July 14 – Germany and Czech Republic, 2012

Munich – Day 4, part 1

Jul 142012

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.

: Train station sign.

: Main entrance, the tracks are where trains would unload prisoners.

: Entrance gate with “Work Sets You Free”.

: The courtyard, where roll call and work orders happened twice a day.

: First row of barracks which housed the infirmary.

: The other barracks were all burned down.

: Foundations where other barracks stood.

: Sleeping quarters in barracks. Later the dividers were removed to make room for the 10x overcrowding.

: Guard tower.

: Crematorium.

: Crematorium building.

: Site of one of the pits where ashes were thrown.

Munich – Day 4, part 2

July 14, Munich No Responses »

Jul 142012

After Dachau we were thrashed – it was an emotional ride you can’t prepare for. We headed back to the hotel and then regrouped around 5:30 for dinner. Munich’s biggest park, the English Garden, has a beer garden in the middle of it. It’s quite famous so we made the long walk over there.

Munich’s English Garden.

The walk through the English Garden was great. Seeing all the open green space and people having fun took the edge off the day. The biergarten, though, was a bit of a disappointment. We had been spoiled by Augustiner-Keller – this biergarten felt much more touristy and lacked a full serve option where we could just relax.

Beer garden in the English Garden. We longed for Augustiner-Keller.

We bit the bullet and headed across town to our favorite place instead. Even with the subway it took us about 30 minutes to make the commute, so you can imagine how hungry and thirsty we were when we arrived.

Back at Augustiner-Keller Biergarten.

Most of the tables in the biergarten are communal, and as we were looking for a place to sit a Swedish couple asked to join us. They had just finished a week long trek through the Italian Alps to celebrate Gustav finishing his PhD in Physics. We gave them a bunch of grief after our waitress showed up carrying three huge steins of beer and a tiny glass of white wine. I wish I took a picture of that.