Post from Ravensbrück

It’s the end of Day 2 of this five-day seminar I’m attending, the ‘Eighth European Summer School at Ravensbrück.’ I have often noted to myself how writing about something as it’s happening seems to give it more validity, somehow, than writing about it after the fact, and part of the reason I’m here is to validate my own intentions, my understanding, my authority, my ability as an author. So, I’m validating. I hope.

I am writing this, and posting it, from one of the former female SS guards’ barracks, which is now a youth hostel, and a very nice one too. The youth hostel is outside the camp walls, in case you are wondering. I have 3 roommates, all German students, intense and enthusiastic and exuberant—as are all the student participants, making me a bit envious and nostalgic about being a student. Hum.

I have two ironies I want to share: the food here is astonishingly good, and the memorial site is completely… how shall I put this—unguarded? There are no gates, there are no ‘hours’. Because I am here, I can come and go freely in and out of the camp itself—but anyone could; you wouldn’t have to be staying here. So on several occasions (because I am mad) I have had the entire camp to myself.

The sky was so tremendously glorious tonight, with high altocirrus clouds just barely covering a waxing and gibbous moon, and the translators had gone home because it was so late by the time we finished watching the ‘Women of Ravensbrück’ film so I couldn’t join in the discussion, so I just went through the gates on my own and looked at the sky. It is the same sky.

What makes it different, being in a place at night? Partly, I think, it feels a bit illicit. But being in such a place at night? Alone? It is intense, but not frightening. There are crickets here, which there aren’t in Scotland, and I love the sound of noisy nighttime bugs in summer. It is a very quiet place, apart from the bugs, and an empty place. A clean place. Turning it into a memorial has purified it.



But the intensity makes me feel as though, like Sophie in The Freedom Maze or Hannah in The Devil’s Arithmetic, when I blink I will open my eyes and be trapped there and the only thing I’ll recognize is the sky.