Recently I was traveling in Berlin for a long weekend with friends; I woke up in the morning of my last day convinced that I needed to visit Sachsenhausen, a nearby concentration camp. Throughout an otherwise joyful weekend celebrating an upcoming wedding, echoes of the past struck a deep chord within me. I thought about Mark Twain’s saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
The steps leading to the systematic murder of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and disabled people during the Holocaust rhyme with the steps that are happening to immigrants in the U.S. today. This was especially clear to me in visiting the section of the Jewish Museum in Berlin that outlined the accumulation of small and large laws passed to exclude and systematically oppress Jewish people. The accumulated laws are displayed on a giant list many, many panels long hanging from the ceiling.
If a similar exhibit were created today, “Trump Administration Executive Order preventing citizenship of people born in the U.S. to parents that are not legal residents” would most certainly would be listed. As would “One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passes transferring tens of billions of dollars to immigration enforcement and detention.”
Walking through Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was very heavy and emotionally draining. “More than 200,000 people were interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. They included political opponents of the Nazi regime, members of groups declared by the Nazis to be racially or biologically inferior, such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and people persecuted as homosexuals.” It was used as a model camp to train SS guards, and sanitized tours by foreign dignitaries were used to justify the whole concentration camp system.
This makes me wonder about modern day prisons in the United States. Are there migrant detention camps in the U.S. being similarly used? Will “Alligator Alcatraz” be used as a model to base subsequent detention camps built with tax dollars obligated by OBBBA?
I tried to be as present as possible during the tour of the camp and uncharacteristically took virtually no photos. The exception was when I looked down feeling particularly weighed down by all I had seen and found myself looking at a beautiful pink flower. This was quite a surprise, but when I saw one, I started to see other flowers in the field where row after row of prisoner housing once stood.
This little pink flower in the place where so much evil has been perpetuated is a welcome reminder that there is hope in even the worst places. This is true even now, amid current U.S. federal policy. I am taking this reminder to seek out and cultivate resilience. I am taking this reminder to continue planting seeds, even in the rockiest soil, such as Washington, D.C.
