Today we visited the Dachau Concentration camp. We arrived and walked through the gates with the inscription “work sets you free” on the door. Actually walking through those gates myself made me extremely aware of how many people passed through those gates and never came back out again. As we toured the camp, I felt such grief for so many people that I have never met. I understand how important it is for us to learn the history of the camps and how these abuses of power came to be, but actually standing where the prisoners of Dachau suffered so greatly made me realize how vast and horrific the violations that occurred in these camps truly were. The place seemed so serene and peaceful, the trees and flowers were in full bloom and the birds were singing. I think that the fact that such peace exists in a place where great suffering once occurred is a testimony to how hard the families and people of Germany have worked to memorialize their loved ones and create a monument to them so that they will never be forgotten.
The most impactful part of the Dachau tour was seeing how the conditions of the barracks deteriorated over the course of Dachau’s use. At the beginning, the barracks were clean, if not cramped. As the war raged on, more people were piled into the barracks, the space becoming unlivable and a center for disease spread. The people’s own living space was used as a torture device and there was no rest to be found under the cruel, watchful eyes of the officers.
Everything that the world was shown about the concentration camps was propaganda perpetuated by the Nazi party. The tour guide brought up this question multiple times: how much did the public of Germany truly know about the horrors of the concentration camps? This guilt and fear that the people of the country had to endure was much of the reason that we do not know a lot about the true scale and cruelty of camps like Dachau.
The deeper we delved into the history of the camp, the more bloody and horrific the testimonies from the survivors became. However, I understand that the only way to ensure that something like the concentration camps never happens again is to learn about what they were and how they came to be in the first place. This was an extremely emotional experience, but it was also one of the most important things that we did on our trip to Germany.
