Dachau Concentration Camp

We spent a morning in Dachau, one of the more well-known concentration camps during Hitler’s terrorizing rule.  As we drove in, I wondered what we would see and experience. And I also wondered what it must be like today to live in Dachau, with such a horrific stain on the town and association with the name.

Dachau is still today, as it was in the 1930s and 1940s, a suburb of Munich, Germany. The people who lived there, surveyed later, knew for the most part that Dachau was not the “work camp” for political prisoners it had claimed to be. But fear was the tool used – both inside and outside the camp – to keep people quiet.

We walked through the gates of Dachau, the same gates 200,000 prisoners walked through during the 12 years the camp was in operation. There, we got a glimpse into the darkness of Dachau.  We started with a film that told the story – with very graphic and horrifying film footage of the massive death toll by starvation, intimidation, and inhumane treatment of the prisoners.  Ironically, the inscription above the entrance gate to Dachau read, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which means,  “Work will set you free.”  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

I will always remember Dachau, and in fact, the motto: “Never again” is the only hope to come out of the atrocities the Third Reich inflicted on millions of innocent individuals.  But torture and genocide still go on in our world – Rwanda, Darfur, for example.

What must we do to stop the killing born of hatred or each other?

I’m glad our children had the ability to experience Dachau first-hand.  It was a day we will likely never forget.