We spent the day at the Dachau Concentration camp. It was a very somber experience. It is very hard to imagine how such a place ever existed and how human beings could treat other human beings this way.
We got the audio guide so we could do our own walking tour. It was a great help. Not only did it explain the things we were looking at but it had actual stories told by survivors and liberators of the camp.
We could see the partial platform where the pisioners got off the train.
This is the gate house they entered the camp through. On the gate in German is says " work makes you free" the camps were originally classified as work camps.
We saw the yard where the prisoners were to stand and take roll call every morning and every night. This process could take hours. If someone was missing or had died and the numbers didn't add up they would start the whole process over and people would be punished. Prisoners would carry their dead bunkmates out in the morning and prop them up so the roll numbers would match. I just finished reading The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult and that story really brought all that I was seeing to life for me.
There are 7 guard towers around the camp. The camp is surrounded by a brick wall, a barbed wire fence and a ditch. The guards had permission to shoot and kill any one who was with 7 meters of the fence. The ss soliders would force people into this zone and say they were trying to escape so that they could shoot them. Desperate prisoners would run into this zone so they could be put out of their misery.
Dachua was the very first original concentration camp, all the others were based on its model. It was built to house 6000 prisoners to be re-educated and reformed to follow the new governments leadership. At it peak during the war there were over 70 000 pisioners here.
The bunkers for the prisoners were first set up with bunk beds with 24 prisoners per room
Then they were made into rows of bunks which tripled the number per room
Then the beds were basically just troughs where people could try and sleep. One of the ways to get beaten and punished was to not keep your living space clean. Can you imagine how that worked with now over 2000 people per room? There was so much disease and illness, many people died that way.
The camp was set up in 1933. After the war started it became much busier. The original political pisioners gave way to Jews and homosexuals and all other peoples deemed " not fit", special needs people, sick or infirm people. These people, had all kinds of medical experiments conducted on them. They were made to do inhuman tasks and physical labour with little or no food.
When the population of the camp got too big they started with the gas chamber. It was truly terrible to stand in here and I broke down at this point.
You had to strip down and stand naked and they would put gas into the room to kill the prisoners. After they were dead they put them in these ovens to burn their bodies.
There came a time that the camp ran out of coal for the fires so they took the prisoners out back, lined them up along this wall and shot them in the neck. They made a gully for the blood to go into and just stacked all the dead bodies up in a pile.
There was a man on our audio guide, a liberator of the camp, telling his story of what he had seen at the camp. It was hard just listening to him recall something that was so long agao but you could tell it was a sight he will never, never get over. It is hard to believe that people lived in the village right where this was all occurring and they actually said they had no idea that any of it had happened. The smell alone would have been atrocious nevermind all the trains that arrived full of people day after day.
Since the camp has been closed there has been a few memorials erected, by survivors, by church groups (a lot of pastors and ministers and rabbis were sent to Dachau), and by governments.
This one symbolizes all the patches the different groups at the camp.
This one the working struggling prisoners
This is a memorial walk for all the unknown dead at Dachau. They know that over 41 000 people died there but they suspect that the number is much much higher.
We must always remember what happened here, we must never forget and we need to stop it from happening all the places that it is happening right now.
After our emotional experience we headed back to our hostel. Now in England and France it is very easy to figure out the transit system, you can't even get near a bus or a train or a subway without a ticket. In Venice we had a 3 day water boat bus pass, in Florence we never ever bought a bus or a train ticket because we couldn't figure out where the heck to get them from. The same thing happened to us here today. We couldn't find a ticket kiosk at the Dachau station. Well we got on the train and the conductor nailed us. This is us being all gangster like lol.
We didn't have tickets, we faked out way out of it by saying we couldn't find them and with our broken English- German communication the conductor just kicked us off the train without any fine thank The Lord! We hunted around at the station and finally found a ticket machine, we bought our tickets and hopped on the next train. We need a pick me up after that so bratwurst on a baguette it was :)
Marian once forgot to punch her ticket on the GO train and had to go to court in Toronto to plead her case to a judge. Thank goodness you just got kicked off. Love your adventures.
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