Dachau, and Other Things

The first rain I had seen in many months came in Germany. I was on a bus, pulled over at a stop in some small village off the highway. The wind picked up, blowing leaves around in tiny funnels, and then it came down quick, forcing those outside in to a frantic sprint for cover. The girl that would eventually sit next to me was one of these poor people. A few minutes after it began, she got on soaked from head to toe, cradling a bag that contained a laptop. She said she liked the rain and did not mind it much.

Ten hours later I arrived in Munich and the clouds were still threatening, with occasional reminders it could unleash anything it wanted at any moment. I tucked away in one of the beer capitals of the world with one big beer that turned into many, making my way through some Hemingway and watching people come and go. This was one of my favorite evenings in a while -- something peaceful and so rare in my current situation -- and I did not have to take a photo or walk outside or do anything at all to have it.

There were not many things that would take me from my blissful corner seat, tucked away by the window in the presence of rain, but the next day I decided Dachau was one of those things because it is one of the simple things every human being should do in their life. A German concentration camp in operation between 1933 and 1945, it held some 200,000 people over the course of its operation while bringing about the deaths of over 43,000 Jews, homosexuals, prisoners of war, etc. The camp here served as a model for most others that would sprout up across Europe. As a close friend put it, who had been there before, "it's like being punched in the gut."

It is a very peculiar sensation being in a place where such atrocity happened on a beautiful day. You cannot really see it, or sense it, or understand how human beings are capable of doing such things to one another when the weather is so fine and the birds are happy in the trees and all the pleasant noises that would have been present back then are there still. But there were certainly other sights and sounds 75 years ago that would have changed the picture into something more haunting.

One question commonly asked in places like this is, "how could they have done it," which I always find peculiar because it assumes they were different than us and that we might have had the fortitude to do something else. The Milgram Experiment on obedience, done in the 1960s, I have always found to be a fascinating answer in this regard. Essentially, it shows that normal people are capable of doing terrible things as long as the person giving the command is perceived to be credible and in charge. Watching old videos of these experimental trials, where average subjects continually send potentially fatal electrical shocks to a acting patient, is truly a frightening display of human weakness. It seems that conscience means very little, as much as we would like to think otherwise, and I do not know what that says about us and what could be coming next if we do not remember what we have done before.

One place where Dachau becomes particularly heavy is through a small patch of woods, just over a calm little stream. It is there you find this sign which leads to a building with a chimney that holds this brick oven. There are not really words to convey how cold and plain this building is. Around Dachau, there aren't many words spoken at all.

My brief stint in Germany continued soon after on a eight hour bus to the North. The Black Forest of Bavaria gave way to lush green farmland leading up to Berlin, and I sat back, diving further into my book, occasionally looking up at the scenery and occasionally eavesdropping on the Spanish conversation behind me. In Berlin, as in most places in Germany, the holocaust is never too far away. To the credit of this country, they do everything they can to educate the next generation while embracing the past in an honest and straightforward way.

In the middle of downtown, close to shops and parks and a lovely little bookstore, lies the holocaust memorial. There is no explanation given, but most interpret the rectangular prisms at various heights to signify tombstones. I sat on one of them for awhile with my young German friend, looking around at the people wandering in between and along the edges. "There are some people who say we learn about it too much," she told me. "But I think it is very important, the education we get on it all, so people don't forget." I told her that one thing is certain: that her and I, a German girl and an American guy, would not be having this conversation, or any conversation at all, a few short decades ago, and that means we have all done something right.

Soon we moved on someplace else, and from that place I continued moving and by the time it was all done I had spent more than a day of my life on buses and completed one big triangle across the country. I arrived back where I began the week before, and things had not changed much.