The Fairy-Tale Road Sights

Performing Arts

1. Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen

The site of the infamous POW and concentration camp is now a memorial to the victims of World War II and the Holocaust. Anne Frank was among the more than 70,000 Jews, prisoners of war, homosexuals, Roma, and others who died here. A place of immense suffering, the camp was burned to the ground by British soldiers, who liberated it in April 1945, arriving to find thousands of unburied corpses and typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, and other diseases spreading rapidly among the survivors. Today, all that physically remains of the camp, which is inside a nature preserve, are the foundations of some of its prisoner barracks and a number of burial mounds overgrown with heather and grass and bearing stark inscriptions such as "Here lie 1,000 dead." The history of the camp and its victims is explained further through a series of moving video, audio, photo, and text exhibits within the slender, minimalist structure of the 200-meter-long (656-foot-long), 18-meter-wide (59-foot-long) Documentation Center. Built almost entirely of plain concrete panels, the center is softly lit and peaceful inside, its floor sloping gently upward from the entrance and beyond the exhibits to windows that let in light and views of the trees outside. Visitors to the Memorial should plan to stay at least two or three hours. Ninety-minute tours of the site in German and English leave the Documentation Center information desk from March to October at 2:30 and 4:30 from Thursday to Friday, and 11:30 and 2:30 on weekends  Don't try to see everything when visiting the memorial, but do take some time to walk around outside, visiting the site of the barracks to gain a better understanding of the atrocious living conditions inmates of the camp were forced to suffer. Bear in mind that the memorial is not recommended for children under the age of 14. Older children should be in the company of an adult.