Another long day that dragged on and on because of the sleeplessness. I was in and out all night, waking up to inane drunk people talking loudly and dry heaving. Miraculously, I got up with my alarm at 7 and had breakfast with Liz and Meghan. We spent the morning in Marienplatz window shopping, looking for batteries, and watching the snow fall in the open air market. Even the snow falls gracefully here. The glockenspiel was stunning in the frost. We ended up killing some time in a nearby cafe before our tour was to depart for Dachau.
It is difficult to put such a place into words. Around 200,000 people from all walks of life were brought to Dachau and were expected to work until the bitter end. German intellectuals, Bohemian Jews, homosexuals, the unemployed, Roma (Gypsies), and basically all of those considered useless to the S.S. were stripped of any semblance of human dignity the second they were escorted past the front gate. I felt so fortunate to be standing within the camp gates so that I could make sense of it myself. Walking around, you could feel death in the air. It is like a massive graveyard for all of those without graves---for all who were not permitted to have graves because they were considered subhuman. It was also fitting that the temperature outside was 25F (~ -4C) and snowing. The winds were so brisk that I could feel my face chafing. A few hours in the bitter cold was a small sacrifice compared to all of the suffering that so many faced against their will.
I began to feel sick to my stomach when we walked inside one of the crematoriums, as well as the "showers." To witness where such cruelty against humans took place is very much like an out-of-body experience---the vestiges of an evil far greater than any of us.
It is wonderful that the Germans has preserved this site as a memorial to all of the fallen. It goes to show how they do not forget about their painful past, and nor should we. It is not just an issue of heinous torture that happened in a region-specific place, but rather a collective suffering that affects all of us. History keeps repeating itself, as evinced by Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia, Milosovec's Serbia, Armenia, and the current U.S. situation in Iraq. If we only learn one thing from Dachau it is that this cannot keep happening. We are the only humans that we know, and the differences in lifestyles among 6.6 billion people have to be acknowledged and tolerated (embraced if we are lucky). If not, we risk extinction by our own hands.
"Never again."
Never again.
1 comment:
This perfectly discribes the feelings I had and I'm sure most people have when visiting Dachau.
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