When you put history and Germany together, laughter goes away, people become serious, faces become emotionless. It’s like the universal rule, that when we talk about German history, we should be serious, we should reflect, we should respect, we should be open and learn about the past. Today is such day, I visited my very first concentration camp 40 minutes away from Augsburg – Dachau.
I consider myself having a pretty well known on the Holocaust. In high school, I read a couple books about it including Night, I wrote a research paper comparing the Holocaust to the Massacre in Nanjing, I also had a chance to speak to a professor at Kean University that studies the Holocaust, he told me he had spoken to a couple survivors and told me their stories. Because of that, I have formed a natural instinct of whenever I come into contact with this kind of topic, I quiet down and pay my respect. Of course, that’s how I was like when visiting Dachau. We were lucky to get an amazing tour guide. Through his words and actions, you can tell he is not doing this job just for the pay. He told us stories, including his own. He told us his father participated in WWII, and ever since he has not spoken a single word about the war until he passed away. He started the tour by sitting us down, telling us our interpretation of the war and the Holocaust are not quite the same as his and Germans. It is crueler, more detailed, more than Jews, and influenced the Germans and the society more than we think it did. Janni and Marius, the two Germans in my project group, came with us today. I was walking with them the whole time, listening to our tour guide while asking Janni and Marius questions and their thoughts. I learned students in Germany has to visit a certain amount of concentration camps, it is part of their education, for them to learn about the history. We first looked at the building where the people in the camp lived. They were extremely tiny, the tour guide said they made two to three people fit on one bed, it’s crazy, I can’t even fit on there. Then we walked to the valley where most killings and massacres took place. Although Dachau was not an extermination camp, thousands of people were killed here. Including so-called war-criminal Germans, Italians, and Jews. The rest of the tour consisted of a visit to the gas chambers, the museum, and a building that hosted “special prisoners”.
Everyone was quiet, respectful, and maybe shocked in a way. Visiting a real concentration camp is nothing like learning about and watching videos about it. There might not be much to see, but the atmosphere and environment are really emotionally draining.
Dachau, known as the mother of all concentration camps, continue to have thousands of visitors daily. It serves as a piece of history, as a reminder to people not to make mistakes, as an educator for upcoming generations to learn about the terrible history that no one believed it could happen.