NEUENGAMME, a township an hour's drive from downtown Hamburg, is one among hundreds of lovely tranquil villages in Europe ideal for pensioners.

But behind its peaceful facade lurks a horrific past. It was the site of a major concentration camp in northern Germany during World War II, built in 1938 by the SS, Hitler's personal guards and notorious ethnic cleansing squads.

I visited Neuengamme on a freezing Saturday morning.

Although traces of war, such as electric fences and watch towers are gone, the compound still evokes ghastly memories. Neat piles of rubble stand where there once were inmates' barracks that housed Jews from all over Europe, German Communists, Hitler's foes, mental patients, homosexuals and Russian prisoners of war captured in the Wehrmacht's campaigns on the eastern front.

Today, little remains of the barracks except the debris, after British soldiers burned down the structures in 1945 for fear of a spread of plague.

At the time of its seizure, the camp resembled a massive dumping ground of prisoners' bodies.

As a result of pervasive education about the Holocaust and Germany's other war crimes, almost everyone now knows, or should know, something about the identities of those who perished in the death camps. The most surprising thing that rattled my mind that day occurred when I examined up close victims' belongings contained in glass cases in the camp's museum. Suddenly, suddenly something caught my eye.

It was a brown paper bag, on which the SS guards would usually write down prisoners' names and corresponding numbers for the convenience of everyday head count before ordering forced labor.

There is nothing peculiar about the bag other than a few blurry words in the top right corner, which read, "Prisoner's nationality: Chinese." Astounded, I read on. Not much more information was given.

After over half a century, the handwritten signature, unmistakably in Chinese, had become illegible. But the sheer fact that there was a Chinese victim of Nazi persecution is vastly shocking.

Perhaps sensing the consternation in my expression, the in-house curator, a Mr Lappoehn, approached and told me the sad fate of Chinese Holocaust victims during World War II.

There were an unknown number of Chinese sailors working in Hamburg's harbor in the 1930s.

After Hitler came to power, the sailors' connections with the outside world brought them trouble.

German secret police were suspicious of their activities and arrested them and their families on espionage charges. A great number of them later died in Neuengamme. The few to survive returned to China after the war, Mr. Lappoehn said.

As I listened, my heart ached. I couldn't help grieving for the lost lives, not just because they were Chinese. It's true that Jews suffered the most in World War II, but too often the Holocaust is the very first - and only - thing that comes to mind when we talk about German wartime atrocities, while the list of horrendous killings actually is much longer, involving more ethnic groups and minorities.

For instance, the Roma (Gypsies) also were targeted for systemic extermination, but their miseries are scarcely documented. As for the far less numerous Chinese victims, even less is known of their suffering.

Since the Nazis before their defeat destroyed many death camp documents that could be used as evidence against them in trials, the work of recovering victims' identities is still unfinished to this day.

Undying hope

In Neuengamme's memorial halls, the walls are covered with enormous paper banners hung from the ceiling. They bear the names of 39,000 known victims. Efforts to identify the remaining 14,000 dead proceed slowly and sometimes fail. But although the chance of retrieving all the identities is almost nil, the Germans never give up. They are fired up, said Mr Lappoehn, by the undying hope and perseverance manifested by the victims' relatives.

Around the year, vehicles with French, Dutch or Polish license plates can be seen outside the camp compound, from which emerge, from time to time, frail septo- or octogenarians. They know their parents, brothers and sisters were shipped off to Neuengamme and no word had since been heard of them.

Nonetheless, they still come year after year looking for the smallest clues of their families' presence. Once, an old woman searched in the museum's digital archive developed for tracing services, and her face brightened when she saw among the results the names of her two deceased brothers. "She was so proud at that time," recalled Mr Lappoehn.

Banality of evil

The things I saw and stories I heard continued to haunt me after I wrapped up the three-hour visit.

Why would human beings persecute fellow human beings with such brutality? I kept thinking about the famous explanations philosophers Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman gave for the Holocaust.

It was the "banality of evil," contends Arendt, that drove otherwise civilized Germans to perceive nothing evil in complicity in the Final Solution; it was the "modernity," argues Bauman, embodied by the perception that rule-following is morally good, that led to the Holocaust.

Both sound plausible and profoundly incisive about the vulnerability of the human condition. But whatever the explanations, they appear metaphysical and pale in comparison to the evil that actually took place in the camp.

According to one blood-chilling tale, a German SS guard, himself the father of two, wrapped a rope around the neck of a little Jewish boy and tightened the noose several times to make sure he strangled his victim.

Scholarly debates will persist over the cause of some perpetrators' contradictory nature, that a cold-blooded murderer can also be a loving father. Many Germans today will presumably be appalled by the boy's gruesome murder, and declare how ashamed they are of what their fathers and grandfathers did. But I always wonder how it feels to know such a monster is someone's father and grandfather, and to be made to repent crimes that one did not commit oneself.

In Germany, war guilt is passed from generation to generation. There is no end of final reckoning.

German historical education includes as its core one or more visits to concentration camps.

Such visits will keep the nation, especially young Germans, in permanent moral shackles, and perhaps even estrange them from their fathers and grandfathers.

But only a shamed nation knows it takes everything to move on.

Willy Brandt, ex-German chancellor, helped loosen the shackles somewhat when he dramatically fell to his knees in front of the memorial to Holocaust victims in Warsaw in 1970. Dignity sometimes has to be lost before it is regained.

German initiatives to recover the identities of all the victims, as Mr Lappoehn, the curator, and his colleagues are doing in Neuengamme, attest to the country's admirable attitude toward its past.

Every dead person should have a name. I believe one day those Chinese John Does who perished in the concentration camps will also have their names back.