Today marked a couple of milestones on the trip. We moved to our final city, Hamburg, and thus our final hotel stop. And we turned in the rental car that has served us very well for the past almost-three weeks.
Gedenkstatte Bergen-Belsen
Halfway to Hamburg we stopped at the Bergen-Belsen memorial site.
People leave pebbles here and on the grave markers, as if on a cairn.
The Bergen-Belsen Memorial is quite different from the one at Dachau. On our visit to Dachau we found the focus is on the camp layout and the prisoners' routine. You walk around the grounds, viewing the barracks, assembly ground, fences and guard towers, and so on, and can perhaps imagine a little of the life of a prisoner.
Almost none of the physical plant is left at Bergen-Belsen, just the grounds and some grave sites we'll describe in a moment. The main facility is a new Exhibition and Documentation Center, where the story of the camp and its population are told in great detail.
The exhibits pay great attention to sources and provenance for the quotes and photos, possibly a response to the revisionists who'd like to pretend all that unpleasantness didn't happen.
Bergen-Belsen was initially a camp for Soviet POWs, who were brought in great numbers in 1940-41, when there were no buildings to receive them. For the first winter the POWs lived in the open, or in hand-dug earthen dugouts. The Germans documented every prisoner and although recording addresses and next of kin, almost never made any attempt to contact relatives. The official propaganda line was that the Russians were sub-human beasts, not worthy of consideration.
Prisoner records on display.
In all, nearly 50,000 Soviet POWs died here over four years, mostly from exposure, starvation, or disease.
German soldiers took snapshots of burial details.
From late 1944 when the Allies were closing in on German territory, the SS began transporting prisoners of all sorts from peripheral camps toward central ones, especially to Bergen-Belsen. The transport was sometimes by cattle-car trains, sometimes by forced marches; the camp had no facilities to receive them (some newcomers took up residence in the earthen dugouts made by the Russians years earlier). During spring 1945 disease and starvation began killing thousands, and the SS guards, overwhelmed by the problems, gave up trying to bury the dead, simply stacking them.
When the British Army liberated the camp in April 1945, they found more than 10,000 corpses stacked unburied around the perimeter, and thousands of emaciated, barely-living prisoners. These and other scenes were recorded by British Army photographers, and some of the film they shot is shown in the Exhibition Center. So we watched footage showing the disarmed SS guard personnel forced by the British to work burial detail, loading bodies onto flatbed trucks and dragging bodies off the trucks to drop them into the mass graves the British had dug. This process was taking too long so the British reluctantly began using a bulldozer to push the piled corpses into the graves; this too was filmed and shown.
It's one thing to look at the mass graves now, when they are just big rectangular mounds, quietly growing the native heather.
Here rest 2500 dead
But when you have watched the process of creating that grave by dragging naked, emaciated corpses to the edge and pushing them in, it gives quite a different feel to seeing it. There are a dozen of these mass graves at the camp site.
There were Jews held here also, but (as also true of Dachau) this was not a death camp where Jews were collected to be murdered. Instead, the Jews here were those who were known to have friends or relations in the United States or in neutral countries, or might otherwise have political value or be exchanged for German prisoners. Their conditions were no better than the other prisoners, and like the others, many died of malnutrition and disease.
The Frank family were among these, and it was here that Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus a month before the camp was liberated.
The center documents that this and other individual headstones on the site are only memorials; the actual grave of Anne Frank is unknown.
Bye-bye Julie
This was our last day with the Benz B-Class. Nobody we know cares, because it isn't sold in the US, but it was nice car to drive: comfortable, firm ride, flat cornering, good visibility, tolerable mileage (roughly 28mpg). It had lots of convenience features. One small one: if you just lightly push the turn-indicator lever up or down and let go, it gives exactly three flashes on that side and stops. This is perfect for the autobahn, where everyone (really, everyone) keeps right except to pass, so you very frequently want to pop out, pass a truck or two, and drop back. Just touch the lever with your pinky finger and the car goes "blink blink blink" for you, you don't have to remember to cancel the signal after you've passed. Also it has a hill-holder: if you hold the brake and clutch pedals both on a hill, when you release the brake pedal the brakes don't release until the clutch starts to come up.
But its great feature was our constant companion, nanny, and minder, Julie the GPS. The interface to enter a destination was a bit clunky (not a touch screen; you enter the name of a town using a little joystick to thumb through an alphabet clicking one letter at a time), but once you had it entered, Julie would guide us anywhere through the most confusing street layouts. Without the GPS we'd have been lost and backtracking and probably yelling at each other many, many times. With it, we could go anywhere and get there the first try. "Prepeah to tuhn left... Tuhn left in three hundred MEEtuhs and then, keep right." We'll miss her.
We drove about 3,350 kilometers, just over 2,000 miles in all, and got honked at only one time, when David dithered over whether to turn left into a car park or not. No close calls, no dents or dings. David is preening but really, credit should mostly go to Julie and to the high quality of the average German driver, who anticipates trouble and follows all the rules. We were just trying to live up to the local standard.
First Evening in Hamburg
Julie brought us to the block where our hotel is, directly across from the Hauptbahnhof, very busy. In fact we couldn't spot the hotel on first pass and there was no place to stop. However, Marian had spotted in the atlas that there were parking garages a block away, and we followed signs to one. And here we had a great stroke of luck.
We knew from picking the car up at the Munich Bahnhof, that Avis doesn't keep cars in the station; they have their office in the station (which is like a shopping mall except there are trains down the middle) but the cars are a block away in a parking garage. We did not know where that garage would be in Hamburg. The plan was to check into the hotel, then go find the Avis office in the Bahnhof, and they would tell us where to bring the car.
Well, as we drove into the parking garage we noticed Avis signs and on the second floor, a row of stalls all marked "Avis." We'd hit the Avis location by sheer luck. All we had to do was drop the keys and contract into a box at the front desk and walk away. So that was a lot of hassle saved.
Later we did go into the Bahnhof—and if you want to know the reality of the phrase "a flood of humanity," just try to cross the center of the Hamburg Bahnhof at rush hour; it was intense—to buy Hamburg Cards that let us ride all the public transport for the next week.We walked around a bit and were most pleasantly impressed by the scale and the bustle of the commercial center. This is one big, busy city, more sophisticated-looking than Munich and more concentrated than Berlin. Had a nice dinner; tried the local beer (almost as pleasant as Augustiner); walked back. Wi-fi works well in the room; life is good.
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