So, I have now found myself in Leipzig. And I don't have much energy to do much beyond eat and send a few e-mail's. I have even broken down and checked into a "real" hotel. I spend the extra 20 DM and get a business suite, with a couch and 2 televisions and three phones and a big bath and the like. All very flavorless and generic and American. But I don't feel like I have the energy to look around for another guest house tonight and break through the whole language thing yet again.
And it does disappoint me a little bit, that I think my mind has been so overwhelmed by these camps and my body by the pace I've set, it is disappointing that there are things that are interesting and I am here, but I'm not seeing them. Things like the Planck Society in Gottigen, the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Dom here in Leipzig, the castle in Torgau, all of these things and so many others that aren't in any travel guide and you just get out of the car and go looking for them and stumble into something absolutely wonderful. Something like Boscheballes or the view of the fields and the river from the roadside cafe.
After some breakfast this morning at the Hotel Rust, I drive back down out of the Harz, and decide to have a last look at the KZ Dora and the Kohnstein massif that as the tunnels burrowed through it.
Now, maybe this next thing is the zen of traveling. A place that you are not looking for, don't even really know about, but in a fashion the car moves towards it through strange roads and turns and then suddenly there is a sign pointing towards the mountain. And the name of the sign is a different camp, on of Dora's subcamps. I start following the signs, and am led across then along the railroad tracks. The road gets worse and worse, from good asphalt to moderate concrete to really bad brick to muddy gravel. And out of noplace is the foundations of the main building of the "Ellrich" subcamp. The prisoners here were tasked with the expansion of the tunnel system for the B-12 complex. And the numbness came back into my mind from the day before. The imagination in my skull trying to picture the slaves, the Kapos, the truncheons, the snow, the hell created at the hand of man.
"21.9.44 We're now stationed here in Ellrich. The SS are in command of everything and everything is top secret. What I get to see here is like a bad dream to me - it seems inconceivable to me that this could be anything close to reality. Although the living conditions of the prisoners in Kochem [a sub-camp of Natzweiler] were bad enough, in retrospect it seems heaven to me when compared to the situation here. Here it's hell.
"21.3.45 Nice sunny day
"19.3.45 The weather's nice again. A chess craze has followed the skat craze. Many chess players gather but I'm the champion. Yesterday we enjoyed ourselves very much." - Rudolf Zseby, guard at Ellrich.
From here, I continue to drive around the Khonstein. I drive back up towards the main Dora camp, and pull into the parking lot. There is a part of me that wants to go back here, to see it all again. Maybe to prove to myself that this is indeed a real place. To prove that this is real history. To see that the human lives lost here were real, that these are the buildings they ate in, this is the building they were deloused in, this is the tunnel they welded tail fins to rockets in, this is the building the died in and right next door the crematorium they finally left Dora at.
But I don't get out of the car. I just look on the map for the next place to go to. This part of the trip needs to have an end, so I can start to think about where it goes in the next chapter. So I drive on, with all of this stuff I've been talking about on my mind. I find all of these places here in the old East Germany, all these places grandpa had gone through. But I think after the camp I have given up interest in the castles and the rivers and the cathedrals and the taverns from Faust. Right now, I guess, all of this would be a distraction damming the rivers and streams and currents running all along through my head.
I decided to either go back to the states at the earliest opportunity, or to go back to Cologne to see my friend Alex again and maybe see if that helps to start sorting everything out in my mind.
After some e-mail tag, we get in touch. I move some flights around, and go to bed.
