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Message in a Brick Wall
by Claus-Dieter Steyer
A construction worker makes a sensational find: A 60 year-old message in a bottle, written by two inmates of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.
Oranienburg, Germany. Historians consider this discovery a sensation: almost 60 years, after two concentration camp inmates left a secret message in a bottle, it was found during construction work. This is a very exiting discovery says Günter Morsch, director of of the Sachsenhausen Museum and Memorial. There hasn’t been anything like this in decades. The only similar discovery – poems written by a Russian prisoner of war, also hidden in a bottle – was made in the late 1950s.
The bottle was hanging on a wire inside a hollow brick, says construction worker Jürgen Steffin. "When I tore down the wall, the bottle fell to the ground and broke. It was that noise, that caught my attention."
Steffin’s company is doing reconstruction work, turning the camps former armory into a visitors center. Part of the construction was the demolition of an old partition wall. As it turned out, that wall was built in 1944 by two inmates, who left a message in the wall. 42 year-old Anton Engermann from Cologne, Germany and 24 year-old Alexander Tadeusz Witkowski from Poland must have hoped, that their message would be found in a better future, when the prison walls would be raised to the ground.
The identity of both men was confirmed quickly. The museum contacted Engermann’s widow. The family was deeply touched by the event. Engermann, member of the anti-Nazi resistance underground in Germany was arrested in 1934 and became one of Sachsenhausen’s first inmates in 1937. He remained incarcerated until his liberation in 1945. Engermann died in the early 1980s in Cologne. |
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Gate, with the cynical slogan "Work will set you free."
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