I may as well start by saying that I took a course on Holocaust history two years ago, and have known since that someday I needed to visit one of the infamous camps. That's why I called yesterday's trip "long-awaited"; not that we, any of us, awaited this trip with joy of any kind-- but we awaited it with a sense that we needed to go. It was by no means a happy trip, but it was one of the most important ones we'll make this entire semester.
So... I'll let the story begin. We arrived shortly after lunch, under blue skies and a warm sun.
Welcome to Dachau, once one of the most feared places in Europe. As the common phrase went 60 years ago, "Dear God, make me dumb, so I will not to Dachau come!"
One of the cruellest, most horrific ironies of modern history. Scores of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Czechs, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Nazi political opponents, invalids, and criminals entering the work camp (or slaughterhouse) Dachau, were greeted by the words "Work makes you free." What kind of "freedom" is this march to death?
The shower room, where newcomers were marched in like cattle, deprived of their personal belongings, rushed through showers and burning disinfectant, handed clothes (whether they fit or not), and rushed out again. If they weren't fast enough, they would probably be beaten.
After spending a few hours in the old registration buildings (now museum), we went outside to visit the rest of the camp. By this time it was lightly snowing, and by a few minutes later it was blindingly white. I do not mind the sentimentality when I say that I truly felt a huge relief when the clouds turned dark, the flakes began to fall, and our view of the whole camp was blurred because of the driving snow. It felt so much more right that it was dark and cold and snowy. The bright sunshine felt like a mockery of all the years that thousands of starving, aching, sick (or dying), coatless (sometimes shirtless) men stood stock-still in this immense courtyard for "roll call," every single day, several times a day, and often for hours on end. "We're wearing coats and scarves and gloves, and we're freezing. How must they have felt -- out there for hours -- when most of them had few clothes or perhaps even none at all?"
Looking back at the entry gate of the camp -- from the inside. It was so weird, chilling even, to be looking at a building I'd seen so many times in pictures. It's more chilling to imagine how the inmates must have felt every day seeing that gate. Not many that entered it ever left.
Inmates' first view in the morning was of one of the seven guard towers, where SS members armed with machine guns (and all too happy to use them) watched over everything. But there was no time to look out the window -- the beds had to be made and the room had to be spotless, and the men had to be out in the courtyard within minutes, or else...
Inside one of the blocks -- row upon row of bunks stacked together. Seriously, one of these beds would hardly have been big enough for me, let alone for a man.
Looking back at the main building complex down the snow-swept road. Each tree stands next to a rectangular gravel area where a block (housing unit) once stood. The camp was designed for 6,000 inmates. By the time of its liberation by US troops, it was crowded with 32,000.
Lest ye doubt that it's true: these are two of the infamous crematory ovens that you've heard of in the stories that make you cringe. They are housed in a building with five main chambers. First is an entrance room, where people would be brought and told that they were going to have a disinfecting shower. Next was an undressing room. Next, a small waiting room. Next, the "shower" room-- meant to hold 150 people at a time (though honestly it was claustrophobic being in there with just two other people). Of course, you all know the story: it's not really a shower, it's a gas chamber in which those 150 people would be "showered" with Zyklon B (prussic acid) gas, and die agonizingly in 12-15 minutes. Then their bodies would be carried into the next room -- the crematory, partially shown above. These ovens could hold 3 or 4 bodies at a time.
This particular gas chamber was built late in the camp's existence, and was never used at full-blown mass-murder rate, although small numbers of people were occasionally brought through.
The crematory certainly was used, and when US troops entered the camp, they found 3,000 bodies here (still to be cremated).
The crematory certainly was used, and when US troops entered the camp, they found 3,000 bodies here (still to be cremated).
If you study Holocaust history for long enough, barbed wire gains a meaning of its own in your mind, and is certainly not associated with real cattle anymore. On the left you see the barbed wire fence that bordered the camp. If a man could get past the ditch, and if he could escape the notice of the SS men in the seven guard towers, he still had to battle with thick barbed wire if he were to have any chance of escaping. If he did escape, it would be with a body sliced and shredded by that wire. Far, far more likely is that he would be seen and shot down on the spot by those guards with their machine guns. But for many inmates, life was difficult enough that a suicide-run towards the fence seemed their best choice.
Another cruel irony -- the camp, itself a jail and graveyard, still needed a prison for "special" offenders. The long hallway between rows of cells looks bright in this picture, but is actually dark and claustrophobic.
Those were all the photos I could get... but there are plenty more memories. Heidi commented to me at the time that everything felt so unreal. I easily agreed -- we cannot begin to understand what we see here. There were only two moments when things felt truly "real" to me: first, when I looked down that long, mocking barbed wire fence and had to place my hand on it, remembering every story I've read and imagined of desperate escape attempts, or suicides, or cold-blooded murders, that took place at that wall of flesh-tearing wire. The second moment was as I stood in the gas chamber, claustrophobic though alone, and trying to imagine the nervousness of 150 people, ashamed of their nakedness, and afraid of the close quarters -- nervousness and fear that turned into screams of agony and terror as they met their cruel death.
We in our easy, charmed lives have absolutely no concept of what it means to suffer in this way. You who have felt greatest hunger -- you still cannot conceive of what it feels like to starve day after day, week after week, year after year, until you are literally flesh and bones and your great hope is to find a dandelion left growing somewhere in the camp, that might assuage the hunger for half a second. You who have been cold "beyond bearing," in some Oregon or English bone-chilling rain and wind -- you still can have no understanding of what it feels like to stand on legs that have no strength in them, with hardly a shirt on your whipped back, in a frozen courtyard in driving snow, for hours or days on end, not daring to move lest you be beaten into further pain.
And please, my dear friends -- if any of you out there still believe that humans are "truly good" deep down, and that any evils they do are merely the result of an evil environment -- stop believing it now. You cannot tell me that this barbarism was "a one-time thing," and that "it could never happen again." Cruelty and disgusting hatred and racism have happened before, millions and millions of times, across the world, and they will happen again. You cannot tell me that it was "only a handful of vicious men" that did this. It was hundreds of thousands of servicemen who did the deeds, and millions of citizens across many countries that in one way or another allowed it to happen; and it is millions upon millions of others across the globe and across time who have been involved in other murders, massacres, holocausts, death-marches, and sadism of every kind. You cannot tell me that "I could never take part in such a thing," because every one of us has a streak of cruelty through us that could do great harm to others if not restrained, or at least a streak of fear that could do great harm to others if threatened enough. Those SS men with the machine guns had wives and children back home. The orderlies with the whips were themselves inmates, frightened and lost.
If there is one thing that Dachau has to tell us, and if there is one thing that I pray you carry away from all these long-winded writings of mine, it is that man is fallen and prone to evil. If you will not believe that, then Dachau can only be a warning to us, a mere symbol on which to place a vain hope that "this will never happen again." But if we each will embrace the idea that our race, all of humanity, is utterly fallen and already "dead," then we can begin to look for a solution to this fallenness (and I will risk even more offense and state with certainty that there is only one solution) and thereby give those who died here the best honour we can, by seeking Life and bringing all those around us to it.
