Neuengamme

Location: Westbound in the North Sea

Hey everyone! Long time no post. We are now leaving Hamburg and heading for Antwerp, Belgium; the ship is taking its time, so we should be there in three days. Germany was busy but great - I actually liked it there a lot more than St. Petersburg. Since I have so much to catch up on, I'm going to break this down into the individual days:

–– Hamburg, Day 1: 9/5/13 ––

After staying up fairly late to listen to the entirety of the second installment of "The World According to Boyer" (our Geography professor always presents a vey entertaining overview of the countries we are about to visit) I was tired and without much of a plan for what I would be doing the next morning. My roommate, Emily, was in the same boat. She offered that I tag along with her and some friends who were going to "Find an internet cafe." That sounded pretty good to me, because it meant I wouldn't by traveling by myself and that I could then plan what I was going to do for the next few days.

So that morning I packed my laptop into a little backpack that I brought and set out with Emily and her friends. As it turned out, we were a group of all girls and I made the 13th person. Nobody else had laptops or backpacks. That was when I began to wonder if this internet cafe plan was going to materialize. I wondered that a lot in the coming hours.

We followed people to the nearest metro station, where we had a bit of trouble figuring out which tickets to buy since the English translation button was broken and none of us spoke German. Where were we going? I still wasn't sure! Everyone else in the group was planning to go to Berlin and stay overnight the next day, so we all hopped on the train to the central terminal to figure out how they would go about getting bus tickets for that. On our way, we bumped into another group who were being led by a very speedy old woman to the station to get to the Neuengamme concentration camp, which had been turned into a memorial/museum. Our group decided to follow them (though we lost sight almost immediately, with one of the guys shouting back to us that the stop was "Bergedorf.") What ensued was a very interesting situation during which no single person seemed to know where we were going, but as a group we made it onto the train and then on the bus to Neuengamme with relatively few problems. We then found ourselves winding through a little neighborhood in the outskirts of Hamburg. The houses were lovely, and each was equipped with a cute little garden. We reached our stop and were deposited in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, with a couple residential houses on one side and a corn field on the other. Someone thought that we should walk down the street paralleling the cornfield, so we did.

It was a beautiful warm day with a cool breeze, and the atmosphere seemed so calm and happy walking down the street beside the gently swaying cornfield that by the time we arrived at Neuengamme it began to just seem creepy. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but outwardly there were no signs that tens of thousands of people had been killed there almost 70 years before. I always pictured the world as still being grayer and colder by the Nazi concentration camps, and the juxtaposition was unnerving.

We first walked around the memorial area out front, and then through a little forest to see the warehouses where prisoners were forced to work. We didn't really meet any other people until we we walked across a field (with little wildflowers growing all over it) and into a portion of the camp with informational displays (there were always sections in English), at which point we passed several groups of German schoolchildren who were on field trips to the camp. I think one of the most impacting things I saw at this part of the camp was the book that they kept as a register of all the prisoners. The people's names were right there––Auguste Martin was born the 11th of November, 1906 and was killed on February 2 of 1941. Also written down was the person's ethnicity, the prisoner number that they were given, and a brief description of how they died. Many were not executed outright but died because of the work, the harsh conditions, and their treatment by the guards. Every person's death was recorded so calmly and precisely, with little quotation marks on subsequent lines when a several people all died in the same way and the recorder didn't want to take the time to write it out on each line.

We were there for several hours. We spoke with a man sitting at an information desk in one of the buildings, and he told us that buses left every half an hour from a stop close by (not the one we arrived at) so our group split in half with those wanting to go early leaving half an hour before my group. When my group reached the bus (there are now six of us) we once again managed to get on the right one, and then to the correct train, and we navigated ourselves back toward the center of Hamburg. We spent the rest of the afternoon meandering around and finding food, after which we headed back to the station next to the ship. Note that I have been carrying my laptop with me this entire time.

When we left the original station we headed right across the street (within visual distance of the ship) and found that a little ice cream shop there had free WiFi. Finally! So I was able to get online, and look up what I wanted to do for the next few days while the rest of the group headed back to the ship. (I eventually went back too.)

Well, that's all I've got for day one, and this took long enough that I'd better head to lunch now. Stay tuned for day two!