Will we ever say Never Again and mean it
I had to be out of the hostel fairly early, so I grabbed breakfast and packed up. I'm still not so sure about this whole hostel concept...it's just kind of odd sometimes. I really hadn't talked to the other two girls in my room (again, they didn't speak much English or German that I could tell), and there wasn't really any way to ask them to please not take up every open surface area, chair, and table while I was trying to pack. And then I walked back into the room to finish things up, and one of the girls was sitting at the table talking. The room had lots of nooks and corners, so I figured the other girl was sitting somewhere I couldn't see, especially since I wasn't really looking for her. But nope, it turned out, the other girl was somewhere else, and this one was quite loudly and adamantly talking to herself. Um...ok. Probably better that I didn't understand any bit of what she was saying - I didn't really want to know.
I dropped my luggage in the designated room where it could stay until I was ready to leave the city. Walking toward the train station, I crunched through a layer of slick ice - all that was left of yesterday's snow which had melted in the afternoon then frozen again overnight. At the train station I puzzled over the instructions to get tickets, trying to sort out how I could get to my intended destination and back with the proper fare - especially since the Munich subways and street cars don't check tickets at the door, but send innocent-looking and often plain-clothed individuals around at random intervals to spot-check that passengers are carrying the correct ticket. The summer of 1991 when I lived outside of Munich and took language classes in the city, I navigated this system every day, but it has been years since I've entirely forgotten how it works.
My destination was a small-town suburb about half an hour north of Munich. Of all the time I have been here, I've never visited this particular historic landmark, and I figured this was as good a time as any.
Dachau. A blandly typical if perhaps exceptionally pretty Bavarian village with a river running through it and cute little downtown district full of bakeries and shops.. And, oh yeah, the seat of the worst genocide ever perpetuated against humankind, because this is where the Holocaust started. Even as early as 1933, prisoners of various sorts were being brought to the complex. In the early days, mostly political prisoners - communists, dissenters. Later began the arrival of ethnic groups to be cleansed - gypsies and Poles and Jews. At the height of the war, entire cadres of Russian prisoners of war were shipped here for wholesale execution. As the third reich was clawing its way to the end of the war, coal was so scarce that bodies were buried rather than burned, and waves of typhoid weakened the starving prisoners so direly that the Nazi rulers could not even keep up with the demands for prisoner labor in the war factories. It was American forces that liberated the camp in April of 1945, and because it was one of the first camps to be opened to foreign eyes, none of the troops had any idea what they were about to face. Thirty thousand people are documented to have died at this camp alone - not counting many more who died before they were registered as prisoners.
The old concentration camp is on the eastern outskirts of the town, and it took me about an hour to walk there from the train station. Just outside the gates, paths lead through trees and little hills and if you didn't know better, you'd think you were out for a day at the park. A plaque at the entrance gates thanks the American troops who faced lingering Nazi resistance when they forced their way into the camp on that spring day in 1945. But what is most striking about the site is not some sense of the sinister, but its utterly unassuming banality. Especially under a fresh coat of pristine snow, it's difficult to understand this place as anything other than a museum exhibit, far-removed in space as well as time from the place where all these things happened. One side of the camp abuts again a condo complex and then a school yard, where kids play and families grow up. The surrounding village gives no inkling of how its current residents feel about the fact that the world hears the name of their home town and shrinks in horror. I suppose you can't think about that and go on living there, yet there it is.
The museum at the camp is housed in one of the few remaining original buildings, and seems to me a strange mishmash of obscure political history and vignettes of horror. The exhibits are repetitive and difficult to follow, but the one that stays with me is a map of all the camps and subcamps across Germany and the occupied territories. And this is what I hadn't known - I've heard of Dachau and Auschwitz and Sobibor and can name about a half dozen more. I did not know that there were hundreds of installations, all over the nation, that housed and murdered prisoners. I suppose this should be obvious - you can't take out six million people at one place. But the thoroughness, the calculation, the precise arrangement of such a vast system of internment offers its own view into the horror of the Holocaust.
I left the Dachau camp through the same gates I came in through, gates that once separated the doomed from the free. Along the way I passed the sign that reads in five languages: Never Again. Nie Wieder. Plus Jamais. And I was reminded of a song by the spoken-word and hip-hop artist Ursula Rucker, who spoke of Rwanda and dozens of other modern-day atrocities when she asked:
Will we ever say Never Again and mean it?
