We began our 8th day in Germany with a bus ride east to Dachau, a concentration camp located near München. I knew this would be heavy day, but a very important one.
When we arrived at Dachau, we met up with our tour guide who said the remembrance site was emptier than usual due to it being a weekend & no school trips occurring. I learned that visiting concentration and extermination camps is required for German school kids and teenagers.
We began the tour by walking through an iron gate with the words, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which translates to, “Work makes one free.” This saying is at the gates of other concentration camps as well. I remember seeing pictures of this when I was younger, so to step through those gates knowing what happened to the people who did before me was chilling.
Our tour guide told us about the history of Dachau, and how this was a “model concentration camp” of sorts, used by the Nazi party to train jailors for other camps. “Only” 41,500 people were murdered here, as this was primarily a work camp. There were, however, a few mass executions at the camp. After learning about some of the history, we went into a reconstruction of the barracks, where our tour guide told us more about the life of the inmates at the camp, and their awful conditions.
In the barracks, there was a lot of information about the awful treatment of the prisoners. If their beds were not “up to standard,” they could be punished in horrible ways like pole hanging. Most of the inmates had little to no access to sanitation, while Jewish inmates were not allowed to bathe at all. In each and every thing we learned about the camp, you could see how it was intended to dehumanize and destroy the inmates.
After the barracks, we walked to the crematorium. On our way, we passed the yard where lineups were conducted twice a day to count the inmates. The inmates were expected to stand for line in hours in sometimes inches of snow dressed in thin clothing. We learned that some prisoners would purposefully run into the electric fence to take their own lives, rather than suffer in this living hell.
When we got to the crematorium, there were various religious buildings near it, that were built after WW2 in remembrance of this site. We saw where they cremated bodies, and our tour guide told us about how they had to build another crematorium due to the amount of bodies. This camp, although it was not used primarily for extermination, did have a gas chamber in it which we walked through. Seeing this all made me feel sick to my stomach for the victims and their families.
After leaving that area, we ended our tour at the museum on-site. Our tour guide said something that stuck with me, about how those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and that its our generation’s turn to stop something like this from ever happening again. This experience, while harrowing, was so important. I learned a lot about the Holocaust that I did not know prior, and I hope to carry this information with me the rest of my life.