Dachau

So, probably the most important thing to mention right now is that one of the most annoying things that could have happened to me, computer-wise, just did. Yesterday my power cord stopped working, which means that whenever I use my computer, my battery will run down. Right now a kind roommate is letting me use her power cord, but I can't count on that everywhere. This means I save my battery for when I really need it and only use my hostel's computers. I haven't exactly been spending all my time on the internet lately, but this means even less than usual, so I will probably be even less punctual (than usual :p) when answering email and updating this blog.

Anyway. Sunday was my last full day in Germany, and I spent a lot of it at Dachau. I'm...not really sure what to say about it. My tour guide asked us on the way there to think about why we were going -- why, when we could have done so many other things in Munich, we decided to go to the site of a former concentration camp. There were rather a lot of different answers for me. I've seen so many Holocaust exhibits and memorials since coming to Europe that I wanted to see one of those camps with my own eyes. They're so important to Germany's history that it felt wrong to leave Germany without seeing one when I had the opportunity. The tour guide said we could have gone to a beer garden or something more cheerful, but I felt that I couldn't just see the happy things and ignore the horrible. There was even a bit of feeling about how I'm mostly German, even though we've been American since before the National Socialists came to power, and it feels sort of like a part of my history, even though my only German connection is really in my ancestry. I don't know if I can explain better than that, but in any case, I really felt like I had to go to Dachau.

But I still don't know what to say about it. I was there, but I wasn't THERE. I could see the "work will set you free" sign on the gate, but not know the despair of the people working in the camp and not being set free at all, except in death, until finally the war was over. I could see the outline of the "no smoking" sign in the administration building, put there as a taunt to the prisoners who were not allowed cigarettes, and the shelves in the barracks for inmates not allowed to have possessions to put on those shelves, but I can't even imagine what they felt and what they went through. I have no personal framework for that. And of course I'm glad that I have no personal framework for imagining, much less understanding, but I could only feel the dimmest reverberating echo of their anguish as a visitor sixty years later, and it still only seems slightly more real to me. I saw it, and was horrified, and incredulous that this could have existed at all, but I could not be there as they were there. I do not regret that, and yet I do. I don't know.

I saw the gate, and the roll call square, and the administration building, and the barracks. The bunker built only for torture. The watchtowers and the fence. The road to the crematorium, and the plaque bearing the words "think about how we died here". And I saw the vibrantly green grass and the trees with branches thick with leaves, and wow was that incongruous, except that the Nazis used that to their advantage, because in the beginning the world could not believe the horrors happening there.

I'm just about done with my time on this computer, which is just as well. Let this post stand on its own. I'll talk about the rest of Munich and Salzburg in my next post.