Dachau

I had been in Europe for a week and had yet to see the sun. The weather was exactly the way I predicted - cold, dreary and unforgiving. I tired of taking pictures through rain soaked windows as we whiz by the country side.

Dachau. The weather matched the somber air of the museum and camp. There is no way to describe the place. The atrocities sit hard on the heart. Numbs the imagination, crushes everything you think you are as a person, as a part of humanity, this piece of humanity, as cruel and wicked as the Roman Soldier who rammed the sword into Jesus’ side.

Just outside the medieval town center of Dachau, a Memorial Site stands on the grounds of the former concentration camp. This was the 'parent' camp. Dachau was the 'Academy of Terror', the originator, role-model and training ground for the vast order of brutality that spread over half of Europe in the wake of the armies of the Third Reich, and which ultimately culminated in history's greatest crime, the Final Solution.


While each camp was responsible for its own particular form of barbarism, what distinguished Dachau is that almost everything that happened in the system as a whole happened at some level there. Almost every category of victim passed through its infamous Arbeit macht frei (Freedom through Work) gate, German dissidents, outspoken clergymen, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Jews, Polish civilians, all in all the citizens of some 34 nations.

Today's Memorial Site combines the historical authenticity of the original environment and its many surviving buildings with the function of a modern exhibition center. It is a place of memory, of pilgrimage and of education. (viator.com)

Two incredible pieces of art work – one in the court yard - express the bleak condition of the human beings who lost their property, their professions and their dignity, yet somehow survived the torture, the starvation, the cruel work and the determined decision to wipe them off the face of the earth. What remained was a human song, the soul and spirit created by one God, so strong it defied those who held in their hands. What could not be erased was a bare thread of human connectivity to self and others. Compassion. It saved many from death. It was that will, that stood in solidarity and strength that humbled me in this dreadful place.

In 1985, I stood in line at a bank in Cleveland, Ohio and I noticed the woman waiting ahead of me. The woman had a number tattooed on the inside of her lower arm. I had never seen this before, and yet, I knew exactly what it was. I shivered. I never spoke to her. I wasn't able to even greet her or look her in the eye. She never knew I was there. She was the only person I ever saw with such a mark.

Forty years later she stood next to me again in a place where there was no food for the hungry, no pity for the sick, no aid for the dying, no burial for the dead.

Connected? By a bare thread.

When I was living in Louisiana (1977), I met a young German girl who had married a GI. She flat out told me that this never happened. Disconnected? Incredible.

Ahmadinejad?