We’ve seen the images all our lives, probably starting in a history class. The yellow stars.
The striped suits. The ovens. The piles of
corpses stacked like pipes. We know it and we are repulsed by it, but
we seldom feel it deep in our bones. It seems too distant. It all happened way back then, over there, in
black & white.
Even as I approach the entrance of the Dachau concentration
camp, holding the audio guide to my ear, it’s hard for me to sense viscerally that the Holocaust really happened, right here under my
feet. But suddenly I reach the gate, and I see the block letters wrought into the iron—ARBEIT MACHT FREI—and my blood turns cold. The breath leaves my chest, and I feel nausea rising. I can see the prisoners on the Appellplatz, standing in their pajamas in the snow, at attention, for hours at a time as the roll is called, slowly. I press my fingertip into the barbed wire. I see the hooks in the ceiling. And peer down the chute where they dropped
the pellets. When I can’t take it any longer, I head back to the bus stop.
The Nazis built the camp at Dachau to imprison their opponents almost as soon as Hitler seized power. They continued their abuses—torture, murder and starvation of prisoners—right until the very end, just a week before the surrender. But Dachau was, incredibly, a mere shadow of what went on
elsewhere. The savagery is beyond
comprehension. An hour east of Salzburg,
at the Mauthausen labor camp, SS guards would march inmates to the edge of a
quarry cliff and give them a choice:
jump to their deaths or push one of their comrades. Guards at the Janowska death camp in the Ukraine
made Jewish orchestra players play tunes as the guards executed prisoners in front of them. Because they liked killing
people to music.
Who were these monsters? Are they really the parents and grandparents of all these ordinary, iPod-wearing,
Facebook-posting people I see walking past me on the streets of Salzburg, pushing their kids
on merry-go-rounds at the park, weighing their bananas at the grocery store, inviting me
for a beer after dance class with a chummy pat on the back? The more I see of Austria and Germany—the normalcy of it,
the everydayness of it—the more I’m convinced that the Holocaust could have happened
anywhere.
All the ingredients of a holocaust—racism, resentment, delusions of
exceptionalism and entitlement, the desire for order and uniformity over freedom
and diversity—these are universal human phenomena. There is nothing German or Peruvian or
Mongolese about any of them. They swell up in every country from time to time, but usually, thankfully, not all at once. I can only conclude that post-Weimar Germany was simply one of those freak collisions of the
universe, a singularity in space-time in which all of those hazardous ingredients
converged in a single country in a single era, stirred
and whipped into an explosion by a charismatic leader who just happened to live
right there and then.
Would you and I have followed orders? Or stood by idly as others followed theirs? Or would we have dared to speak out and resist, knowing our families might be murdered for it?
Down the road from the Dachau memorial, there is a kindergarten. As our
bus rolled by it, I felt that in that building, behind the painted smiley
faces hanging in the windows, there were women who were at that very moment teaching little children the Golden Rule—and for
as long as they do, in this place and elsewhere, there will be no more Dachaus.
