One woman looks back on her many visits to the famous concentration camp memorial.
Ask locals about dachau and they will tell you of a beautiful hilltop castle with a spectacular view, Renaissance ceiling, and a café that serves the best cake you ever ate. They’ll mention the Old World ambience, the wealthy suburbanites, and the tourist attraction that will long be synonymous with the town’s name. That day in March of 1933 – when Himmler set up Germany’s first death camp at an abandoned WWI munitions factory in Dachau – would become the thorn in Dachau’s side, which will be sore as long as memories of the camp remain. I have been to the Dachau concentration camp memorial five times. The first was as an exchange student in high school. My classmates and I had just finished a five-day journey down Germany’s “Romantic Road.” We had enjoyed a lazy cruise down the Rhein, bought souvenirs in kitsch-laden Rüdesheim, and delighted in being of drinking age. We arrived at the memorial on a gray, drizzly day in June. Although we were curious about the historic site, we were more concerned with giggling and planning our next beer night. We did notice that our Czechoslovakian bus driver Herbert refused to park within view of the gate, and remained in the driver’s seat holding a newspaper over his face for the duration of our visit. His brother was killed at Dachau. After the ominous walk past the watchtower, within the barbed wire fencing, we learned from a cleaning woman – who talked to us through the window of the museum building – that the camp had closed just before we arrived. Bribed by our German teacher with a twenty-mark bill, the woman let us in to view the gallery and its billboard-size horror photos, uniforms, and whipping post, but we were told that we could not access the gas chamber or crematoria. After touring limited parts of the museum and grounds, we were not disappointed to have missed the concentration camp’s grizzlier memorials. Heads bowed, we returned to the bus in a kind of shock. The only sound to break the silence of the bus ride home was that of quiet crying. The Dachau concentration camp opened in 1933. Its first prisoners – roughly 3,000 of them, were held for political reasons. Within a few years Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and anyone considered a weak link in the Aryan chain were interned within its confines. A model for all subsequent death camps, Dachau was the site of torture, starvation, human lab experiments and murder. The now-famous iron gate bearing the message Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free), in front of which so many tourists choose to have their picture taken, swindled the camp’s first residents into believing they had a fighting chance. When the camp was liberated in 1945, 30,000 prisoners were found crammed into a space originally built to house one-fifth that number. According to camp records 31,951 registered prisoners had been murdered, but the precise number of the countless unregistered prisoners killed is unknown. Many structures in the camp were destroyed for health reasons, but relics and reproductions – for some visitors the site alone suffices – powerfully evoke the horrors of the Holocaust. My next four visits to the memorial were with friends and family from the U.S. With each visit, I have become more knowledgable. I have, of course, now seen the crematoria and found little comfort in being informed that the gas chambers at the camp were never put to use. I’ve stood breathless inside the Jewish community’s eerie oven-shaped monument, and discovered a somewhat hidden, flower-lined path where victims are buried. While the shock factor has worn off, the sadness I felt on my first visit at 17 remains. Those who ask me to take them to the memorial tend to start the tour curious, but more out of a car-accident-gawking-like voyeurism, for they don’t yet grasp what awaits them beyond the front gate. And then we begin our walk along the barbed wire, and I find myself sparing no horrifying detail to shock my guests out of their made-for-television mindsets. But when I look at their faces, I see there is no need for words.