Never Again – The Hospital Room at Stutthof (Northern Poland & Berlin #30b)

There is only so much darkness anyone can take before they reach their limit. The same can be said of suffering. For those imprisoned at Stutthof Concentration Camp the darkness was infinite and the suffering unbearable. Stutthof was the longest running concentration camp on Nazi occupied territory. As the war went on, conditions at the camp worsened. By the time Stutthof was liberated, there were only one hundred inmates left alive. Two-thirds of those imprisoned had died, others had been transferred to work or death camps. Still others were sent on forced marches that added to the death toll.

Some of those who did manage to survive did not let the memories of what they and their fellow prisoners suffered die. They provided testimonies which became the basis for exhibitions at Stutthof. These inform visitors of the crimes committed at the site. Visiting the Museum of Stutthof is a bracing experience, one that is difficult to emotionally process. It is hard to imagine what the prisoners went through, especially the women unfortunate enough to be subjected to medical experiments. Nevertheless, a rough approximation of this can be found in a section of the camp that was known as the hospital room. There is no getting around the fact that it was horrifying, and it still is today.

Bitter Memories – Salt Off The Sea

On this trip my friend and I visited two concentration camps, Ravensbruck and Stutthof. There were only four days between these two visits, thus comparisons were inevitable. Both camps were still partially intact. No great effort had been made by the Germans to destroy either. The camps lasted right up until the war’s final days. The structures which had stood the test of time best were those used by camp administrators. Prisoners got the worst of everything. This was true, even after the camps were closed. For instance, the areas where they lived had been largely obliterated. This erased history that could have helped better tell their stories. ?

Another less obvious, yet startling similarity between Ravensbruck and Stutthof was that both camps were extremely close to holiday destinations. The camp at Ravensbruck was within a stone’s throw of Schwedtsee Lake. The camp memorial overlooks the lake. After I wrote and published several posts on Ravensbruck, a reader whose mother-in-law was imprisoned at Ravensbruck sent a revealing antidote. She said that when her mother-in-law visited the camp many years after her imprisonment, that was the first time she had ever seen the lake. This is revealing because of the lake’s proximity to the camp. The anecdote shows how prisoners were isolated from the immediate surroundings. Stutthof was similar in this regard. The camp was a short distance from the Baltic Sea and resort communities on the shoreline. Some of those imprisoned at the camp recalled that they could taste salt in the air. Hints of another world which lay entirely outside of their existence. It must have been excruciating to know the outside world was off limits to them, most likely forever.

Trigger Points - Blood Curdling Screams

Stutthof and Ravensbruck had another commonality that left an unforgettable impression upon me, the experience of female prisoners. In this regard, Ravensbruck is preeminent because the camp was established to imprison women. Male prisoners came later and were always in the minority. Stutthof held both female and male prisoners. In that regard, it was like many other camps. What set the female experience at Stutthof apart in my mind was an area known as the hospital room. This was where horrific experiments and murder of females took place. It was the most deeply disturbing part of any concentration camp or prison site I have visited in Eastern Europe. The women’s block brought back repressed memories of an article I had read forty years ago about such medical experiments and the man most notorious for carrying them out.

During the mid-1980’s, People magazine, America’s premier entertainment and celebrity publication, ran an article on Josef Mengele. This Nazi doctor carried out horrific medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz and several other concentration camps. Mengele had been sighted on several occasions in South America, where he went into hiding after the war. Nazi hunters spent decades trying to locate and capture Mengele. Mengele managed to escape the clutches of justice. He died in a drowning accident in 1979. The article I read was written around the time his remains were positively identified in 1985.

What I remember most vividly from that article was a survivor’s account of experiments Mengele performed on women. The survivor recalled a procedure on several women that caused blood curdling screams. Those who suffered through this procedure died shortly afterwards. The description of those screams was terrifying. I can still remember the exact moment when I read that account. For years it must have been lodged in my repressed memory bank, waiting for something to trigger it. That trigger turned out to be the hospital room at Stutthof.

Unspeakable Acts – Shock & Horror

Less than half an hour after entering the site I came to the hospital room. While making my way through there, I noticed that it looked as though a procedure could take place at any moment. There are very few places I have visited where I sense evil, but this was one of them. A feeling came over me that I was in the presence of a dark force, one that was worse than death. It was deeply disturbing. I thought of the article I read on Mengele so long ago. I imagine the same things happened in the hospital room, hundreds if not a thousand times over. I would like to say that it is unimaginable what women endured there. Tragically, it is not. The suffering inflicted here was unbearable to think about. And yet thinking about it is one thing and suffering it quite another. Women suffered unspeakable acts in that room. That will always remain as my memory of Stutthof.

After visiting Stutthof and being unable to put what I had seen and felt in the hospital room out of my mind, I did some searching for survivor’s accounts. This led me to a webpage which included a testimony from Stutthof. It can be found by clicking here. I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether they want to read that account or not. I did and I regret it, but not as much as I regret the fact that this happened to someone’s mother, sister or daughter. And that somewhere in the world it could happen again. Everyone should visit Stutthof as a reminder of what we can never let happen again. Hopefully it is not too late.