The inscription on the front gate of the Dachau concentration camp reads "Arbeit mach frei." This message, which also haunts the front gate of Auschwitz, translates to "Work will set you free."
The extreme irony of those words, however, does not strike home right away. Only after one has left the camp grounds, perhaps 20 or 30 minutes later, is the brain capable of attempting to process this and other ironies - the utter absurdities of the concentration camp.
And then, later, once you've left, only an attempt is possible. For no right-minded human soul can ever fully wrap his or her brain around what happened at Dachau and the hundreds of camps just like it.
Dachau was the first camp that the Nazis set up in 1933. As such, it served as the model for Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe. Dachau also happens to be one of the best-preserved of all the camps still in existence, which allows for the chilling expression of every painful detail you see there.
I will try to describe as much of the camp as I can here, though no words can do any justice to the emotions I felt during my visit to Dachau, just as my emotions could never capture even one-millionth of the horror that the actual inmates of that place must have felt during their time there.
Walking through the front gate and into the confines of Dachau, a chill inched down my spine and through my body. Others who have visited concentration camps cite a similar feeling. In Dachau, the chill was particularly tangible, as the camp is a full 10 to 15 degrees colder in the winter than surrounding areas. In the summer, it is a full 10 to 15 degrees warmer. These two facts, which should be innocent idiosyncrasies of the local climate, surely cost hundreds of extra lives from 1933 to 1945.
Coming through the gate, you enter a massive field, several football fields long and wide, carpeted in gravel, and utterly barren. This is the appellplatz, or the roll call area. Every morning, prisoners of Dachau were made to stand in the appellplatz while the roll was read. The process usually lasted an hour or so, but would continue until every single name in the prison was accounted for. This meant that the roll call could take all day.
Oftentimes the roll would drag on - in any temperature of course - while corpses were dragged out to their spaces to be counted. Prisoners could not move. If one collapsed, as often occurred, he would be beaten. If another prisoner tried to help him, he would be beaten.
This is an example of what Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, calls the "useless violence" of the camps in a book I recently read titled "The Drowned and the Saved." Useful violence, in contrast, while awful, adheres to at least some code of logic, even if that code is twisted and evil. For instance, the mass murder of Jews in places like Dachau and Auschwitz, for Hitler, was useful violence. Hitler's plan was to murder every living Jew. The death camps made sense for this plan.
Then there is the useless violence that prevailed within the camps themselves. For instance, there was no purpose, no utility, to the rule against helping a fallen prisoner during the roll call, just as there was no purpose to many of the cruel acts performed by the guards. It is one of many examples of Nazi violence as an end, rather than a means.
From the appellplatz, one walks through the barracks. The bunks are wooden and big enough for perhaps a large dog. Towards the end of the war, when Dachau was filled to several times its capacity, each bunk slept more than one person.
All of Dachau is fenced in by barbed wires, with seven lookout towers surrounding the perimeter. In case anyone thought otherwise, it should be noted that the idea of escape from a camp like Dachau was totally absurd. Getting out of the camp was impossible, and even if it were to be accomplished, where could one go? Escaping Dachau, one would find him or herself in the heart of Hitler's Reich. Being identified once within a thousand miles in any direction would result in being sent back to a camp and instant death.
After walking through a series of religious monuments - there is also a museum at Dachau - you arrive at the end of the camp: the crematorium. You begin by walking into the gas chambers. Only the shower heads are missing from the room, which is small, but would have been packed to the walls for efficiency.
It is unclear today to what extent the gas chambers were used at Dachau. Some say they were not completed in time for mass use; other inmates swear that they watched hundreds march to their deaths there. For me, having seen the chamber firsthand, it matters not. The mere existence of such a device was enough to make me nauseous.
Leaving the chamber, you walk into an adjacent room where the bodies would have been stripped of any gold teeth or other valuables. Then you reach the room with the ovens, where the bodies were burned. I wish I could tell you what I was thinking in this room, but I honestly can not remember, and would think that most people would say the same.
When you're in that room, your brain pretty much leaves your body. It can not make sense of that senselessness, so you do not think. Some people cried. Most just stared, blankly. As I said before, only after you've left can you try to make sense of what you felt there.
For an entire weekend, I did think about Dachau after I'd left, and how I felt while I was there. I've realized this: sadness is not the primary feeling I experienced at Dachau, though the sadness I felt there was unbearably heavy and burdensome. For me, the prevalent emotions were confusion and fear.
Confusion that such a thing was possible. I could not, and still I can not, understand how such events can come to occur. I keep trying and keep failing.
Fear that somewhere within each of us, there is a type of evil that, given the right circumstances, could somehow morph into what I saw at Dachau. Fear that an entire nation could commit these acts and think they were right to do so.
It frightens me that nearly all human beings have something deep down inside of them that could potentially allow them to watch this happen, impotently.
And it was not a historical aberration. Convincing yourself of that is the most harmful kind of naivet?©® Look at Abu Ghraib and you realize that the impulse to dehumanize another person knows no boundary of time, place or nationality. It is a part of the human experience, and one for which we must hold a steady contempt and keep a constant vigil, so that the words "never again" do not fade away.
