Dachau

The day before we went to Oktoberfest [Saturday] we decided that since we were in Munich we would take a tour of Dachau, the original concentration camp.  I was intrigued that we could see it up close and personal, but I was also wary of what part of history it represents.

Dachau was the camp around which all others were modeled.  Commanders put in charge of running such camps were trained there.  Dachau was the place that people feared worldwide.

We entered through the front gate of the compound, black with a cross-bar design.  On the gate door is spelled out ARBEIT MACHT FREI ('Work Makes You Free')  This is notable because it is the biggest lie ever told.  Those words are there because the Nazis wanted to make Dachau seem clean and efficient, an institution in which enemies of the state were reformed and improved through hard labor and discipline (we know that this was a fabrication as well: it was a place of starvation, cruelty and an asylum in which one was worked to death).

The open pen of the main camp was very scary because I knew that millions of people had been hanged, gassed and tortured without mercy within its walls.

The buildings are a solemn, pale, white, as if they are haunted by reminiscences of the atrocities that they witnessed.

I did not want to speak inside of Dachau because speaking is not appropriate, and there is nothing to say.  It is the last place in the world for merriment; rather, it is a memorial of the horrific tragedies the world will never forget.

We watched a black-and-white film about what went on at Dachau.  The film was from the '60s and narrated the story of what Dachau was and how it functioned.  It was supposed to be informational, to spread awareness of what life was like for a prisoner inside of its walls for those who were uninformed.  There was graphic footage of the dead and dying, and you really get a sense that you're sitting in the place that was once the most vile institution ever concieved.

The German nation is eager to let the world see the memorials of what happened, as a statement that they are in no way denying that it happened or that it was a dark period in the history of humanity.  They want to stress that the Nazi Era is not representative of the rest of German history, and that those who subscribed to such evils are not the same as the rest of the German people.  Dachau survivors are invited to come back to honor the dead and find closure, but why in the world would you ever go back to the place where you were starved, worked, beaten and considered less than a rodent for (most often) years at a time?  There are memorial statues all over and the camp, which has been re-established as a museum to honor those who were victims.

After the main building which had maps and displays of the Third Reich's expansion and the different tortures that were carried out, we walked past the plots where the barracks used to be.  The barracks were the shacks in which prisoners were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into bunks with no ventilation and no personal space except for one's weary, unhappy thoughts (why should you be given anything when you are sent there to die?)  At the end of the barrack rows are enormous Christian and Jewish monuments, a tower that bears the cross and a shrine with the Star of David.

Down this stretch there are trees which are old and thin and add to the depressing atmosphere of this house of horrors.

From there we saw the crematorium, the long building in which prisoners were forced into taking Zyclon-B showers and suffocated to death with poison gas.  The Nazis used Zyclon-B, a rat poison, per Joseph Goebbels' propaganda that equated Jews to rats and other pests:

‘It is true that the Jew is a human being, but so is a flea a living being - one that is none too pleasant . . . our duty towards both ourselves and our conscience is to render it harmless.  It is the same with the Jews.'

This very subject is difficult to write about.

 We walked through the building and passed through the actual gas chambers and I have never been so creeped out in all of my life.  I was standing in a room in which countless people had been showered with acid and gassed before their bodies were put into ovens and cremated.  When the camp was functional the room was fitted with fake shower heads to lure the prisoners into a false sense of security.  The prisoners were made to disrobe so that their prison clothes could be washed and used for the next wave of prisoners brought to the camp by train.  The shower heads have long since been removed, but the grates on the floor and the ceiling remain.  The next room had the large brick ovens in which bodies were burned to ash.  It was strange to actually see a former concentration camp.  One can FEEL the death in the silence around the compound.  Though it was intriguing to take a tour of the site, don't feel right calling it interesting because it is a memorial to the evil that once plagued the earth and killed so many.  It deserves absolutely no positive review.

Throughout the tour and to my ultimate dismay these two women were posing and smiling for pictures in front of the huge map of all the hundreds of concentration camps there ever were in the Nazi Empire.  I could only watch in disbelief as they did because I had assumed that no one would make light of it.  My friend and I wanted to say something, but we did not because we were too bewildered.  Dachau is NOT Disneyland (in fact it's the exact opposite) and you DON'T trivialize a holocaust museum.