July 13, 2010

We left the hotel at 7:30 for a three hour drive west to Bergen-Belsen in West Saxony. We traveled on the autobahn for a while and then on country roads through little German towns. We arrived at their Education Center and were welcomed by a group of their teachers. We were given choices of four different themes for the day and met with one of their teachers. I worked with Martin Schellenberg, a historian. We discussed how to use primary photographs in our teaching. He guided us in using photos not to illustrate our theme, but to start with a photo and work out to observe, make assumptions, and then view the photo within its context. We were told that there were not photographs of Bergen-Belsen before liberation. Most of the photographs we have were taken to show what the armies did when they arrived; there were photos that were taken by soldiers, and albums found that belonged to victims, as well as photos taken secretly. Our main goal with photographs is to personalize the photograph by connecting it to real life.
We were then taken on a tour of the exhibit and then outdoors to the area where the camp stood. The museum is only two years old and is filled with primary photographs and documents of the camp. Bergen Belsen was first a camp for political prisoners, Gypsies and homosexuals. It was also a POW camp for Belgian, French, and Russian soldiers. As the war was coming to a class, several camps shipped their victims to Bergen-Belsen, tripling the number of people. Finally, the camp was used as a DP (displaced person) camp after the war. The exhibit was very well done with combinations of photos and documents and also running video of survivors from each type of situation. There was a section devoted to Anne Frank as she had been sent to, and died at Bergen-Belsen. The exhibit hall is partially located in an area that was part of the camp. Because the whole camp is considered a cemetery, the part of the exhibit hall over the cemetery was built to extend out and not touch the ground.
Because the camp had been burned after liberation due to the fact of a typhus epidemic, very little is left of the physical evidence. We walked along several cleared paths which seemed to run into a meadow. The paths were actually cut to represent the outline of the camp walls. To the side, we saw the remnants of a barracks which was noted by the bricks in a pattern . Several of the bricks had initials of prisoners scratched into their sides. There were artifacts such as cracked cups or tin bowls laying in the grass alongside flowers. It was such a quiet place - making all of us contemplate the fate of the prisoners.
We then walked through the mass graves and their markers. There were so many of them - large mounds covered with grass with a stone marker depicting the place, the month and year, and the number of dead (such as Bergen-Belsen, April 1943, 1000)
We all felt that the time spent there was way too short and that we wanted more time to explore. We struck out for the three hour bus ride home and back to Berlin for a another great meal, though the restaurant was not air conditioned, as is hardly anything else, and we all tended to melt. We walked back to the hotel through a lovely part of the city that reminded us of Fifth Avenue in New York. We managed to get to bed about 12:30 for a 6:45 wake up call!