Dachau

Dachau wins the Best-Idea-for-a-Trip-yet Award. It sounds terrible to say I enjoyed it, but you really can't help but be affected by this monument. Most of the original facility is still there, including the infamous gas chambers, incinerators, bath house, offices, etc. There's one rebuilt barracks showing how they went from housing 50 men each to over 300. The museum there is massive. Tiffany and I took 2.5 hours at a fairly brisk pace and didn't finish the exhibit. It's a thorough and well written account of the rise of National Socialism, the original creation of the camps, the War, and the aftermath. There are 3 religious monuments on the grounds: one catholic, one protestant, and one jewish. Mother Teresa founded a convent there that houses people from all three faiths (each in their own communities, but working together as well). These nuns (and Rabbi's, and monks) preserve the memories of those who died there, and also serve the survivors and descendants of survivors that visit Dachau today.
Dachau was one of the largest camps in Nazi Germany. It housed people from 30 different nations, political prisoners (especially Russian), "social deviants" (including homosexuals, communists, and anyone who opposed the Reich), Jehovah's Witnesses, Clergymen, Gypsies, and many many Jews. After the war, the closest estimates were that over 200,000 people had been imprisoned there in the course of its 12 year history. There were 67,000 prisoners when the camp was liberated. Dachau was originally built to house 5000.
These dry numbers seem horrific enough, and the images on film and paper are even more overwhelming, but of course no words can really capture what went on in Dachau. http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/english/ is one of several memorial sites dedicated to the memories there. In its opening frame Eugen Kogen describes Dachau:
"Dachau - the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory."
It is as important to Germany today as the castles, the palaces, and the Roman walls that once formed the Limes. It stands not only as a memory, but maybe as a place of healing and atonement for a nation whose guilt is unfathomable to my well-off American mind. But, having been there, I feel at least a little closer not only to those who live here today, but to the shadow which stretches over 60 years of German history. Like Allende's Azucena (from the prose poem "And of Dust We Are Created"), Germans find themselves held by the deaths and the horrors of their past. The culture today has fought to overcome it, has taken drastic steps to attempt to get past it, but in America we don't even think of it. Could another Dachau be created? No, of course not. Such hate could never exist in the world today.


Of course not.