Sachsenhausen exhibit reflects Nazi era's untold stories

The exhibition "Untold (Hi-)stories" at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin is exceptional not just because of its decentralized layout, or because the art was created by amateurs. What makes this exhibition unique is that it offers insight into how young people from across Europe today look at the crimes committed by Nazi Germany.

The sculptures, installations, and short films were created as part of a project named "Young Interventions," launched in 2020. Now they are being shown publicly on the extensive grounds of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which was turned into a memorial in 1961 and now also houses a museum.

Though there is a map provided, perhaps the best way to experience the exhibition is to walk around the memorial and come across the installations at random.

Sachsenhausen was built in 1936, and the first work of art one sees is in Tower A, the entrance gate to the camp built that year by its first prisoners. One encounters other works while walking through the barracks, where more than 200,000 people were imprisoned before the camp's liberation by Soviet and Polish soldiers in April 1945. Tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners died of hunger and disease, largely caused by forced labor, medical experiments, and mistreatment.

For the exhibition, groups of teenagers, young adults, and descendants of camp survivors from around the world met for workshops several times over the past two years. Under professional guidance, the young people then created their works of art.

People degraded to numbers

Dorothy Ann van der Ent and Alex Rovira Lopez come from Spain, a country also once under fascist dictatorship. "We were very shocked to learn how people here were stripped of their identity," van der Ent told DW. "They were just a number or a triangle." The pair's contribution to the exhibition was a three-dimensional sculpture that somewhat resembles Tower A.

Inmates in German concentration camps were not allowed to report their names to the guards, and had to give their assigned number. In  Auschwitz, in German-occupied Poland, it was also tattooed onto their forearm.

Prisoners also had a triangle of cloth emblazoned in different colors on the left side of their striped prisoners' clothing, which the Nazis used to divide their victims into categories: political opponents were marked red, homosexuals pink, so-called "anti-socials" black, criminals green. A yellow triangle was later added for Jews.

Pigeonholing then and now

Henrieix du Teilhet drew inspiration from these different-colored triangles used to stigmatize the prisoners. In his workshop, he said, he learned "that without all the administration behind it, the atrocities would not have been possible." Du Teilhet decided he wanted to use his work to confront how people are still pigeonholed based on their political and sexual orientation.

His installation invites people to "change their perspective": A transparent plastic film displays 266 colored triangles, but from the other side; they're all white. And that, du Teilhet says, hopefully leads one to ask, "Why do we still think in categories, and why do we still exclude people?"

The short film, "Men in Zebra," is a family project created by Stefan, Mischa, Milo, and Lotus Lemaire from the Netherlands. In the film, the family members read from the memoirs of their grandfather and great-grandfather, Jan, against the backdrop of the former concentration camp. Jan, a communist, was deported from the Netherlands by the Nazis to Sachsenhausen, where he was imprisoned from 1942 until the end of the war, in 1945.

Mischa Lemaire first visited Sachsenhausen in 2010 and returns often. His family's film, which can also be seen on YouTube, is a tribute to his grandfather. "When you read his diary and hear the family stories, you understand this place much better," Mischa says.

How stones in Sachsenhausen 'come alive'

Jan Lemaire was imprisoned in barrack 52 that, like most of the others, no longer exists. But its location is still marked by its foundation. "Through the diary, the stones here come alive," says his grandson, Stefan, who never got to know his grandfather, who died at the age of 53.

Today Stefan and Mischa are almost as old as Jan Lemaire was at the time of his death. Thanks to his records of his years in Sachsenhausen, third- and fourth-generation family members also found out how he felt about the Germans. "He made a big distinction between his German friends inside and outside the concentration camp on the one hand, and the Nazis on the other," grandson Mischa says.

When the pair talk about their short film in the exhibition "Untold (Hi-)stories," they first do so in their native language and then translate it, which they see as a way of honoring their grandfather. "Dutch in this place, surrounded by art and beauty that comes from the heart – he would have liked that," says Stefan.

The exhibition "Untold (Hi-)stories" at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial can be seen until the end of 2023.

This article was originally written in German.