I woke up around 7:30 knowing it would be a somber day. We were going to the German concentration camp of Dachau, which is located outside of Munich and about 45 minutes from Augsburg. I had visited concentration camps in Poland when I was seventeen, so I knew what to expect and felt mentally prepared. When we left the hotel, it was raining and cold. On the bus ride, I thought of how when I was in Poland, whenever we visited concentration camps the weather was beautiful, but this weather seemed to suit the situation much better.

We arrived at Dachau and met with the tour guide, Claudia. As we stood in the visitor’s center, she briefly reminded us the basics of World War II and Hitler’s rise to power. She said the camp was opened in 1933, which was the year the Holocaust officially started. The main difference between Dachau and the camps in Poland was that half of the prisoners at Dachau were political prisoners, while nearly all the prisoners at Polish camps were Jewish. Only a quarter of the prisoners at Dachau were Jewish.

We walked as a group through the gates with the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will set you free”) above the entrance and into the camp. It seemed like a very large courtyard in the middle of the camp surrounded by buildings. We walked into the registration room, which was our first stop and first glimpse at the squalid conditions the prisoners experienced. This is where we learned how the theme of assigning numbers to people throughout the Holocaust was used in Dachau: prisoners were assigned a number and beaten by guards 15-20 times if they forgot it. When they died, the number could be assigned to an incoming prisoner. Hearing this helped me understand how dispensable human life was in concentration camps. The prisoners were stripped of their hair, personal belongings, but most of all, their dignity and humanity.

We saw the barbed wire lining the camp and the trench around it. The trench was about six feet deep and two feet wide. The tour guide explained that throughout the twelve years that Dachau operated as a concentration camp, only one person escaped. He was a political prisoner who escaped in 1933, the first year that the camp operated, but was killed in the Spanish Civil War combat.

The part of Dachau that felt the most real to me was the living conditions. As we walked from the fence to the barracks, we learned that the prisoners were forced to stand outside for hours a day in their striped jumpsuits, often in the rain, cold, and snow. If they moved at all, the guards beat or even killed them. People would often pass out from cold or dehydration. Standing there in the rain in my raincoat shivering, suffering through that seemed unfathomable to me. I cannot imagine what the prisoners felt like. While we were in the barracks, Claudia explained to us how the prisoners slept with four people in a space about the size of a twin sized bed today. Every day, they were given about two pieces of bread and one cup of soup a day with very little water. The average weight of the prisoners was 80 pounds. It was crazy to me that we were standing in the same spot that this torture had taken place decades ago, and that I was finally in the place that I had learned about for years in school.

The hardest part to see was the crematorium. This is where bodies were tossed in and burned after they killed by guards, disease, or starvation. The people who put the bodies in and took the ashes out were also prisoners. I considered how these people could have been forced to burn the dead bodies of their friends and family.

I now feel much more able to comprehend what really happened in the Holocaust and how important it is to prevent anything like this happening again. Although it was very hard to walk through Dachau while learning about the torture the prisoners faced, I absolutely understand the Holocaust on a deeper level now.

We rode the bus home and had some time to destress and process what we had seen. I went out to diner to get doner sandwiches on Maximilianstrase. The sandwiches were unlike any American food I know. The owner recognized those of us who had been there before and gave us all free tea and lollypops. I greatly appreciated his hospitality and awesome food.

I worked on my blogs until late at night and went to bed excited for what I’ve been waiting for this entire trip: the site visit to my company, SGL Carbon.