We visited Dachau. I really don’t want to write about this, so I will just include some pictures and the email I sent my family in the evening.

Jason and I visited Dachau today – the first concentration camp that set the model for all the concentration camps to follow. We were there for about four hours, and it was incredibly draining. I broke into full tears four different times, Jason many times too. I do not want to go there ever again but I am very thankful we went there today.

Terms like the “atrocities of war” are trivial. Dachau and the concentration camps that followed it were simply about hatred and prejudice, not about war. I still cannot comprehend how the human psyche allows this to happen, let alone how it recruits people to implement such horrors.

I thought the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was impactful, but I’ve been way over that line now. Standing in a museum or memorial dedicated to the memory of people murdered in the Holocaust is nothing compared to standing in a shower room where people were hanged, or where 20,000 bodies were kept before cremation, or walking through a gas chamber where “mass exterminations didn’t happen, but small groups of people were killed.” And yet I was able to walk through there as a free citizen, not as a prisoner. I cannot begin to fathom how people in these camps found the will to survive – I am not sure I would have been able to. I am crying now as I write this, ten hours later.

I encourage you to experience this sometime in your life. I do not ever want to do this again but I am very thankful that I did it today.

Please, continue to choose love and compassion in your life over hatred or intolerance. There is no justification for any other path.

Dad.