Meditations on Dachau (p. 1)
If you’re a writer, I guess you know how some words find their way inside you. Sometimes you hold onto words like this, the way you’d keep a stone in your pocket so that when you needed it, you could reach in and hold its cool smoothness without anyone knowing. Sometimes you want to take the words and throw them as far away from you as possible, not caring who you might hit. This is one of those times I just want to get rid of my thoughts. I’ve been writing this for two days now, turning the words over and over in my head like one of those rock polishing machines, trying to find some sort of shiny truth in them. I have not. They are far from polished, but I can’t hold them any longer. If you find them too sharp please know that I do not mean to harm.
I dress up for our class trip to the Dachau concentration camp memorial. I wear my black dress and tights; I find my formal gray shoes and change out the cheerful pink laces I usually wear in them for sober black ones. I know some people think clothes don’t matter; most of the time I’m one of them. But it matters what you wear to funerals. I remember my aunt fixing my cousins’ ties before we buried Grandma, smoothing down the jackets of their dark suits. There’s something comforting in these rituals, something important. It gives you something to hold onto. So I dress up. I’m not sure what else to do.
Our tour guide, Adam, is from Australia. When he speaks to us he seems angry, but I am not sure whether this is due to a quirk of his personal speech patterns, a bad day, the horrific events he is describing to us, or simply my own imagination. There's an almost morbid camaraderie among the guides at the Dachau memorial. As he waits for our group to gather before the entrance, he talks with another guide about some incident the week before. "I wish I was here to see that," he says to his friend with a laugh, and then, to us, "sorry, tour guide talk. It was really hot last week and some kids from the high school up the road jumped in the river and were swimming in front of the mass graves. Very disrespectful." We have not yet entered the memorial site proper and none of us quite know what to do with this story. There's so much foreign to us here: the way the townspeople of Dachau and the memorial seem at cross purposes, the fact of a high school nearby, the existence of mass graves. We gather in front of the gate and the tour guide tells us it is a replica; the original was stolen a few years ago. The infamous inscription, "Arbeit macht frei," means "work will set you free." Originally it gave prisoners entering the camp the hope that if they worked hard enough they would be released. Soon they learned that this was true only in the cruelest sense; that if they worked hard enough they could find the release of death. As we wait to go through the gate we are caught in a traffic jam. A group leader is directing his kids to stand behind the gate for a photo op, as if they have been placed in jail. They obediently arrange themselves: shortest in the front, tallest in the back. Some wear solemn expressions, some smile for the camera. The wrought iron breaks apart their faces into a mosaic of skin. When we finally get the chance to go through, we ask the tour guide if they were really doing a photo op. "Oh yes," he says, laughing a little bitterly. "It's terrible isn't it?" We're all mildly horrified. My friend turns to me and says, "I don't think it's funny at all." Some superstitious part of me feels such play acting invites the worst kind of bad luck. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone, not even a moment of pretending it- at least not here, in the shadows of the gates, in this thoroughly normal place that witnessed so much. Between 41,000 and 43,000 people died at Dachau. That scholarly margin of error could easily contain the populations of my high school, middle school, and elementary school combined. The lowest estimated death toll is over twice the population of my home town. I try to visualize it- walking through, in my mind, the deserted streets of my town, everyone I know gone. I cannot. The loss is too big. So I try to imagine only the margin of error, the people who might not have died. I imagine going back to my town and finding the schools standing empty, all those kids gone. When I was in sixth grade the death of a boy in my middle school from cancer sent shockwaves through the community. I try to imagine that effect multiplied by 2000: 2000 times the grieving friends, 2000 broken families. I cannot. It's too much. I cannot imagine death on this scale, let alone murder. Even the statistical uncertainties are unimaginable. I think you come to the site of a concentration camp with certain expectations, however unconscious. You want it to be important for you. You want it to be an experience. Maybe you want to feel some sort of connection with the dead, to understand their lives through the geographical location of their deaths. Or maybe you are one of those people who believe in a biblical evil. Maybe you expect to feel some remnant of it scarring the land. Personally I think that is the main reason we come, those of us who do not have family members among the survivors or the victims: to recognize evil. This is why we ask our guide, over and over, “Did they know? Did the Germans know?” Our history professor had repeatedly evaded this question the day before, no matter how delicately we phrased it, saying it was not a good question to ask (although we were talking about the role of the media in Nazi Germany). He did not attempt to provide us with a better question. We want to know the warning signs, what to look out for. We want some sort of verification of our own humanity. You want it to mean something, prove something, enlighten you, make you a part of something larger than yourself. But- for me at least- I feel none of those things. In fact, walking through the camp, I feel nothing. If the dead are here, I can't find them. When we walk past the mass graves where they buried the ashes of tens of thousands, the shooting range where 4000 Russian POWs were murdered for target practice- I felt more alone, more cut off from everything around me than I ever have before. There is so much death there, so much death stripped of the trappings of meaning. We have some names but no way of knowing who was buried where; we do not even have precise numbers. In the case of the Russian POWs we have only skull fragments in the dirt. How do you humanize fragments of bone? How do you remember, how do you honor them? How can you possibly give the dead back all the Nazis took from them? The number of people buried beneath stones a foot across could fill a stadium. Under the weight of these questions you begin to feel desperate.
