Thursday, March 14, 2013

Visiting the Dachau concentration camp


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.


5 comments:

  1. An exacting read. I hope others will reflect too. Chance to appreciate peace now

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  2. I think I've told your wife this, but there's this part of me that's kind of relieved that the generation of people who fought in WWII on the German side is dying off, due to that same sort of unease I've always had: did person-X participate? How? Why?

    Then again, I'm embarrassed to say that I've never asked my father (lived in Virginia in the '50s) whether there was Jim Crow in his part of the world. I doubt it had much effect on his life (certainly his parents, who were Jewish radicals from NYC, wouldn't have tolerated any of that stuff), but I don't know. Still, a lot of Boomers grew up before the end of Jim Crow, and we just don't talk about that at all.

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  3. ...my first thought as I realized what you were writing about was "I hope you didn't take my girls..." but then there are lessons to be learned, and when is the right time to talk about the ugly part of history. Fortunately, I am not a parent, therefore that decision will never be mine to make...I am sure I would make the wrong one.
    I have met many holocaust survivors and they all had a compelling and unique story to share. Their story is that of survival, and forgiveness, and an underlying fear that will never go away. This part of history still gives me nightmares.

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  4. Sherry: It was a pretty easy decision not to take the girls; they are too young to see something this horrible. I taught Cornelia a bit about the holocaust, explaining "the Nazis murdered Jews and Gypsies and gays simply for who they were" and left it at that, at least for now. As she grows older and learns more, she'll get the full awful details. I am awed by survivors' ability to forgive. I'm not sure I could if I were in their shoes.

    Dan: I will actually be a bit sad when the war becomes so distant that there's no one alive who remembers it. There are two or three relatives in the Biedl family tree who participated, at least one of them willingly, the others forcibly. We don't talk about it much in the family, not because we're ashamed but because it doesn't seem that important anymore. Grandparents on my mother's side were not at all liberally minded on racial matters during the Jim Crow era. Since then, they've seen the light, and so I'm willing to forgive their earlier ignorance. I believe tolerance and kindness are not innate; they must be taught. Only the truly enlightened discover it on their own in the midst of culturally ingrained bigotry. If my parents had been bigots, how long (if ever) would I have taken to unlearn it? Thank goodness I'll never have to know.

    Jim: Appreciating peace is one of the great lessons from that era. My friend put it nicely this way: "While visiting the realities of a concentration camp must have been horrible, I'm glad that at least it still stands there as a reminder of how low we can go. So many silent people let that happen, which is probably the lesson for most of us."

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  5. Jason, thanks for your great post. I've been to Dachau too, and it is a chilling place. I've read a bunch of books to our boys about the Holocaust, and we've talked about it too, but I'm not sure at what age I'd take them to a concentration camp either.

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