{"id":447,"date":"2012-07-14T23:27:47","date_gmt":"2012-07-14T23:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anirama.com\/trip\/europe2012\/?p=447"},"modified":"2012-07-20T15:27:58","modified_gmt":"2012-07-20T15:27:58","slug":"munich-day-4-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/trip\/europe2012\/munich-day-4-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Munich – Day 4, part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

We visited Dachau<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Jason and I visited\u00a0Dachau\u00a0today – 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.<\/p>\n

Terms like the “atrocities of war” are trivial.\u00a0Dachau\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

Dad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\t\t