Out of such desperation I ask the tour guide what he wants visitors to take from the site. I think he might be a bit annoyed by the question. “There’s just so much misinformation out there,” he says, “from all the movies and TV shows. I think it’s incredibly important that people know what actually went on, that the rhetoric the Nazis used was almost identical to some of the rhetoric certain extremist politicians use today.” (Since he knows I am American, I think he may be referring to Donald Trump.) “We have a duty to prevent dictatorships from rising to power, to prevent this from happening again.” Although I am sure he is sincere, the words sound rote. I wonder how many times he has told a visitor this. After a pause, he adds with more animation, “You see these people who come and then they make a Facebook status or they post it on Instagram and then they’re over it. But we need more than Facebook activism.” He seems to resent us, his visitors. I think it might be jealousy that at the end of the tour we can leave.
Still I am not sure what he wants from us. I have studied genocide in college; I know about Darfur, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Iraq, Syria. An incomplete list, one whose scope is paralyzing. What can I do in the face of that? The guide tells us about the gas chambers. My horror grows until I feel vaguely nauseous. I briefly think I may throw up. I wonder if people often throw up at these memorial sites, and if it's someone's job to go around and clean up afterwards. It's a sunny day; the sky is beautiful and birds are singing. The guide tells us he will wait outside while we go through the gas chamber. "Take your time," he tells us. I do not want to take my time. I desperately want to get away from it all, the building, the old worn out horror, my own lack of feeling. We visit the ovens where they cremated the bodies first. The gas chamber is a creepy cinder block room with a low ceiling. I stand inside it and feel nothing. My friend asks me what the writing on the floor grates says, since I can read German. I tell her it is probably a brand name and wonder if, by talking in this place, we are breaking some sort of rule. Then I think about how I am more concerned with appearances than with the fact that people were murdered where I am standing. I desperately want to feel something. I imagine the faces of the dead, black and white, high contrast; I have seen them in so many photographs. They are anonymous in their putrefaction, in the way the shapes of their skulls show through the skin and their eyes are only black gashes. In my head I rewind their decomposition, redefine the features of their faces with muscles and fat, habitual expressions, personalities. I draw the gas back out the chutes, the air back into their lungs, the life back into their eyes. And then I realize that the faces forming on the corpses are no longer black and white; they are in color and intimately familiar; I have imagined the faces of my family. I leave immediately.
In the museum I walk through the special exhibit about an artist survivor who documented his experience in drawings. I cannot forget these drawings- prisoners lying in agony on the floor of a common room, poisoned. A man crying out in pain as SS men beat him to death. Another clinging to a pole while a dog bites at his feet, the pain on the face of a man about to be hanged, a distorted dead body by the side of the path, the rage on the face of an officer as he drowns a prisoner in a ‘scientific experiment.’ It is very, very hard to look at these drawings. I too am an artist. I know enough to tell when something has been drawn from life.
On our way back from the concentration camp I asked the guide how he copes with such an emotionally exhausting job. "I don't really think about what I'm saying anymore," he said. "It's all rote now. I went to Auschwitz last year and I cried. But here, at Dachau-" he shook his head.
When I asked him how his job affects him, he said it gives him perspective; all his problems are dwarfed in the shadow of Dachau. "What do we have to complain about? Bad weather?" The bus stops and two middle aged women get on and stand between us. They must live on the bus route. They are catching up with each other, talking about who got married and who died and the well being of their godchildren.
By now my tights are itchy and my shoes, unused to my feet, have begun to pinch. We begin to talk of something else.
