Month: July 2017

I feel that Dachau  deserves more than just my thoughts so here is my wife’s perspective:

Our tour guide took us into the main grounds of the camp and we were face to face with a giant sculpture. It depicted emaciated prisoners throwing themselves into the electric fence, which we were told often happened, as this was an “easy way” to leave the camp – to escape through death. In the museum that was housed in the registration center, just behind the sculpture, we were shown just a portion of the atrocities that these prisoners were subjected to. Even now, as I try to recall them all, I sit here horrified that one human could think so little of another human’s life. These people were classified by race, political party, sexual preference, among other things.   I can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like to be stripped of your identity and slowly have your spirit be methodically crushed over time as your body starts to deteriorate.

While walking the grounds, the main thing that struck me and didn’t leave me was how immense this camp was. Only a handful of structures remained on the main camp area. In part of our tour, we were shown through an example barrack that the prisoners would live in. The “barracks” where the prisoners lived were not very big and they would crowd over one hundred prisoners into each one. I remember taking a panoramic picture of the grounds and I was astonished how many of these barracks fit in the camp. Only the foundations of these buildings remained but they stood as a solemn memorial to those who lived in them. We walked the length of the camp to see the crematorium and I just couldn’t get over how many people there must have been. Also, the fact that they had to build a new crematorium to keep up with the bodies horrified me.

As we left the camp, which I knew would change how I thought of the Nazi party, I remembered seeing a map of all the concentration camps and death camps. This one camp I experienced was just a small glimpse of what would become the Nazi’s final solution. I hope and pray that we may never repeat any of the horrors witnessed by that generation.

Last night was a tough one for my wife. The food poisoning that hit me the day before was rearing its ugly head in the middle of the night for her. She is not someone that usually throws up and this time she almost had to force herself to let the yuck out. When it finally happened she described it as smelling like “a beer hall.” I’m just glad I didn’t have to smell it. It wasn’t an easy night for me either as we were both still feeling the affects of being ill. But we were determined to make it to our tours today!

First tour of the Nazi History day: Dachau, the first concentration camp. I don’t really know what I was expecting going into the tour. I didn’t know what kind of impact a place like this would have on me. Honestly I still to this day am still processing and don’t know how to write it down. When I originally wrote this in my journal I really didn’t know how to figure out a way to describe it. What I can say is this was an awful place. As you walk into the camp there are 3 German words, “Arbeit macht Frei,” which directly translated means, “Work sets you Free.” Which is 100% a lie.

Dachau was never an extermination camp and never killed masses of people all at once, but it was a terrible place of hard labor, little food and endless torcher. Many, many people were killed here, in the tens of thousands, just really a terrible place. The stories that our guide Jeff told were endless. There were some about some things that the guards would do to inmates that made you cringe, very hard to hear.

The torture they had to endure was immense. There was on that sounded like one of the worst things anyone could do to another person. What they would do was chain their hands up on a hook behind them while they stood on a stool. Then they would kick the stool out from under them and when they did this it would take 10 minutes for the prisoner’s shoulders to dislocate and then they would be up there for another 50 minutes. They would then have to find someone to help put their shoulders back in place because if they didn’t they would be deemed unfit for work and killed. This place was horrible.

The camp is really not that far from Munich, the citizens knew about it, but there was nothing they could do. They were scared. Scared of what would happen to them. Scared they would end up in this terrible place.