Samstag, 22 Juli
I woke up feeing exhausted and aching all over. Those damned Isar rocks! Smite them all! My knees and legs were cramped from crouching, sitting, kneeling, and squatting by the barbecue all evening, so the thought of being a tourist hurt. (Literally.) The thought of where I was going wasn’t really too thrilling either. Dachau is an ancient medieval/renaissance town in its own right, but where were we going? The only reason why Dachau is infamous. Its concentration camp. Mary and I weren’t exactly bright rays of sunshine when we greeted each other. Nor was anyone else. It was with a rather stiff air that we all made our way to the Deutsche-Bahn and took the suburban train to Dachau. That was my first shock, that it’s a half-hour from München. The bright sun of Bavaria, so near the melancholy cloud of Dachau.
I don’t like to dwell on all that I saw. Like the air of a graveyard, there was a strange stillness or disquiet in the atmosphere, despite the sun, that kept it from being a lovely day. It was terrifically hot, and I later learned that it’s always either hot or cold in Dachau, no real middle ground. When we walked up to the entrance from the bus stop, I was startled to see how simple everything was, including the simple wrought-iron gate. “Arbeit macht frei” it said, in large letters across the gate. I shivered, despite the intense probably 37-grad heat.
We met our tour guide, cheerful and smiling blonde woman, by the main building. She looked about college-age and spoke in a rapid but well-enunciated German such that I could understand a good bit of what she said, especially when I strained for it. (I’m surprised at how much German I can understand audibly. Thank goodness it’s not French, which is impossible!) She explained that the tour would be two and a half hours—and I instantly looked to Mary. Had I heard that right? My German comprehension apparently had been correct. Two and a half hours! I blinked. That’s a long time to be walking in the sun of a dreary graveyard of a museum. Well, I decided, it was 5 € for all of it. Stop griping.
We moved from place to place to stand in front of signs as the tour guide explained the history and significance of certain sights. Dachau was started in 1933 as a camp for political prisoners and outcasts—“asocials” and political prisoners and homosexuals and gypsies—and was more of a work camp and a sort of trial-by-error example of a camp than any of the others. In the mid-1930s, when the Nazis were more of a political party than anything, the propaganda of the camp in the German news was rather… frightening. To justify the existence of such a camp, the newspaper articles explained about the rehabilitative nature of the camp and how they would routinely release prisoners who did show improvement or a change in attitude. (And they actually did, early on.) The nature of the persuasive propaganda put me in the frame of mind of Wicked, the musical, in which the Wizard of Oz uses the media and the idea of manipulative propaganda to make the people of Oz believe what he wants them to believe. Why is that story so strongly affective? Because stuff like it actually happened.
Our tour guide brought us to the gate and gestured at the inscription in iron. Our tour guide gestured to it and said, in German and English, “Es sagt, ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ oder in Englisch, ‘Work makes you free.’ Which is, excuse my French, bullshit.” (She did indeed say the last part in English.) As we came to see as the tour progressed, Dachau was a very interesting place… if you look at it in a detached, completely unemotional sort of way. (It’s very easy to get severely depressed by just looking around. I attempted to get into detached Historian mode.) For instance, it was at Dachau where the head guy of Auschwitz was trained. It was at Dachau where they pioneered methods that would be used elsewhere. Creepy as heck, but it puts some things into perspective, a little bit.
After we’d been walking for far too long in the hot sun, our tour guide asked, rather genially, if we’d like to see the crematorium. Mary and I looked at each other. I supposed that unless she kept a somewhat upbeat attitude, her job would be pretty miserable. We all decided, sure, why the heck not, let’s go see the crematorium, and we set off toward a tree-lined square, where rusted barbed wire was the only last surviving artifact showing that the beautifully shaded and quaint little square around a squat and unassuming building was actually a place for death. It was, literally, pretty, because of the memorials set up around the building. It did not look like anything other than a small brick house, with a rather large set of chimneys. Then we walked inside.
I don’t think I’ve ever walked so quickly through a museum in my life. Because it was a museum. But I’d had no idea, none, that there were gas chambers in said museum, as well as ovens. Somehow the word “crematorium” seemed to conjure something that did not mean “site of mass murder.” I have no idea what I was actually expecting.
No one said anything as we exited. If anyone met anyone’s eyes, they averted their own quickly. We all thanked our tour guide after that, but that was all any of us really said on the long walk back to the bus stop, and throughout the train ride back to the Hauptbahnhof. We all agreed to see each other tomorrow at Goethe for Neuschwanstein, but it was with a strange air that we all parted.
I immediately headed back to my room, getting a few things at the Tengelmann’s, and sat sort of detachedly on my window sill. I grabbed the first of Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, Assassin’s Apprentice, and stared out at the Kinder Garten down below. I severely needed a book as distraction. Needless to say, reading all 480 pages of it—British typesettings and spellings and all—took me only a few hours, and I was happily distracted by the time I fell into an exhausted sleep.
