Everyone should experience a concentration camp.
October 3, 2023 | Articles, Travel Stories
You felt it walking through the gate. The air was heavier. It just was. I noticed that people fell silent, mid-sentence, as they made the step into the camp. The only sound was our shoes, landing softly on the hard gravel. It was a very somber moment stepping into Dachau Concentration Camp.
I had been to battlefields and war cemeteries before. I have felt the quiet stillness in the air that is unique to such hallowed ground. But never like this. This was different, the first time I had experienced such a feeling. I could sense the suffering. The brutal suffering that continued here for over a decade.
The top of the wrought-iron gate had the haunting black script: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” “Work will set you free.” is the contextual translation, and nothing could be farther from the truth.
The outside walls of the main buildings were painted a drab yellow-beige. My tour group first entered the intake room. A prisoner’s introduction to camp. Where the dehumanizing begins. All possessions were seized, and prisoners were stripped and showered and assigned numbers and coloured stars. Prisoners of a high rank, for there was a hierarchy, would be conducting many of the duties, and filling in paperwork for the new arrivals.
When the building was restored for use as a memorial, the original wooden beams were used. The walls are plain white. The floors are wood, and creak a bit. The building is presented as simple as it was in 1945.
As you walk through the long, thin building, there are many displays. Life in the camp is depicted and the history of the camp explained. The black and white photography is all untouched original. it’s an emotional journey.
The displays hang from the ceiling. As I made my way through the exhibits, I fell behind the group for a time. I could not believe the pictures and was taking some time to look at them. The faces of the prisoners. So bleak and worn. Beaten down. Some faces with absolutely zero life, as if dead inside.
What must a person have seen and experienced, what must a person know, to have such a hollow, empty expression??
Those pictures will never leave my memory.
There were many ways a person could end up as a prisoner at Dachau. Religion most commonly, but religious prisoners did not stay at Dachau very long before being taken by train to other camps outside Germany. Anyone who fell outside of Hitler’s ideals was subject to arrest. Political ideology, drinking, homosexuality, and unemployment could all result in your internment.
At the end of the building, we stepped through a shower room, not deadly, another bare room where prisoners had been given their prison clothes and assigned barracks, and out into the afternoon sun.
We were standing in a large open area, with small loose gravel and a row of trees on the far side. Roll call was done here, and punishments handed out so all the prisoners would watch the very clear message being sent. You can see where rows of barracks had once stood, marked by thin concrete slabs, only a few feet between them.
In the distance, one row of barracks remains, rebuilt as a reminder of the extremely cramped and unsanitary living conditions. Everything was made from plain rough wood. Again, real photography provides excellent context as we quietly walk the building. Prisoners were packed into the bunks tighter than sardines in a can. Toilet facilities were disgusting, basically a four-foot diameter round trough over a hole. With the complete lack of sanitary anything, it is no wonder disease was so rampant at these camps, and spread like wildfire through the barracks.
At the far end of the camp, opposite the main building, there are two memorials to those who suffered here. One Jewish, made of dark gray rock, with the menorah perched overhead. Quite plain, sitting by itself, surrounded by nothing but gravel. One Christian, with the cross inside a large curved structure made of lighter gray rock. A little nicer, surrounded by grass and a couple small flower beds. The messages are similar. So many died for only their faith, evil was allowed to rule the day. You don’t need to belong to either faith to feel the power in the memorials, and understand the context between the differences in the memorials. You feel it.
You might have your faith shaken by what we saw next. Our tour made its way through a break in the inner fence, and followed a path behind a grove of coniferous trees. Into a small clearing, with two red brick buildings on either side. Bars guarded small white-framed windows. The smaller, older looking building was introduced as the crematorium. It was closed to the public. I only took pictures of the explanatory signs outside. It felt wrong to take any others. I noticed many people with their phones and cameras down, taking far fewer photos in that area.
Here I am going to paraphrase our guide, as I tell the story of the second building. The first crematorium was not efficient enough, and the bodies were piling up. There are pictures. You can’t un-see them. A second crematorium was ordered built.
As punishment for speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis, thousands of clergymen were taken to Dachau, and some killed. Records attest that many priests were used in Malaria experiments, often dying. It was the priests in Dachau who were ordered to build the second crematorium.
Imagine being forced to build a crematorium under those circumstances. Pure evil, the kind of mind-killing tactic used often by the Nazis. Word is, the priests were slow building the crematorium, and that by the time they were finished, Germany had no coal to use for the fires. The building was never used as it was initially intended. The Germans did however, install shower pipes so that the building did not go to waste. Our guide stopped there, letting the information sink in.
A phrase to make you think. Crematorium efficiency. How did mankind get there?? I know, man has fought and killed for centuries, and invented horrific and efficient ways to do it. But it’s still hard to wrap my head around.
There is a path off to the side of the clearing, through short trees of various types. There are small clearings off the path, with small mounds, from two to four feet across. Ashes. Piles of ashes. Thousands of people. Some are roughly covered with patches of grass, and small markers signify that there are human remains in the piles.
Again. Trying to wrap my head around the atrocities that happened at Dachau. Remembering that Dachau was the blueprint for future concentration camps. Remembering that, by concentration camp standards, Dachau had a low death toll of around 41,500. Over one million were killed at Auschwitz. Dachau was a work camp, supplying local mines and a munition factory with forced labour. There were no death camps on German soil, for propaganda reasons to the German people. Out of sight, out of mind, control the message.
By the time the camp was finally closed, over 200,000 prisoners had spent time at Dachau. I, indeed my whole group, walked pretty quiet. We could see the memorial as we approached. A nasty wind had picked up, and the skies had darkened. It seemed fitting to the mood of the group.
The last stop on our tour is the memorial. Dedicated in 1968, the memorial portrays human figures entangled in barbed wire. Black iron. Striking and thought provoking. As you walk through the memorial, the walls differ in angle and height, to symbolize that mankind’s journey was NOT a straight line to get here.
There is a relief on the wall as you exit the memorial. A chain, with coloured triangles, the same as the colours used by the Nazis to categorize prisoners, represents solidarity among the prisoners. I can’t imagine living in such a place, but I do understand that “We only have each other,” means more here than most anywhere else.
Standing out front a few minutes later, I turned and looked back at the main buildings. Dachau was an evil place. Perhaps most evil in that Dachau was the blueprint for all camps to come. Unspeakable atrocities were committed on humans, by humans. The air is heavy for a reason. A blanket of sadness.
I’m very grateful to have experienced Dachau. I urge everyone to visit a concentration camp. To feel the heaviness of the air, to understand what happened, to see with their own eyes. To know that this is a real part of history that can never be forgotten or repeated. I left a different person than I arrived.
You will too.
