Dachau

Yesterday we went and toured the Dachau Concentration Camp, which was the first Concentration Camp ever built. It was, as expected, incredibly sad. Thousands of people suffered and died there--from starvation, overwork, abuse, medical experiments and extermination. It is impossible to find and accurate number as the SS, who kept meticulous records, omitted the deaths of anyone who they saw as sub-human--which included over 4,000 russian political prisoners and every Jew that died after 1942. Nevertheless it is enormous. We took a tour and saw a reconstruction of one of the dormitories where they had set up the number of beds that would've been present in 1933 when the camp opened, then 1938, 1942, and finally 1945. The number jumped from something like 55 in the beginning to, in some dormitories, over 2,000 by the time the camp was liberated. 

I think what surprised me the most about Dachau was how hollow it all felt, how empty, as if there had been so much sadness that the very walls had become desensitized, immune. After all, its only buildings, now. The gas chambers, the ovens, the overcrowded dormitories, the electrical fence on which many chose to die of suicide rather than starvation... it was overwhelming. 

While there we saw large tour groups of both schoolchildren and German soldiers, both of whom are required to tour at least one camp at least once in their lifetime so that it cannot be forgotten or denied. I wish America would do the same thing for our atrocities...but where would we go for tours? To the Native American reservations that still exist? To the Japanese internment camps that were torn down so that we wouldn't have to remember that we, too, held innocent people in cages, perhaps the storefronts that for years wore signs reading NO COLOREDS ALLOWED? How about the fence on which Matthew Shepard, a gay man, was tied up and brutally beaten to death? 

Unfortunately our mistakes have either already been swept under the rug or are ongoing. As the resident winners, we have the luxury of forgetting our mistakes(and therefore repeating them...Gitmo comes to mind). In a way, it is a mercy that the Germans aren't allowed that option. Right across the fence from the Dachau memorial site are normal apartments. People live in Dachau, their patios look out across the long fields were gray dormitories used to stretch. Nevertheless, the Nazi regime and the second world war are not common dinner table topics. In fact, they are almost never discussed outside school. It is simply to painful for people to face daily the knowledge that their people, their country(sometimes their family) caused such an incredible atrocity. Germany was a highly-industrialized, modern, developed nation at the beginning of World War II. Progress does not always equal civilization. Civilization does not always equal civility. Progress simply allows us to distance ourselves from the emotional and psychological consequences of our actions. 

It is easy to look at the actions of others and see morality as a thick, black line. It is only when we examine ourselves that the line grays, blurs. Modern german citizens, faced daily with that thin, gray line-- the line between mother and monster, grandpa and nazi often look away. It is a choice they cannot make. I cannot say that, placed in the same position, I wouldn't feel the same. We are all capable of horror. It is what makes us beautiful, no? That are good choices, our loving choices, our human choices, are irrevocably wrapped up in our wrongs. On the Statue of the Unknown Prisoner is says, "The dead to be honored, the living to be reminded". He stands casually, hands in his pockets, head upheld-- a sharp contrast to the pictures of the camp prisoners standing at attention for hours on end, heads bowed. It is a beautiful memorial to the human spirit--the spirit that looks daily, hourly, into the awful darkness of its own heart and yet somewhere, somehow, finds light.