I walked a shorter route back to the center of town, across the creek and along picturesque pathways, and then hopped back on a train toward Munich. Out of the past, back to the present.
I dropped my luggage in the designated room where it could stay until I was ready to leave the city. Walking toward the train station, I crunched through a layer of slick ice - all that was left of yesterday's snow which had melted in the afternoon then frozen again overnight. At the train station I puzzled over the instructions to get tickets, trying to sort out how I could get to my intended destination and back with the proper fare - especially since the Munich subways and street cars don't check tickets at the door, but send innocent-looking and often plain-clothed individuals around at random intervals to spot-check that passengers are carrying the correct ticket. The summer of 1991 when I lived outside of Munich and took language classes in the city, I navigated this system every day, but it has been years since I've entirely forgotten how it works.
My destination was a small-town suburb about half an hour north of Munich. Of all the time I have been here, I've never visited this particular historic landmark, and I figured this was as good a time as any.
Dachau. A blandly typical if perhaps exceptionally pretty Bavarian village with a river running through it and cute little downtown district full of bakeries and shops.. And, oh yeah, the seat of the worst genocide ever perpetuated against humankind, because this is where the Holocaust started. Even as early as 1933, prisoners of various sorts were being brought to the complex. In the early days, mostly political prisoners - communists, dissenters. Later began the arrival of ethnic groups to be cleansed - gypsies and Poles and Jews. At the height of the war, entire cadres of Russian prisoners of war were shipped here for wholesale execution. As the third reich was clawing its way to the end of the war, coal was so scarce that bodies were buried rather than burned, and waves of typhoid weakened the starving prisoners so direly that the Nazi rulers could not even keep up with the demands for prisoner labor in the war factories. It was American forces that liberated the camp in April of 1945, and because it was one of the first camps to be opened to foreign eyes, none of the troops had any idea what they were about to face. Thirty thousand people are documented to have died at this camp alone - not counting many more who died before they were registered as prisoners.
The old concentration camp is on the eastern outskirts of the town, and it took me about an hour to walk there from the train station. Just outside the gates, paths lead through trees and little hills and if you didn't know better, you'd think you were out for a day at the park. A plaque at the entrance gates thanks the American troops who faced lingering Nazi resistance when they forced their way into the camp on that spring day in 1945. But what is most striking about the site is not some sense of the sinister, but its utterly unassuming banality. Especially under a fresh coat of pristine snow, it's difficult to understand this place as anything other than a museum exhibit, far-removed in space as well as time from the place where all these things happened. One side of the camp abuts again a condo complex and then a school yard, where kids play and families grow up. The surrounding village gives no inkling of how its current residents feel about the fact that the world hears the name of their home town and shrinks in horror. I suppose you can't think about that and go on living there, yet there it is.
The museum at the camp is housed in one of the few remaining original buildings, and seems to me a strange mishmash of obscure political history and vignettes of horror. The exhibits are repetitive and difficult to follow, but the one that stays with me is a map of all the camps and subcamps across Germany and the occupied territories. And this is what I hadn't known - I've heard of Dachau and Auschwitz and Sobibor and can name about a half dozen more. I did not know that there were hundreds of installations, all over the nation, that housed and murdered prisoners. I suppose this should be obvious - you can't take out six million people at one place. But the thoroughness, the calculation, the precise arrangement of such a vast system of internment offers its own view into the horror of the Holocaust.
I left the Dachau camp through the same gates I came in through, gates that once separated the doomed from the free. Along the way I passed the sign that reads in five languages: Never Again. Nie Wieder. Plus Jamais. And I was reminded of a song by the spoken-word and hip-hop artist Ursula Rucker, who spoke of Rwanda and dozens of other modern-day atrocities when she asked:
Will we ever say Never Again and mean it?
I walked a shorter route back to the center of town, across the creek and along picturesque pathways, and then hopped back on a train toward Munich. Out of the past, back to the present.
posted by skylanda at 8:03 PM
1 Comments:
You forgot the word "alleged" before the word seat.
FYI.
Post a Comment
<< Home