Dachau

(Warning: I discuss some pretty disturbing death and torture things in this post.)

My phone died almost as soon as I got to Dachau, so I wasn't able to take any pictures, but I'm not sure how I feel about taking pictures in a place like that anyway. (Personally, I mean. I don't have anything against others doing it, and I'm also pretty sure I've taken pictures at plenty of other sites of human suffering. But there's something about this, the cultural tenor of it and the place it has in my own mind, that makes me unsure.) Besides, it's not like I'm going to forget it.

It was devastating, and overwhelming, and I kinda felt like I was in a daze for a while after. The tour guide told lots of stories about the horrors and tortures inflicted on the prisoners there, which I had expected (it would seem gratuitous, the descriptions, if this weren't real life. I guess real life is kinda gratuitous, is entirely too much, sometimes), and some stories about the resilience of the human spirit, which I'd also been expecting.

But you can't really anticipate or predict how this stuff is going to make you feel. Easily the most uncomfortable places were the gas chamber and the barracks where guards used to torture people. In the barracks, you walk down a long hallway, and you can peer into empty rooms on either side, with cement floors and peeling paint and the smell of old things. I kept expecting to see things in the rooms out of the corner of my eye, maybe even see people still in there, ghosts or trapped in time, but of course they were all empty.

You can walk through the gas chamber at Dachau, you can stand in the actual, real room--it's not a reconstruction and there aren't any bars or glass to stop you from getting too close--you're right there. When I walked in, that's when the overwhelming feeling really hit. I could feel it pressing down on me at the same time it was rising up, twisting my stomach and my chest. I'm not sure I could say exactly what the feeling was, but it was right there.

The stories of things that happened during the war were intense. But maybe my favorite story I heard on the tour was of something that happened after the war, when some nuns started a convent in some buildings that (if I recall correctly) used to be SS housing or offices. The entrance to the convent is through one of the camp's guard towers, because when she was forbidden to make the entrance there, a nun took a sledgehammer and made one anyway. And some ex-prisoners were really happy about that, because it meant that this thing that had once meant fear and death could now lead somewhere good.

The guide talked a lot on that theme, about the way many buildings that were previously used by the Nazis now serve other functions, and how that's a good thing, that things don't always have to be preserved as their evil past selves. Something about that really struck a chord with me, the idea that yes, we can't forget what something meant, but that doesn't mean that we can't make it mean something new.