the Memorial’s central exhibition space – we confront accounts by women inmates from different countries. Although each has her own voice, the degrading treatment is similar. Further ahead, past the camp gate and guard station, prisoners’ compound and SS canteen, tuberculosis ward and gas chamber, burial ground and execution-passage – is the cell building or camp prison that the prisoners referred to as bunker. This was an integral part of the camp’s penal system and the site of acts of particular cruelty.

The more we see outside, the more our journey grows
inward.

My German friend says with tears in her eyes as we look at the tiny punishment cubicles, “I hope this upsets you. I hope you stay upset, because sustained dismay at what went on here is the best hope to ensure a crime of this intensity will not be committed again.” But more than dismay, I leave with this particular resolve. I know that when someone asks about my concentration camp experience, I will not change the subject, nor will I gloss it over, nor will I encourage them to stick solely to the sights in Berlin.