Travelling Fletchers

Outside our Berlin apartment door, the pavement is set with small brass cobbles. They’re called Stolpersteine – stumbling stones. Each one carries the name of someone who once lived here, along with the year they were taken away and their fate. They shine in the sun, but their stories are heavy.

On Sunday we visited Sachsenhausen. Opened in 1936 as a model camp, it was designed to set the blueprint for others that followed. Our guide showed us many things in this both impressive and horrifying camp – the watch towers, the places of execution, the rooms used for experiments, and the autopsy facilities.

One story will stay with me. The guide took us to the so-called neutral zone – the strip of ground between the camp fence and the wall. Step into it, and you’d be shot. A guard once snatched a prisoner’s hat and threw it into the neutral zone, ordering him to fetch it. The man obeyed – and was killed. The guard then had to complete pages of paperwork for the shooting. That same paperwork could be used to apply for leave, because the guard claimed he was ‘traumatised’ by the incident. The cruelty wasn’t just in the killing – it was in the cold efficiency of turning it into an administrative task.

Sachsenhausen’s story didn’t end in 1945. After the war, the Soviet secret police used it as Special Camp No. 7 to detain political prisoners, suspected Nazis, and others they considered a threat. Thousands died there from disease, starvation, and exposure. In the 1960s, East Germany turned it into a memorial – but one that largely focused on communist resistance. Only after reunification did it become the broader memorial and museum we see today, reflecting the full and complex history.

We returned feeling rather numb, the mood sombre. Berlin remembers its past in many ways – sometimes with grand memorials, sometimes with a few words on a small square of gold in the pavement. Both are hard to walk past.

Processing a heavy day in Berlin the best way we know how – with ice cream in the sunshine.