My travel card in Berlin, 1991.

One late afternoon we went for a walk around East Berlin. Lots of Trabant parked around, a very few shops: the differences with the western side was striking. In the evening we stopped at a small fast-food, where we had bratwürst and chips.

The owner was the only person there, so he decided to sit with us for a chat. We spent an hour listening to him passionately complaining about the changes they were incurring with the dissolution of the DDR, and his fears of this seismic shift in what looked like an uncertain future.

He even cried at the end, which caught us off guard. Right before we left, he patiently suggested a quick way for us to go back to West Berlin, because in his opinion that area of the Eastern side was not safe for youngsters at such a late hour.

Us in Berlin, summer 1991. Photo: Ornella Domenicali.

Chasing Ghosts

It took me two decades to finally find the will to go to the bottom of this story. For years, I painstakingly collected pieces of information: small details that each one of us in the family might have heard, from private conversations with him or elsewhere. The endpoint was always Sachsenhausen.

My father showed me several artifacts his dad brought home after the journey back from Germany. A spoon (pictured below), a plate with a swastika on the bottom and several tins and bowls.

The spoon my grandfather brought home from Sachsenhausen.

I went back to Berlin in 2011, a few months before I moved to the UK. It was a completely different beast, compared to my memories from two decades earlier. The fascination stayed with me for a while and didn’t wane until a few years later.

I visited several times in the last eight years. More recently, I’ve filed requests for information: the first with the people responsible for the archives at the camp; later with the International Tracing Service in Germany.

The responses arrived within 24 months. This I received from the Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen:

I inform you that no documents have been found in our archives. Most of the files of the administration of concentration camp Sachsenhausen were destroyed by the SS before the evacuation of the camp. Among those were nearly all of prisoners’ files with exact personal data and photographs of the prisoners. Those records which have survived are kept in various archives, mainly in archives of the Russian Federation […]

This plaque was erected by the Communist GDR government, to commemorate the Death March undertaken by the prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp under the Nazi government. The GDR placed emphasis on political prisoners over the other groups held at Sachsenhausen (Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals); hence the pictured prisoners are wearing red triangles (the symbol for political prisoners, particularly communists). — Wikipedia

Liberation

I was born at the beginning of the 1970s, so I have never had direct experience with war. I can’t imagine the kind of ordeal that people must have lived in that place. I had to see it in person.

The first in my family, and with crucial help from my wife, I eventually went to Sachsenhausen. The S-Bahn train from Central Berlin to Oranienburg served as a silent contemplation, where the rhythmic noise of the gear helped me thinking about all the connections. War, imprisonment, the great escape, freedom, the Cold War, propaganda, fear of a different holocaust. A cynical loop.

Ironically, the youth hostel (Jugendherberge) where I stayed in 1991 was located precisely in-between two of the S-Bahn stations from the route: Waidmannslust and Hermsdorf.

In my mind, the tannoy system calling each subsequent station was like reading a different chapter of the story. From 1945 Berlin to 1991 Berlin, when I first made the other way round. Eventually, the last stop anticipates a walk in the countryside towards what is now a memorial and a museum.

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei is written on the gate. I crossed it with a heavy heart, feeling all the weight of a personal watershed moment.

We saw there the very same artifacts he brought back with him: the spoon, the plate, the tin cans, and the wooden last he used to make. My family still own a few of them, and the ones found at the camp look identical. As a kid, I used to play with them in the courtyard.

Wooden last found in July 2006 during renovation work in the former prisoner’s kitchen.

To find the same familiar objects I’ve had in my house for so long, in what is now a memorial and a museum, was horrific. Walking around the concentration camp and see the barracks, the medical facilities, the execution trench, the gallows, the ovens, was a challenging task.

Yet, I still can’t fathom what his days could have been like, back then. Even the food, which is something he described in detail, matched with what is represented at the museum.

A spoon exhibited at Sachsenhausen.

In hindsight, I now understand why some of the objects he kept throughout the odyssey of travelling from Berlin to Italy — with the War still ravaging Europe — were tins, bowls and a spoon.

From the description at the Museum:

An eating bowl and a spoon were two of the very few possessions that prisoners were allowed. A prisoner’s daily rations generally consisted of one litre of watery soup with a little potato or swede (rutabaga) and about 300g of bread. Prisoners who were without a bowl and a spoon would not be able to get even this meagre food allowance. Above all, in the years 1944 and 1945, when the tens of thousands of inmates were not even issues with the most basic of items, a bowl and a spoon became valuable belongings to be guarded at all times.

I keep wondering what kind of friendship he had with the Russian inmate; if they were — in fact — friends; how exactly did they manage to escape: was that in Sachsenhausen or at a labor camps outside? Did he manage to go back to the Soviet Union? Did the Cold War make them enemies?