I wasn’t sure what to expect from this day… We have learned about the holocaust in many history classes but I wasn’t sure what to expect from seeing the remnants of it in person. We took a bus to Dachau after a brief hotel breakfast. When we arrived, we were introduced to a very nice and knowledgeable tour guide. He walked us through basically everything at Dachau. I can’t even put into words how I felt while walking through that place. He showed us the museum, where the prisoners lived, where they were shot, and where they were put in solitary confinement. However, the place I’ll never forget was the place where the prisoners were gassed and then incinerated. I’ve never been that emotional. For nearly 4 hours, I don’t think any of us in the group said a word to each other. The craziest fact of the whole day was that Dachau may have been the easiest concentration camp. I’ll never be able to wrap my head around that.

For lunch, we were provided a sandwich and a buttered pretzel just like the first day, and I was very grateful for this as I was very hungry. We then took a bus back from Dachau to the hotel where the rest of the day was to ourselves.

The SGL group met later that day to work on our final presentation. It was a very productive couple of hours because we clarified who was working on what and how to organize our presentation. After our group met, we went out to dinner at a nice Italian place on campus. I had very good pizza that I thought was the best pizza I had all trip. It was very nice to have dinner with Matthias and Johannes, and I wish Kiki could have made it. By the time we were finished with dinner, it was very late and I just went back to the hotel and fell asleep. Day 8 really hit me hard, but Dachau was something I had to see in order to understand what truly took place in Germany during World War II.