It’s the night of April 5–6, 1945, and there’s a month to go until the German surrender, and the road from Auschwitz is still long. On the train pulling out of the station at Salzgitter-Watenstedt is the French doctor Georges Salan, who in Braunschweig had wondered why the Auschwitz Jews so desperately tried to avoid being allocated to transports of the sick. Maybe now he’s not wondering anymore, because this is evidently a transport of the sick, and clearly a deadly one to boot. At any rate, death will be a logical consequence — and ultimately the purpose — of the conditions on the train. In every car there are between 50 and 60 prisoners, writes Salan. In every car there are between 80 and 90 prisoners, you write. There’s food but no water, writes Salan. There’s neither food nor water, you write. Maybe there are classes on this train, one for Jews and another for the rest, which makes no difference in the long run, because on the train everyone falls ill, and more and more are dying. There are no latrine buckets in the cars, so the prisoners relieve themselves in the food containers and try to dispose of the contents overboard, with varying degrees of success. Those who die are put in the last car of the train. There are many dying as the train with the open freight cars meanders like a Flying Dutchman through the German camp archipelago, searching for a camp or a grave to dump its cargo in.
That’s how Salan describes it in his book.
That’s how you describe it in your letter to Haluś in March 1946:
We went from one camp to the next, and none of them were willing to take us. Men dropped like flies along the way. We got as far as the outskirts of Berlin, but no one wanted us there either, we had to turn around and go back, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, everywhere was crammed with prisoners [you use the German word Häftling]. Finally, on the ninth day, we got to Ravensbrück, 1/3 of the people had died on the way there. And the rest looked like ghosts.
You name some of the places along the train route, but there are more. In fact, the train is crossing large parts of northern Germany in a triangle between Braunschweig, Hamburg, and Berlin. With nearly twenty open freight cars crammed with the sick, the dying, and the dead, it presumably causes some stir among people who see it pass by, stopping at station after station in the hope of unloading part of its cargo. So the train stops at Schandelah, Oebisfelde, Bismarck, Uchtspringe, Havelberge, Ludwigslust, Hagenow, and Bergedorf, which is a borough of Hamburg. This last stop indicates that the transport is ultimately intended for KZ Neuengamme, the main concentration camp for all the satellite camps in the Braunschweig and Salzgitter area, but KZ Neuengamme is full to bursting. So the train turns back east, toward Berlin and the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp, which also, as you note, is full to bursting with Häftlinge. After nine days (I cannot fathom how you keep track of time), the train reaches the Ravensbrück concentration camp, ninety kilometers north of Berlin.
It’s April 14, 1945, and this is where you’re all unloaded.
It should be noted, however, that you’re not the first to be unloaded. At about ten in the evening of April 8, the train with the open freight cars from Watenstedt makes an extended stop in Uchtspringe. The local district doctor, Dr. Behnke, notes down the following: “On board the train there were 66 dead bodies. Transport leader SS-Rottenführer Winkler and Dr. Mittelstedt, an accompanying Polish doctor, no. 3506, asked my permission to bury the bodies, which were in various stages of decomposition. The destination of the train was not known to me. The bodies were buried on Monday 9 April in a mass grave at Kiesberg.”
With Dr. Liedke’s map on the front seat beside me, I follow in the tracks of the train. It isn’t easy following railroad tracks in a car, especially if those tracks have in places been repositioned and straightened out, and the stations that once dotted the line have been left behind on overgrown lots, with rusting rails and collapsing station houses.
That’s why it takes me a while to locate the old station at Uchtspringe, where 66 corpses were unloaded on April 8, 1944. The new station, a naked platform with no station building on a straightened fast track between Hannover and Berlin, is located a bit outside of Uchtspringe. I find the old station house roughly where I expect it to be, along the still detectable embankment running through the town, and the station house is indeed on the point of collapse. The roof has sagged inward, the gray plaster has flaked off, the windows are boarded up, the canopy that extends over the waiting area by the former platform is damp and rotten. On the front of a half-timbered, red-brick storehouse, the name Uchtspringe still stands out in big black letters on a white background, but a newer sign put up by the German Railroad Authority, Deutsche Bahn, warns against entering the station area. Unfallgefahr. Betreten für Unbefugte verboten.
It is at this station, on this platform, within view of practically the whole of Uchtspringe, that a train of open freight cars loaded with 1,600 concentration camp prisoners, all sick and dying in varying degrees, “stops for a considerable length of time” (Dr. Behnke) while 66 bodies are taken off and buried.
After liberation, American troops open the mass grave to identify the dead, but find that all means of identification have been removed — by SS-Rottenführer Winkler personally, according to Georges Salan. The bodies, still nameless, are then reburied one by one.
I search for the memorial dedicated to them that ought to be in Uchtspringe.
I search for other memorials in Uchtspringe, too. The little town is still dominated by its large psychiatric hospital, attractively set in a beautiful park, and today serving as the federal state of Sachsen-Anhalt’s central institution of forensic psychiatry, Landeskrankenhaus für Forensische Psychiatrie Uchtspringe. In the 1930s it bore the name Landesheilanstalt Uchtspringe and was one of the Third Reich’s main centers for forced sterilization and the killing of lunatics and other inferior human material. Between 1934 and 1941, 765 patients were forcibly sterilized at Uchtspringe. Between 1940 and 1945, some 500 patients, most of them children, were murdered at Uchtspringe with drug overdoses. Between July 1940 and July 1941, 741 patients from Uchtspringe were transported to the gas chambers built at the psychiatric hospitals of Brandenburg an der Havel and Bernburg in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where they were murdered as part of the German euthanasia program T4.
Since September 15, 2004, there’s a memorial dedicated to them in front of the ivy-clad main building dating from 1894, a bronze plaque on a rough-hewn granite stone, bearing the words “To the women, men, and children who were humiliated and killed in Landesheilanstalt Uchtspringe, or sent from here to their deaths.” It’s emphasized that this took place under National Socialism, während des Nationalsozialismus.
A completely different time, we are to understand, with completely different people.
Why did it take so long for a memorial to appear?
I look for the memorial to the 66 men from your train who are buried here and find a reddish-brown sign with a cross and the word Kriegsgräberstätte, “War burial site,” with an arrow pointing up a small hill. I trudge up the 250 snow-covered meters of the scarcely discernible path from the road to the top and find a narrow walkway lined with small thuja trees, at the end of which stands a brick-built grave monument with a polished plaque in black stone. Sticking out of the snow at the foot of the monument are the pine twigs of a wreath. On the black plaque, six words are engraved: HIER RUHEN 66 OPFER DES FASCHISMUS. “Here lie 66 victims of Fascism.”