There is no version of this post where I can be glib or casual, so I will not try.
Walking into Dachau on Sunday morning, I thought I was reasonably prepared for what we would see. I grew up learning about the Holocaust in school like most American kids, going through the curriculum probably half a dozen times across different grades. You think that repetition builds some kind of familiarity. It does not. Nothing in a classroom prepares you for standing on the actual ground.
The first thing that struck me was the scale. The camp is enormous. Wide open stretches of gravel, row after row of foundations where barracks once stood, fences and watchtowers that seem to go on further than they should. I found myself genuinely struggling to comprehend how many people passed through this single place. And then Lauren, one of the people in our group who had previously visited Auschwitz, quietly mentioned that compared to what she saw there, she considered Dachau small. That stopped me completely. Instant chills. If this is small, the human mind simply cannot fully absorb what the larger camps represent.
Our guide did an excellent job of contextualizing not just the history of the camp itself but how World War II continues to ripple through German society today. One moment that caught me completely off guard was when he mentioned that BMW had operated its own concentration camp during the war, using prisoner forced labor in their production. Having spent Tuesday at BMW headquarters, having stood in that museum tracing the company’s proud history, having genuinely admired what they have built, that information hit me in a way I was not expecting. It did not erase the visit, but it added a layer of complexity to it that I have been sitting with ever since. Pride and atrocity can occupy the same history. That is an uncomfortable but important thing to reckon with.
Walking through the gas chambers and cremation ovens was the heaviest part of the day. There is a silence in those spaces that feels different from ordinary quiet. I left Dachau grateful, unsettled, and more committed than before to actually remembering rather than just knowing.