Day 8: May 15th

Our visit to Dachau was today, which made today a very somber, heavy day.  We left in the morning, and arrived at Dachau around 11 am.  Our tour guide walked us through the concentration camp, and then we watched a short video about it.

Our path through Dachau mimicked the path that a prisoner at the time would have taken, so we started off by walking through the main gates of the camp.  These gates were very big and made of heavy metal, with several lookout posts.  After the gate building, you could see the barbed wire stretching around the exterior of the camp to keep everyone in.  I immediately felt very dark and heavy- this was where over 206,000 prisoners walked into the camp. Everyone in our group was silent as we walked through the camp gates.  Dachau is a place where you don't want to talk; too much has happened here to say anything.

A lookout stand on the perimeter of Dachau

The opening gates

From there, we walked through the registration building, where all the prisoners would have been showered and beaten and given numbers tattooed on their arms.  Some of the original floors and walls remained, and they had put pictures of what it originally looked like up on the wall. There were pictures of very skinny prisoners being walked through the room, as well as people being tortured.  It's hard to comprehend that I stood in the exact place where so many awful, inhumane things had happened.  There's really no words to describe the feeling of standing in a concentration camp and staring at a picture of a man hanging from the ceiling that now stands over your head.  

After the registration building, we walked through a hallway where the "special prisoners" were kept.  These prisoners usually had committed crimes against the Nazis, and were given individual cells, rather then being kept in the long barracks.  This hallway really creeped me out.  It felt almost as if all the prisoners were still there with us, watching every move we made.  Most of the cell doors were cracked open, and you could see the building's original paint still peeling on the walls.  

A map of all the concentration/ extermination camps

Outside of the registration building

The door of a special prisoner's cell

The hallway for the special prisoners

After the special prisoners cells, we walked along a wide stretch of openness where the 34 barracks had once stood.  All of the barracks had been destroyed for health and safety reasons, although the preservation committee had reconstructed one of the barracks for an example.  The prisoners lived in awful living conditions, with over 1000 men living in a space meant for 250 men. 

 Once we passed the barracks' foundations, we crossed a small bridge to visit the extermination building.  Although Dachau was supposed to be just a concentration camp, they had an extermination building where they tested different gasses before sending the gasses out to extermination camps.  This building was by far the worst experience of my day.  We were allowed to walk through the extermination building, and eventually we got to the gas chamber room.  Everyone else in our group stopped to look around, but I had to walk straight through to the next room.  The atrocities committed in that room, and the sadness and pain that still lingered, was too much for me to handle.  After the gas room was the cremation room, where the ovens still stood.  This room was just as hard to look at as the gas room, so I walked out of the building quickly.  Standing outside and looking back at the extermination building, I started to  cry a little bit.  In a place with so much history, there is really nothing you can do other than cry.

I have no pictures for these parts of the tour, or for the rest of the tour.  It felt wrong to take pictures of everything we saw- almost as if we were mocking the prisoners in a way.  Some things are best to simply experience, and let live in your memories.  To take pictures of everything would feel like I was belittling the camp and making it more of a tourist destination than a concentration camp.

The rest of the day we had free, and my SGL group chose to meet up and finish up our powerpoint.  We had a good time, and afterwards all of the girls, plus a few of the German students, chose to order Chinese food before going to an old warehouse- turned club.  I had a really fun night, but what I will remember from today was the Dachau trip and all of the emotions that went along with it.