WritingForums.com - Concentration Camp of Dachau: A Paradoxical Experience

I’ve been lucky enough to visit the Holocaust Museum and the Anne Frank House. Both places are highly effective in communicating their message to the visitor and leaving a mark in people’s psyche that some rather not have in the first place. Some people would rather not know the capabilities we have to destroy each other, the lows we are able to hit when trying to find the top. Yet some things can’t be evaded or forgotten, even if we try. So once again I go, to a place filled with a history I can’t digest anymore; resigned I got up and off the motor coach.

It was a cold, gray, rainy day; fitting of the place I was visiting, “too fitting” I remember thinking. While walking towards the camp entrance I had the bad luck of stepping in a puddle of water caused by the morning rain. I immediately proceeded to look around for a better area to walk in, but when I caught sight of a sign with the words “Dachau Concentration Camp” I stopped looking, and thinking of the thousands who walked this same road with their feet wet, I moved on. “At least I’ll get the chance to walk this road again when I get out”, I thought. Wanting to experience it alone I quickly made my way to the entrance and passed it without a second glance.

I made my way to the museum like I’d been advised. It was a very long building that served as offices for the German. Once inside I start looking at the old cement walls, the 70 year old desks, utensils, letters, not caring about most of the information that now decorates the place. I’d seen it all before, the pictures, the stories, the deaths, saturated to the point of numbness by the mass exposition of it all… the glasses used by a Jewish man 66 years ago were more fascinating. Tired of the same thing over and over I decided to stop listening and reading, I decided to finally live it.

Outside, I started walking through the main “square” of the concentration camp and headed towards the two barracks left standing. I saw where they slept, where they bathe, where they pissed, and walked out feeling like I had done something I needed to do. I saw, I lived, but all I did was prove with my own two eyes that what I already knew existed, the numbness still remained.

Heading down the main road to the far end of the camp I found myself walking through beautiful sets of trees on both sides of the road marking the places where the other barracks once stood, at the end I could see a tower-shaped chapel in memory of those who died in Dachau. At that point I couldn’t help but notice how nice it all looked; “too nice, it shouldn’t be this way” I remember thinking. Running low on time I followed the path to the area I was most looking forward to visiting, the crematorium. After spending years reading about it I was finally going to be inside a gas chamber, a crematorium, an execution range, for the first time that day I was actually exited. Call it a morbid curiosity.

I will say with all honesty that the area of the crematorium was one of the most beautiful places I visited during my stay in Munich, and one of the most romantic places I saw outside of France and Italy, history aside. The area most resembled a log cabin in the woods. The main structure that included the crematorium and gas chamber turned out to be smaller than I imagined, being only a little larger than the barracks and with a higher pointed roof. A large amount of trees surrounded the area along with a few memorial stones, the far smaller first crematorium, a passage through the woods that lead to the eaten-by-vegetation execution range, and a couple of beautiful graves for the ashes of thousands of unknowns. I was amazed and overwhelmed by the horror and beauty of it all, shocked to be standing inside the gas chamber one minute and walking down a lover’s lane the next. I felt frustrated and cheated, “how can a place like a concentration camp be so beautiful and peaceful? It’s mockery to what happened here.” Yet I wasn’t angry, this place in which I expected to feel and see death and pain had instead provided me with beauty and peace, finally something I hadn’t read in books or seen in museums.

While I strolled back to the entrance I started looking at the concentration camp in a different way. I looked at its beauty instead of its past, looked at what it is instead of what it was. When I got to the entrance and opened the gate to leave I realized there where words written there that I hadn’t seen when I entered. The words, “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Shall Set You Free”, will forever be remembered by those who survived the concentration camp. When I read those words I imagined once again the thousands of people that once walked through those gates, but this time I didn’t pretend to imagine how they must have felt. It is impossible to feel that way, the place has changed, the times have changed, and the way you feel as a unique individual is different from everyone else's. I glanced back at the gates for the last time as I walked away, thinking about how I didn’t get to visit a concentration camp because it doesn’t exist anymore, but I did get to visit a place of memories, of history and contradictions, worthy of the sun that was just starting to creep in between the clouds. Dachau had succeeded, it left a mark just as strong as the other places I had visited, but this mark is one I rather not forget. On the road back to the parking I see the reminder of a puddle of water caused by the morning rain and this time I gladly step on it, “for all of you who didn’t get out and couldn’t wet you feet in this road, this is my tribute.”