The Sachsenhausen Model

Today I visited the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp with our class. It was a gorgeous and clear day – one of the best since arriving in Berlin – and there was an interesting beauty to this place, which was a bit unnerving. I took a lot of photos of the walls and towers, with the trees in the background, and even a few of the barracks.

Going into a concentration camp, I had this expectation for how I should feel. I’ve read books and seen many documentaries about these camps, and I always left them with the same feelings of surprise that this could have happened so recently, a heaviness from the stories and the scale of the death and torture, and a very deep sadness for the victims. From the moment I got to Sachsenhausen, I didn’t feel any of these things. This lack of emotion troubled me until I saw a little cigar box in the Jewish barracks. Inside this box, Etienne van Ploeg, a prisoner of Sachsenhausen from 1942 until its liberation in 1945, had built a hand-crafted model of the main camp.

I’ve built quite a few models, but never one from scratch. Recently, I got a 1:350 scale model of the USS Enterprise. It is estimated that, with this full kit, it will take an experienced model builder around 600 - 1,000 hours to complete it. To build something like this cigar-box model from scratch? That would have to take even longer.

When making a model, a critical decision is that of color. Almost single-handedly, the color choices made will determine the setting, the feeling, and the emotions of the final piece.

So, needless to say, the first thing I noticed was his choice of color. He has used a rich, lively green for the barracks and the forest; a fresh, new-house white for the wall and guard buildings; and the sandy ground is painted a warm and sunny beach tan. The neutral zone – the barbed wire coils, the imposing concave fence, and the dark stone ground leading up to it – are recreated very much like a modern day farm. It and the ground below it are painted a bright white.

There's an interesting element to the housing for the model. It's inside a cigar box, with a latch and closures. Is there meaning to this? I’m reminded of a line from a book. It’s a terrible book, but even the worst literature can produce the occasional nugget of wisdom:

“Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it’s a hard line to walk.”