It is that day again. Time to remember what happened not so very long ago. Last year, I visited the Holocaust memorial in Israel, a museum designed to encapsulate the horrors of what happened to so many people. This time, it’s up-close and personal with the conditions Nazi prisoners really faced.
Also it’s a Sunday, so the trucks populating the Autobahn (where there is no speed limit) were gone, leaving room for plenty of cars going 200km/h or more. But back to the main topic.
We arrived at Dachau, where we entered under a watchtower with the gate inscribed with the blatant lie, “ARBEIT MACHT FREI,” or “work makes you free.” We entered a large, empty open area (looks like a sick place to do burnouts if this wasn’t a historically significant), where the roll call would take place. The guards would roll call everyone’s name twice a day, which lasted between 1 and 12 hours, depending on if anyone was trying to escape or commit suicide. It didn’t matter if it was 20 degrees below zero and snow-covered, it would still happen. Since the camp was surrounded with high voltage fencing, people could commit suicide pretty easily. Escaping was another matter. Out of a total of 206,000 prisoners, only 1 escaped successfully, and he had especially fortunate external circumstances and a big plan.
Dachau was not an extermination camp. Mass executions were rare but they did happen, and not with gas chambers. Instead, Dachau was a slave labor camp, except worse than most slave labor. There was a total of 34 barracks, each meant to house 208 people but housing up to 2,180 people at their peak. The prisoners were shoved in the hundreds into small rooms, where the windows were locked because the prisoners were told that they were sub-human pigs and that they didn’t deserve fresh air. The room had to be spotless or they would be beaten, denied meals (of which they had 400 calories per day), or hanged. The beatings involved the tortured counting the strikes. One slurred word and the beatings would start over. This truly was hell on Earth.
Yet, only 33,000 of 206,000 died in this camp. The prisoners at first just built and deconstructed mounds of sand for the sole reason of working. Once World War II started, they were forced to build materials to help the Nazis in the war. The prisoners could be rented out by German families for a small price to help them in work, which gave the prisoners better conditions, even though they were expected to last a mere 9 months.
The strangest thing is because of how malnourished the skeleton prisoners were: when the Americans liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, about 2,200 prisoners died after being exposed to the luxurious, plentiful American food because their stomachs were not used to it.