To me, today seemed to be one of the most important and educational days out of our whole trip. We visited a concentration camp in Dachau today. Although this was not the first concentration camp I had been to, it was still as impactful as the last two had been. The concentration camp in Dachau was not a camp where there were known mass-murders of Jews, as its purpose was actually to “re-educate” germans who did not agree with the Nazis’ ideologies.
We had a fantastic tour guide that helped explain how the Jewish were impacted by concentration camps overall, but also more specifically about Dachau’s concentration camp. This concentration camp was of the lowest severity, but still is very important and held up a similar structure to other concentration camps. The prisoners ranged from political prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, Catholic priests, Communists, and more. Jews only made up a small percentage though (compared to the other concentration camps there were).
Walking through the camp, the weather was quite cold and dreary. I was wearing a jacket, a long sleeve, and pants. I was cold as it was, but all I could think of was how miserable the prisoners must have felt during the harsh, cold winters with the thin clothes that they were given. We saw the barracks that the prisoners were put in, wash-rooms, crematorium, gas chambers, and more. The beds that the prisoners were put in were so small and seemed extremely frail. I know, I would have felt very tight and uncomfortable in that bed even if I had a nice cushion. Prisoners were given straw-made mattresses, and they had to share with several other prisoners. If the beds were not made to the guards’ expectations each morning, the prisoners were given some type of punishment: lack of food, beating, humiliation, etc.
We also learned about the medical experiments that were performed on the prisoners by the doctors. Many of these medical experiments were done on the prisoners that were in the best physical shape, in order to get the most accurate results. One of the experiments performed was seeing if a frozen body could be resuscitated. A prisoner was to be put into a freezing body of water for a certain amount of minutes in order to represent a soldier falling into seas (from flying a warcraft). They wanted to see how long the soldier could be under before they could lose any chance of reviving him. Another experiment that was done was an attempt to change eye-color. If I remember correctly, this tended to be performed on twins because it allowed for doctors to compare results easier. All of these medical experiments were extremely inhumane to perform, and many, if not more failed. Hearing about the torture that these prisoners were put through was very hard to process, because I know the twins especially were kids…just like us. The innocence was stripped out of them at such a young age, with no choice or chance at survival because there was Nazi control almost everywhere you looked…inside and outside the camps.
There was also a purchasing or barter-like system that was set in place; local businesses and companies could purchase a prisoner to use for work. Although this was also very inhumane, the living conditions were usually way better under the companies than they were at the concentration camps. Moving off of that point, at this specific concentration camp, there was a separation of prisoners. The higher “VIPS”, and more-wanted prisoners were set aside in a “barrack” that was called Barrack X. The living conditions were even more confined than the normal prisoners.
The gas chambers were very sad to walk through, as the prisoners were tricked into their deaths by thinking they were going into showers. Music was played to cover the screams, and the dead bodies were cremated, not by the soldiers, but by other prisoners who were given tasks. As the concentration camps filled up in terms of prisoners, they had less hygienic routines , less food to give out, and more dead bodies laying around. The Americans that freed everyone were faced with an ugly scene head-on, but the survivors are the ones who had to live through that for numerous days.
What I take away from this the most is that we must continue to learn about these horrible events in order to prevent them from ever happening again. People should listen to the few survivors left, and pay attention to what happens in current events. My generation is the future, and we are the ones to pave how our world will look.
Best,
Kaylee