Bogdan Bartnikowski, Edward Farber, Emil Farkas, Alfons Studzinski and Pola Oren: Four men and one woman who survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and have returned to this place of horror today, 77 years after its liberation. For Minister President Dietmar Woidke, this return is invaluable. He said at the commemoration ceremony for the anniversary in Sachsenhausen: "Today we bow in gratitude to the survivors who tell us about the past as contemporary witnesses. No history book, no film, no narrative can replace it. Even 77 years after the end of the war, it is hard to imagine the unbearable suffering that people had to endure here in Sachsenhausen and other places of Nazi terror because of their faith, their origin or their beliefs."
Woidke continued: "I am grateful that we can remember the liberation of Sachsenhausen together today. With the people who experienced this place in all its horror. Your Survival is an important sign of hope, for the fact that racial hatred, intolerance and misanthropy must never be allowed to prevail. We have to remind ourselves again and again how little can be taken for granted Peace, freedom and humanity are. They require our daily effort. They must be actively preserved, defended and created again and again."
From 1936 to 1945, more than 200 people were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen.000 people imprisoned under the cruelest conditions in so-called protective custody. In the beginning, it was mainly political opponents of the Nazi regime who came to Sachsenhausen. Later it was increasingly Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, the mentally and physically impaired or prisoners of war. Tens of thousands of them died from hunger, exhaustion, disease or cold, from the most severe mistreatment, executions, medical experiments and mass killings. Woidke : "Sachsenhausen was a Place of brutal extermination of innocents whose fate we commemorate today."