Today was our eighth day in Augsburg. We are officially over 50% done with our trip. In honor of this I think it’s extremely important to learn about some of Germanys past. This is definitely one of the more important days of our trip and is more history based. today we had an extremely good tour guide who told us that it may not be fun to visit a concentration camp but it’s important to learn about history so we’re not doomed to repeat it. It was a mentally taxing day and definitely a place worth visiting. Dachau was the first concentration camp in Germany and contrary to popular believe it was a working camp, not an extermination camp. The goal wasn’t to kill people. It was to hold them. It is believed that this wasn’t an extermination camp because it was so close to Hitler’s hometown. The first prisoners in this camp were political threats and not Jewish people which also is a misbelief. When you walk in the camp, the first thing we heard were bells which at first didn’t mean much to us. We later learned the bell rang every time there was a death which added lots of emotion to the tour. There aren’t many words to describe the Camp today besides peaceful, it was a sunny day in the 70s yet there was an unsettling feeling throughout the whole camp. We were able to observer the sleeping quarters the kitchen, the barracks, the crematorium, and the work fields. Our tour guide did a good job of combining information and emotion while teaching and letting us explore for ourselves. This whole experience makes everything more real and makes you consider what’s going on today and question humanity as a whole. Our tour guide mentioned that there was a reunion of survivors in Dachau the week before which shows you how recent these events were, and it shows the amount of resilience these prisoners had to not only survive, but to come back 80 years later to prove that they’re still resilient, strong and brave. Something I thought was beautiful was that there are several different churches, currently standing in the camp of several different religions that were built after liberation in honor of the fallen and to fight back against a basic value that prisoners were stripped of. We hear so much about Auschwitz and concentration camps in American schooling that being in the camp almost doesn’t feel real but at the same time it makes everything so much more real. This is something everyone should visit once in their life so we can learn and improve.
After an emotionally taxing morning, we went back to the bus, had a little bit of food and went straight back to the hotel where we were allowed to have a free day for the rest of the day. I spent my time doing some work on my presentation before we got dinner at the Street Food Schmeckfestival. We got Italian pasta that was made in a cheese wheel which definitely crosses off a bucket list item. After that I got some chocolate covered strawberries, danced to some of the music, and had a fun and relaxing time to end our evening.
