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Dachau Concentration CampOn The Amazing Race, the teams once made their way through the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration/Extermination Camp in Poland, pausing for a moment’s silence in memoriam of those who suffered during the Nazi regime. This brought me to recollect my own visit to Dachau Concentration Camp, near Munich, Germany.
We visited Dachau on the morning that we left Munich... 22 December 2006.
It was a cold, frosty Winter's morning in Germany and each of us in the tour group were fully aware of the connotations of visiting such a historic site, especially one with such a dark and tragic history. Even as we approached the site, the whole bus was silent... I think we were all preparing ourselves for the magnitude of what we were about to experience...
As we walked up the path leading to the site, we were enveloped by an eerie silence, which made us even more aware of the chill of the morning... the cold breezes cut to the bone and the frosty air saturated our lungs with every breath...
Walking through the gates almost put you in the Jewish prisoners’ shoes... I could almost feel my freedom drifting away, a feeling that frightens me and makes me feel so privileged for living in an era and a society in which there is no genocide and I have a right to freedom. Walking through those gates, I could almost imagine what it would have been like to enter this space in another time, when there were 200,000 oppressed people packed into the open courtyard, now deserted save for the various tourists... on a winter’s morning, just as cold as the one we were experiencing, wearing nothing more than thin calico shirts and pants – I felt as though I had no right to complain about the cold...
As we walked around the grounds, we absorbed the magnitude of the empty space and noted that sounds that usually echoed through such space seemed to get lost before it reached the other side. The silence throughout the site was truly, truly eerie.
We entered one of the blocks that housed the living quarters, however, you could barely call this place somewhere to live. The wooden bunks where the prisoners slept stood three high and ten across and were barely long enough to fit a person... no doubt many prisoners slept with either their head or feet hanging off the edge. The multilingual plaques on the walls told of the conditions suffered... how the beds were to be immaculately made, cutlery cleaned to spotlessness, floors swept to pristine condition... and the consequences, should these rules not be followed.
The plaques also told of how 1,800 prisoners were made to fit into a space that only allowed for 250, for, towards the end of the war, the camps had become so crowded, prisoners had to sleep head-to-foot.
We left this block to take a walk down the poplar-lined road, down which nothing remained, save for the foundation stones of the prisoner blocks and the poplar trees themselves, which stand barren in the winter frost.
At the end of this road, there are three places of worship that were built, after the war had ended, to commemorate those that suffered under Hitler’s regime. Interestingly, the Jewish Memorial site was the last of the three to be opened in May 1967, with the Catholic Chapel and Protestant Church being opened in August 1960 and April 1967, respectively. A Russian Orthodox Chapel was also built on the site, opened in April 1995.
Near the Russian Orthodox Chapel, is the entrance to the Crematorium and the building itself, we dared not venture there, though... knowing that this was where many executions took place, none of us were compelled to enter for fear of what we may encounter and the emotional weight of the site.
Prior to leaving, we toured through the Administration block, which housed the museum. The limited amount of time we had meant that we didn’t have nearly enough time to absorb everything there was to see, however, none of us could help the feeling of immense melancholy of simply seeing what we had on that day.
Kim |
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