Time seems to stop when you visit Dachau. For the entire time you are in the camp, you find yourself in a vacuum that returns you to the years between 1933 and 1945. The history is so palpable that at times it is almost hard to breathe. Unlike anywhere else I have ever visited there was hardly a sound, no loud voices, no laughter. Although there were children present, there were no childish sounds. It was eerie really. After the first hour or so, it became hard to continue to read all the horrible things that have happened here.
What keeps you going are the few stories of hope and courage, of survival and triumph. I think we all smiled when we read about the Hungarian inmates who hid an elderly deportee so that he wasn’t sent to a death camp. He survived the war and was almost 80 years old. Some of the facts are so amazing as to be inexplicable. With this mentality of total annihilation how some Jews were able to buy their freedom, were released and were allowed to emigrate. Stories of ministers and priests who stayed to minister to the inmates. This is not just the story of the thousands who died here; it is the story of all who passed through and those who survived. It is more than the big picture; it is the individual picture. We now have faces to put on the inmates, we don’t know all the names but all of their faces tell a story that we need to hear, even more so today.
Beyond the administration building, where the displays are, there are several other areas to visit. There are expiatory chapels, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish.
We visited all four and even went to the chapel outside the gates of the camp. You walk down the center road to reach the chapels. It takes you through the area where the original barracks stood. Now there are only numbered markers to identify them.
If you keep walking you will reach the crematory. It is out beyond the Orthodox chapel. In the woods beyond you can walk by the spot where the Russian prisoners were systematically executed. There are still bullet holes in the wall.
As you walk back to the parade ground, you will be able to visit the reconstructed barracks. They give you a visual picture of what they looked like. Stark and barren are the words that come to mind. Cleanliness was pushed to the point of obsession. It was used as a way to dehumanize and to discipline. The object of this camp wasn’t as much to destroy the life as to destroy the spirit.
There is an audio tour, which you can pick up in this building. There isn’t a store per se, but you can rent the tour or buy a book in the first barrack.
The sculpture of the barbed wire fence with human bodies caught on its barbs is a poignant reminder that we are standing on sacred ground and above all we must never forget what one human being is capable of doing to another.
You walk back along the walls with their barbed wire, past the guard towers and into the present. The heavy feeling doesn’t leave us for days and frankly, this was an experience I will never forget.