During my last visit to Germany I was able to visit Dachau Concentration Camp, just outside of Munich.
It is eerie walking into a place that is so infamous with torture, mass murder, and genocide. Even on a warm summer's day, things still seem still. While it is empty of anyone but tourists, one cannot walk the grounds without imagining the guards in their towers, the dogs barking, officers shouting orders and then the wretched mass of humanity that suffered and died here.
You enter the only places left of Dachau; you enter the barracks area through the guard office through a gate that reads, "Work is Freedom," walking along the same path that so many entered through and so few ever left. The Maintenance Building is now a museum/memorial to the victims. Not just Jews, but Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals, Poles, Soviets, the unwanted of the Nazi Regime. They were beaten. They were experimented on. They were executed and incinerated. It is all there there to see.
Although I was traveling with three others, I seemed to take all of this in alone. It seemed like a lot of people who came in groups processed it with inward reflection. I took my time trying to grasp what I already new about the Holocaust and the Concentration Camps. Through official Nazi photographs and the liberators film, all of the horrors are captured - paired with the words of the survivors. It. Is. Hard. To. Witness. And yet by witnessing it we help ensure genocide does not happen again.
The reconstructed barracks gives another grim display of what like was like. Men, two and three to a space originally designed to sleep one. In fact, Dachau was built for 6,000 but housed 60,000 by the end of the war. I simply cannot imagine the despair. That is until I walked to a guard tower where the sign showed the "kill zone" before the fence - the space where the guards could shoot prisoners who stepped into the area. A choice many made to end their suffering.
The flow of visitors eventually leads to the crematorium, still intact. The area around it is now a garden but with reminders of what happened 75 to 80 years ago, "Execution Wall with Blood Ditch," and "Untold Thousands Buried," and "Ash Grave of Thousands" There was so much human ash that it was simply buried after the liberation where it was found. The crematorium is now a brochure version of what it was. It is sanitized, freshly painted, and devoid of any sign that people were suffocated with poison; a death that took up to 20 minutes. Standing in that room is to stand among ghosts. Ghosts of the last moments of people who were trying to figure out what about them made others fear and hate them.
Two rooms later you step into the crematorium - the ovens. Doors open you peer into the blackness of the ovens. A sign tells you that many prisoners (perhaps because the guards were too lazy to drag the bodies) hung their victims in front of the ovens. This is sacred ground.
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I told Lisa today that I was very fortunate. My good fortune comes from my family, my friends, and my career. I was fortunate to see a place like Dachau and to bear the visions of that place in order to tell my children. While Dachau was indeed a horrible place, it reminds me to be a better human being and to be kind. Not many bad things come out of being kind to one another.
