As I said yesterday, today’s blog will be a short one.  Today we visited Dachau which was the first concentration camp where tens of thousands of people were killed from 1933-1945.  I expected to be able to really feel where I was, but I really didn’t feel too much upon arrival.  It was really quiet and empty when we go there.  We then met our tour guide who is a professor and has worked with past year’s Plus3 groups.  He took us through the buildings and shared some history with us.  We saw the remaining and refurbished barracks, the museum, and the bunker.  Once inside some the building there I could begin to feel uneasy as the experience was becoming more real.  Most of the camp was destroyed or taken down after liberation and the resettlement of refugees, so we were able to see just about everything at the camp.  The one thing I will always remember was how it was outside in the main area.  I was just a huge flat are full of pebbles that prisoners would have to line up in twice every day.  It was just so empty and innocent.  After leaving the main area we went on behind the one remaining barrack and saw the foundations of the others.  There were at least 15 rows of barracks going back to the edge of the camp.  It was really powerful to see where the barracks that used to house the prisoners used to be.  Toward the end of the tour, we saw where some mass graves are and where the gas chambers and crematorium were.  We were able to walk through the gas chambers and see what is was like for thousands of other people who died where we were standing.

The whole trip was really shocking as I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I have many family members who were either killed in or survived the holocaust, so this experience was especially powerful for me.  I’m really happy I got to see what I saw today even though the thought of what happened there is so horrible.  I’m sure this experience is something that I will never forget and will be something that I can look back on and share with others so that the memory of the millions of people who were killed in places like Dachau will never be forgotten.