However, I'm perfectly okay with it being March, because March means that I can start to be slightly more optimistic about spring. No matter how pretty the snow is in Copenhagen (see
exhibit A on the right), I've had ENOUGH. Snow isn't so appealing when you have to walk around in it! The pictures look pretty, but every time you take your hand out of your pocket, it gets progressively more painful, even with gloves. I'm surprised my hands haven't fallen off yet. Even
though I told everyone I was going to Copenhagen for the spring semester, that was a lie. I'm in Copenhagen for the winter semester, with a little bit of spring at the very end. I just keep telling myself that I'll appreciate Copenhagen even more in the spring now that I've experienced the winter. I can just tell that all the gardens and landscaping will be so beautiful by May! I understand why the Danes need hygge to get through winter.
Anyway, this past weekend, I traveled to Hamburg with my Holocaust and Genocide class (and my hopes for spring were falsely raised when it was 8°C on Saturday!). Even though it was a short trip (only Saturday and Sunday), I learned a lot and it was great to finally see another city in Europe besides Copenhagen. Hamburg is actually quite different from Copenhagen, which I wasn't really expecting. Because about 80% of the city was completely destroyed by bombs during WWII, the city is much more modern, and has a completely different feel to it. Also, everything is in German (duh) and I can't even pronounce the street names (much to the chagrin of my very German family, I'm sure). Believe it or not, it was a relief to come back to Copenhagen and see Danish again. It felt like coming home!
But I digress. On Saturday we left much too early in the morning and took a bus to Hamburg, including a massive ferry across the Baltic Sea from Denmark to Germany. We went to the Hamburg Museum and saw some interesting exhibits on the war in Hamburg, and I was greatly amused by the fact that one of the display rooms was labeled "1998" and had an old Mac computer and printer. 1998 is in museums already?? I feel old. Most of Saturday we just walked around and saw some of the city, and then in the evening we went to a delicious German restaurant (as usual, DIS feeds us well). I have to say, one thing Germany does better than Copenhagen is cheap beer! It really is cheaper than most water. Then I was lame and went to bed at 9:30 at the hostel (the earliest I've gone to bed since my jet lag the first few days here!), but I didn't regret it because we had a very full day ahead of us.
On Sunday, we were thrown headfirst into dealing with the tough stuff. After seeing a bit of the city, including the remains of a church that was bombed in 1943, the first stop was just outside of Hamburg, at an old school building. In 1945, shortly before the Nazi regime fell, the SS wanted to remove all evidence of what they had been doing. At Neuengamme, they had been performing tuberculosis experiments on twenty Jewish children, so they brought them to this school building and hanged them. There is now a small rose garden in memoriam of this awful event, and for me it was much more powerful than any of the big Holocaust memorials because they had a plaque with each child's picture and how old they were when they died. It made the war seem so much more personal and horrible,
especially because they were children between the ages of 5 and 12.
Then we headed to Neuengamme concentration camp, which is about 15 km outside of Hamburg. For some reason, in my head I had convinced myself that the camp wasn't as bad as some of the more well-known ones, since they didn't have as many Jews and there wasn't much gassing. But my assumptions were totally wrong. The prisoners at Neuengamme were worked to death, and in some ways this was even more horrible. Of the over 100,000 men that went through the camp, about half of them died. That's a lot of people. The conditions were absolutely horrible--12 hour work days, even in the winter, wearing only a thin layer of clothing and sometimes no shoes. This was better appreciated by the fact that we were standing out there for 2 hours shivering, even though we had many warm layers on. They had to either lug around clay to make bricks (there was a brick factory there), or dig out a canal. Much of the work had to be done at a running pace, or else you were beaten. If you were beaten, it meant death because you were so malnourished from lack of food and sleep that your wounds probably wouldn't heal. Most men only lasted a few miserable months. Add to that extremely crowded sleeping quarters, often 3 to a bed, and most of them had diarrhea because they were so unhealthy. It
was very sobering to walk around the camp and know that almost everywhere you walked, someone probably died there. No matter how much you learn about these camps, it is very chilling to actually walk in one.
The two barracks on either side are original (one of them is pictured), and one of them had a very good exhibit on life in the camps and how it has been used since. The camp was used as a real prison until 2003, if you can believe it! Naturally, friends and relatives didn't like this, as they couldn't even go on the premises to pay their respects or lay flowers. On the right of the picture, you can see an outline with stones, which is where the wooden barracks that most prisoners slept in were located. It's hard to describe what it's like to see this and realize that these atrocities were actually committed. It was very sobering and if nothing else, I walked away with the knowledge that I'm extremely blessed to have such a great life. It makes the small complaints of life seem silly and unnecessary, and made me appreciate all my friends and family and the warm, clean bed I have every night. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
So, life is very, very good. This coming Saturday I'm leaving for my long study tour to France already! I'm starting to get VERY excited. I need to brush up on my French. Probablement, je vais seulement dire "excusez-moi" et "merci" parce que je suis un lâche!
P.S. In case you were wondering, the quote in the title is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was on a plaque at the church memorial in Hamburg.
I recognize where the snow picture is taken!
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