I honestly don't even know where to start. It was the most horrifying and devastating, yet humbling experience. Everyone has seen the pictures. Everyone has heard the stories. Everyone has read a book or two about it. But there is something about standing in the exact, unscathed room 80 years later that makes the Holocaust twenty thousand times worse than we already think it is.
Thank God I only ate a piece of bread for lunch, because otherwise I would have most definitely regurgitated it back up my throat.
Well for starters, Dachau was actually the first concentration camp which came about in 1933. It was originally intended for political prisoners, so therefore not those of the Jewish faith, gypsies, homosexuals, or mentally handicapped. The prisoners found at Dachau, at least for the first couple of years, were ordinary people just like you and me, even of the arian race, that simply just did not agree with Adolf Hitler. I don't know about you, but for me, Dachau becomes that much more of a terrifying part of history. Of course eventually Dachau was also filled with the "outcasts," because the Nazis took too many off the streets than they had bunks for in concentration camps across northern Europe.
Your experience at Dachau begins driving through a quaint, normal german village. The bus stops, and you exit in a relatively wooded area. There is a pebble path, leading to nowhere one can see from the street (besides for the visitor area hiding behind more trees only 50 feet away). You keep walking, and eventually you see what to me is the most recognized part of any concentration camp: Arbeit Macht Frei, or rather Work Sets You Free. The harder you work, the sooner you will be released was what the Nazis told the prisoners.
What was once the maintenance building where many of the prisoners worked during the day, is now converted into a museum. There of course is plenty of artifacts, stories of prisoners from Dachau, the daily life of a prisoner, the evolution of Dachau, and much more.
The barracks are next. One of the barracks with individual rooms for prisoners was original. Only prisoners sentenced to isolation, usually from revolt, were housed there. In all honestly, I couldn't walk through it. The outside of the building was enough to make me queasy. Therefore, I have no pictures of it.
There were two additional barracks, like the normal ones we think of, that were reconstructed as the originals would have been.
Next, the fence. Surprisingly similar to the Berlin Wall on the east side, there was a trench before a large wired fence guarded by watch towers every few hundred feet. If you stepped near the trench, you were yelled at. If you tried to jump over it, you were of course shot. And if you somehow were quick enough to reach the fence before being shot, electrocution awaited you.
And lastly, the crematorium. Words cannot describe how incredibly sick I felt the whole time. The ovens were original. There were mass graves, ash burials, execution ranges, a gassing room, sanitary washers for the clothes and shoes that were covered in diseases. The rooms where the bodies were piled up while waiting to be incinerated were unscathed. In those I could also not stand to walk in. I feel like detail here is not needed. But here are the pictures, if you care to see them.
The crematorium.
The original execution range, overgrown by landscape.
The ovens.
The gas room.
Now to finish on a slightly more upbeat note. When Dachau was open to the public as a memorial site, the original prisoners who still were alive came and presented this memorial. Never again will history bear such cruelty, nie wieder.
Hopefully none of my other posts are this morbid. But it was definitely an experience I will never, ever forget. And I hope my experience was enough for you that you don't feel the need to see it yourself.
XOXO
Victoria
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