Nazi forced labour camp recreated in Berlin's new WWII exhibit

Berlin exhibition revives harrowing stories of Nazi forced labour camps

A Glass Case in the Room—But No Golden Treasures Inside

A glass display case stands in the room, but instead of gleaming gold artifacts, it holds a rusted piece of barbed wire. Nearby lie the remains of a tin food ladle. Not all archaeological digs—especially those rushed ahead of construction—unearth ancient treasures. Sometimes, what emerges are objects from the very recent past.

The barbed wire is a relic of a forced labor camp that once stood in Schönefeld during the Nazi era. The Henschel factories had built an aircraft plant on the southern outskirts of Berlin—the precursor to today's BER Airport. Some 15,000 people toiled there during the war, including 5,000 forced laborers, many of them women. The barbed wire and food ladles were found on the grounds of what was once known as Camp V, where so-called Ostarbeiter—primarily people from the Soviet Union—were held under brutal conditions.

Today, the site is home to a new building for the Amy-Johnson-Gymnasium. Fabian Papadopoulos-Koop, a French and history teacher at the school, had an idea: Why not explore this very history in class? Why not blend French and history lessons? After all, he knew Colette, the daughter of Hélène Fauriat, a deceased French Resistance fighter and forced laborer. And Papadopoulos-Koop (39) was teaching a small French class of just twelve students, none of whom were facing final exams. "This gave us the chance to throw the standard curriculum out the window," he says over the phone.

Now, 18-year-old Celina Klemm can say that the era of National Socialism and the war has become "much more tangible" for her. Before, she "couldn't really picture it"—it all felt "so long ago," explains the student, currently in the middle of her Abitur exams. Klemm and her classmates didn't just study the forced labor camp; together with curator Simon Stöckle, they designed the exhibition featuring that rusted barbed wire, now on display at the NS Forced Labor Documentation Center in Berlin-Schöneweide.

At the heart of the exhibition is a model of Schönefeld's Camp V—row upon row of cramped barracks. The barbed wire is also recreated, its original just a few meters away. Hélène Fauriat lived and worked nearby in Camp VII, inside a factory hall where aircraft wings were assembled—the same wings that would later rain destruction across European villages and cities. For Fauriat and the other forced laborers, this meant: seven days of day shifts, seven nights of night shifts, alternating endlessly, always twelve hours long.

Years after the war, Hélène Fauriat wrote a book about her experiences, titled Noël à Schönefeld (Christmas in Schönefeld). The students read it. They traveled to the Ravensbrück Memorial, where they saw the original manuscript. Fauriat had first been deported to the women's concentration camp after the Nazis uncovered her work in the French Resistance. She and her husband, Marcel, had joined a group smuggling maps of train stations and airfields to London.

How they were discovered remains unknown to this day. Marcel was sent to Dachau; their two-year-old daughter, Colette, was left with relatives in their hometown.

Hélène Fauriat did not stay long in Ravensbrück. The SS deported her to one of dozens of satellite camps—Schönefeld, to the Henschel factories, where Camp VII was directly under the concentration camp's control. She arrived on July 21, 1944. "I had managed to hide a washcloth, a handkerchief, my toothbrush, the remains of a comb, and a small photo of Marcel in the palm of my hand," she wrote, as quoted in the exhibition. Beside the text hangs the smuggled photo of her husband, creased from being folded again and again in its hiding place. Hélène worked on the assembly line, hammering rivets.

Students selected the texts and images for the exhibition. The memories had been entrusted to the Ravensbrück Memorial by Héène Fauriat's daughter, Colette, after her mother's death. "Hélène Fauriat's biography shows us what resistance means—and how personal experiences help us understand and grasp the Nazi era," the students wrote.

On a display board hang small metal figures—a four-leaf clover, a ring, an elephant—objects that prisoners like Fauriat crafted from work materials during their meager free time.

Shortly before the war's end, Fauriat was transferred again, first to another subcamp and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By then, the 27-year-old was gravely ill, which spared her the death march. On April 22, she was liberated by the Red Army.

"The story became more personal," says Celine Klemm. Staff from the memorial visited the school in Schönefeld every few weeks. In January, a design workshop was held. Curator Stöckle praises the collaboration with the high school, calling teacher Koop-Papadopoulos "deeply committed." "I was surprised by how engaged and focused the students were," Stöckle adds.

Koop-Papadopoulos is already planning the next school project. "We should install something permanent on the new school building to commemorate the former forced labor camp," he says.