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.
Travel Tales From BB-8 