For nearly the past year, I’ve been working as a proofreader/copyeditor on a project for the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial in northern Germany. The Neuengamme site outside Hamburg has undergone a complete (and long-overdue) overhaul: buildings have been reconstructed, a center for historical studies has been established, and a major, permanent exhibition opened up at the start of May, on the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

I wasn’t able to attend the opening of the exhibition since I was on a boat in Alaska at the time, so all my work on the project has been somewhat abstract up to this point. But now I finally have something to show for myself: today in the mail, I received the book to accompany the exhibition. It’s an amazing, glossy, tri-lingual tome which could almost be a coffee table book if it weren’t so horrifically grim. It’s a most impressive publication, and it’s quite a funny feeling to flip through it and see the words that I sweated over for so long - the tangible product of some very intellectually and emotionally taxing work.

A tremendous amount of time, effort and emotion went into this exhibition, and I’m extremely proud to have played some small part in it.

Further reading…