Postings from Germany

Friday Good

Fair warning:  This is not the usual  cheery posting.

I read recently that all of 8 % of west Germans attend church regularly (only 2% in the former East Germany) though a majority of Germans identify themselves with a church and pay taxes to support the church.  Regardless there seems to be a deep and abiding relationship between public (civic) holidays and the Christian church calendar:  a day off for Good Friday, Easter, the day after Easter, the day after Pentecost, Corpus Cristi, Ascension Day, Mary's Ascension Day, Day of Repentance, All Saints' Day, etc (depending on where you live), is seen as almost a constitutional right even when the vast majority of recipients of these days off have no personal connection to the church and often little understanding of the meaning of the day. I am not a church-goer, but I figure, hey, if you get a day off work, you should at least be able to explain the meaning of the holiday.  I am in a minority on that question. 

THAT said, today is Good Friday, a federal holiday.  That means no shops or markets - financial or vegetable or liquor or clothes or department - are open.  Offices and businesses are closed, and public transportation operates on a reduced schedule. It is socially unacceptable to do any kind of obvious work on this day - no gardening or  heavy house work or clothes washing or sidewalk sweeping or window washing or shed painting. (But restaurants and movie houses are open - it's a holiday after all.)

With limited options for activities, I chose to do something I have intended to do since before I moved to Germany.  Today we visited a memorial to a Nazi concentration camp.

I didn't undertake this as a casual outing or day trip, but rather a pilgrimage, perhaps appropriate to this day.

Bergen-Belsen is not far - less than an hour and a half by car. Strange. There are no big signs to direct you to the site - you have to be looking for it to find it.  And when you find it, it's bit incongruous:   a lovely setting, the heath and the juniper trees on gently rolling slopes where you know unspeakable evil was done.

Bergen-Belsen began operation in 1939 as a forced labor camp for construction workers. Then in 1941 it was converted to a prisoner of war camp for Russian soldiers and in 1943 became a transfer and labor camp for Jews, mostly women.  Unlike Auschwitz, there were no mass cremation ovens here; death was by hunger and disease.  But that by the thousands.

At least 30,000 Jews, 40,000 prisoners of war and  20,000 others died here. The grounds of the camp are now a park; the barracks that housed the luckless souls were burned to the ground soon after the liberation on April 15, 1945.  Memorials mark their mass graves; a few individual markers placed later memorialize individuals who died there, the most famous of whom is Anne Frank.  Above is the marker erected to her and her sister.  And below a photo of her placed on top of another memorial and dotted with stones.

Why the stones scattered around?  We'd seen them before at other Jewish cemeteries in Prague and here in Germany.  There are various explanations for the practice, but one I like suggests that the visitor who leaves a stone is saying: I remember you.  These are souls worth remembering.

After walking the grounds, we went to the documentation center spent time watching films of short interviews with survivors of the camps,  reading the history, looking at pictures, viewing documents.  The center is a long open corridor well arranged for looking at the exhibits.  And though the space was open and there were a number of people there, you noticed that there was very little talking among the visitors.  You listen.  You read.  You look.  You try to do the impossible and understand what you see and what you hear. And I hope, we don't forget. We must never forget.