Saturday 31st July 2004 Stayed abv Voßwinkel lock - A visit by car to Ravensbrück

11° C overnight. Sunny morning, clouding over by midday, thunderstorms later. Set off in 

Ravensbruck by boat- Temujin in 1999 - photo by Nel Mandemaker

the car at 8.45 a.m. to Templin first to collect the post. There was a road diversion, the direct route was closed so we had to go via Neustrelitz. Got our post, Bill’s had arrived too. We stopped at Ravensbrück to have a look at the museum of the women’s concentration camp. Mike stayed in the car, listening to the radio. I went with Bill and Fanny down to the lakeside first, where we looked at the memorial and the crematorium. I held on to Fanny while Bill went in the block which had memorials to a different nation’s dead in each of the cells. There were a lot of wasps about, Mike had heard that it had been a record year for exterminators of insect pests. Took Fanny back to the car. Mike was dozing and Fanny

Ravensbruck memorial garden, my photo from 1999

had had a drink from the lake and got her feet wet, so Bill fastened her lead through the car window and she lay down beside the car while we went in the commandant’s office. It seemed to me - after a four year gap since the last time I’d been there - that they’d somehow sanitised the museum. Only pictures remained on display of the objects they’d previously housed in glass cases. A lot of the outbuildings had been smartened up, painted and given new doors and windows. The garages, where we saw lots of stuff left behind by the Russians, were now locked and there was no display of items from the period of Russian occupation as they had suggested 

Monument at Ravensbuck - Wikimedia photo by Pawel Drodz

back then that there might be later. The site of the barracks, where the women prisoners lived when they worked as slave labourers for Siemens, making parts for the V2’s, had been completely demolished and the large flat area was now covered with a layer of shale. Where we’d seen an exhibition of paintings by a Dutch woman who’d been in the camp, there were now photographic exhibitions, mainly of the choosing of the sculpture for the memorial by the lake from several that had been submitted. Bill said he’d had enough doom and gloom for one day so we went back to the car. On the way home we called in Neustrelitz

 

Ravensbruck - the area where the wooden prison huts used to be
Wikimedia - photo by Norbert Radtke

and found a large Edeka supermarket and bought some groceries. Bill and I did the shopping while Mike stayed in the car again with Fanny having a lie down in the shade after Bill had fixed her lead through the car window again. I went into mild panic when I finished at the checkout as I’d given Mike his wallet while Bill and I went round the camp as I didn’t want to carry cash money with me - his wallet was still in the car. Fortunately Bill had enough cash to lend me 100€ to pay for mine too. Back at the boat there were two trip boats at the lock, one going up and one down. Mike had a chat with the keeper and arranged to be through his lock when he opened at 7 a.m. We carried the perishable stuff and things we needed right away back to the boat, leaving crates of beer, tinned stuff and spuds in the car to collect next morning when we take the boat through the lock. The mooring was lined with holidaymakers’ cruisers waiting to go down the lock. We sweated buckets as we carried the groceries past them back to the boats. Sweat dripped off my nose as I packed the groceries away and then I had to close the doors as we had a sudden sharp downpour of rain. It didn’t last very long thankfully and I opened all the doors again only to close them again ten minutes later for a second downpour. Then we had a good thunderstorm which cooled the air a bit. Boat traffic continued, up and down the lock. I made a sandwich. Mike opened the post. Checking the statement for Nationwide he noted we’d had a sum of $100 (£55.20) deducted from our FlexAccount on 16th June, soon after we started using the callback services from WWT. He was livid, we’d arranged to pay monthly by direct debit. He rang their customer services line, but as it was Saturday he got an answering machine. It was 9 a.m. in Minneapolis. We’ll have to try again on Monday. We both went to sleep, heat exhaustion I think. Mike was up first when Bill came over with his chart to find out where we were going the next day and sort out the itinerary.