March 16.
Today I went to Dachau with Ross, my buddy here and roommate from Freshman year. It was a moving experience like I have never felt before. I don’t know how to put it into words which convey exactly what I felt, but I’ll do my best. The only thing I want to write down is the most climactic moment for me at the site.
Ross and I left from home around mid afternoon and arrived to Dachau around 1:30pm. It’s a short train ride from downtown Munich. The weather was chilly enough to need a jacket. It was the kind of cold where you can’t keep your hands away from your pockets for too long. Once we arrived, it began to sprinkle slightly and never let up for the duration of our visit. We arrived, rented audio-guides, and split up to go see everything in solitude. I figured it would be better that way.
The natural flow of the guided audio tour takes you on a path through the main gate, past the kitchen, and main building (where they stripped prisoners and gave them their striped uniforms), past the barracks (where they stored as many as 2,000 prisoners in ONE near the end of the war!), and ultimately leads you to the death chamber, execution area, and ovens. It was near the gate next to one of the guard towers that I had a profound moment that brought the whole atrocity to reality for me.
Part of the tour explained the impenetrable fences and guard towers. This system was considered impenetrable due to the fact that it was so deadly and so heavily manned. From the outside of the camp moving in picture a 45 foot tall guard tower armed with machine gun turrets below which is a 21 foot tall barbed wire fence. Three feet or so in front of the barbed wire fence is an electric fence – strong enough to kill – which is preceded by a square 6 foot ditch and before a 24 foot strip of grass. The guards were ordered to shoot (without question or warning) anyone who set a foot on that grass strip. I was approaching this whole setup from afar while listening to the description I just gave as I walked. I must have been a foot or so from the grass strip when everything became very cold. It wasn’t just cold from the weather though, it felt different. The feeling made me stop and look around. It felt cold like death. Like I was in the presence of a dead person – the kind of feeling you get at a funeral when you walk up and see the body in the casket. It gave me the chills and forced me to bundle up. I shook off the chilly feeling and began to take a step forward onto the grass when I involuntarily stopped, my foot suspended in midair over the grass line. At that moment it hit me like a ton of bricks that at this exact spot, people had died by crossing the line in order to be shot to end their suffering. People had once lived here who were so demeaned that this had been the spot where they took their out. It was the saddest thing I have ever felt, and I couldn’t cross the line. I felt so sorry for all those people treated like animals, and furious at the guards and SS officers who were capable of such cruelty. The suicide thing really hit home for me. I was moved to tears. Thank God this is no more than a historic site now.
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