Dachau Concentration Camp

This is not a happy post. The contents describe my experience while visiting Dachau concentration camp. The camp after which most concentration camps were modeled.

I’d been waiting all semester to go to Dachau Concentration Camp. Perhaps it was a rather morbid desire, but I thought it was important. Not only for research for one of my books, but also for the sake of seeing how devastating was this monumental event in history known as the holocaust.

I expected to cry. I expected to be brokenhearted for the whole two hours that we were there. I was not. It was definitely sobering. But the birds were singing. The trees were starting to come to bud. The grass was green. Only two barracks out of the thirty that had been there still stood – and they smelled good. They smelled of pine from the rows and rows of bunks. It was overcast, but the sun was giving off enough light for me to get good pictures inside the barracks.

There were two instances when I could see it, when I could put myself in that concentration camp sixty/seventy years ago.

There is, obviously, a gate to this concentration camp. This gate opens and closes as people come in and out (I had expected it to stay open, actually). On the gate are the words: Arbeit Macht Frei: Work Will Make You Free. Ironic?

I heard the gate clang close behind us and as I turned around, I felt trapped (someone probably just wanted a picture in front of the closed gate. We had.) until I reminded myself that we could get out. The gate was not locked. Not anymore.

When the concentration came was found at the end of the war, General Eisenhower made the whole town of Dachau visit it so that they could see the horrors that had gone on right in their back yard.

"May the example of those who were exterminated here between 193301945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men."

We went into the maintenance building, the building that housed everything except sleeping quarters, right down to the hanging posts in the shower room. The maintenance building was hard, white concrete. It looked miserable, but it didn’t tug at my heartstrings. Posters filled every room with pictures and information about the camp. The second moment that hit home was when I stepped into the room where they were stripped of their personal belongings, their dignity, their identity, and their very humanity. Display cases stood between the pillars in the center of the room. They held personal belongings of the prisoners: family photos, i.d. papers, eye glasses, even a play program.
Horrible picture, but you can see how happy they were.

The courtyard where the thousands of prisoners had stood for hours at roll-call and where hundreds had died stands just inside the gate. Once it had been filled with starved human beings. I couldn’t picture it. I rarely have trouble visualizing a place as it once was. I couldn’t see it. It was only a giant gravel courtyard inside a fence.
In some rooms there was no space between the bunks. The prisoners had to climb over each other in order to get to their bed.
View of the courtyard out the front of the barracks.
The lockers held the prisoner uniforms. Each uniform had a patch on it that identified the "sin" of the prisoner - usually just their nationality.
View out the back of the barracks. There were once barracks in those frames.
Wash basin. One for the whole building.

The road back past the other barracks to the memorials and the crematorium.
The Jewish memorial.

Guard tower.

I didn’t make it to the crematorium (my great sense of direction prevented me) but it described in great detail to me. I wish I had seen it, though. Maybe then, it would’ve effected me the way that I had expected.