Dachau is Never Far Away
Dachau
is Never Far away
As
a part of the retreat, we allowed an afternoon for people to relax by
seeing and hearing some of the sights and sounds of Bavaria. Most
chose to visit the famous museums of Munich, but one volunteer couple
and their son, Agnes and I decided to drive out to the memorial site,
Concentration Camp Dachau.
We
drove the short distance from Eichstock to Dachau in the MCC Toyota,
following the road signs that lead you on a winding route through the
graceful hills of Bavaria. I remember that Agnes asked. “What do
you suppose it would be like to live in Dachau? To say when asked,
‘I’m from Dachau.’ Would people always respond with, ‘Oh,
you mean where the Nazis killed all those Jews?’” We agreed that
if that were our address, we’d likely say, “I live near Munich.”
And I remember the startling effect my first sight of road signs
pointing to Dachau produced, posted along the roadside as they are,
as though it were an ordinary place. And on the S-2 commuter train
route, it’s just another stop like Petershaven, Esterhofen or
Rohrmoos. A lot of people get off at Dachau; it’s a fair-sized
city; a lot of people must
say, “I come from Dachau.”
The
memorial site is the “cleaned up” concentration camp and it
stands, surprisingly, on the outskirts of the city. Children
probably walked along its outer walls on their way to school,
laughing and talking, a stone’s throw from the overcrowded
degradation and suffering that was Dachau. Indeed, a newspaper
article preserved in the museum informs the 1935 public of Munich
that a curious young man sneaking a look over the wall was treated to
a night inside, that further trespassers would be rewarded with
extended opportunities to find out what happens inside . . . first
hand. Dachau happened right where the people were.
It was raining lightly as we
parked outside the block and barbed wire walls of the camp. Entering
from the street side, we were actually coming in from the back.
There were no entrances here when the camp was a prison. It takes
five minutes to cross the enormous Appellplatz,
the roll-call square, to get to the old entrance. As I crossed the
square, I juggled camera, brochures and a notebook under an umbrella
and read:
"Every
morning and evening the prisoners had to parade on the Apellplatz.
If a prisoner succeeded to escape, all inmates were ordered to attend
the subsequent Strafappell
(punishment roll-call) lasting a full night and half a day."
I
wanted to photograph the steel filigree gate with its cryptic Arbeit
macht Frei motto.1
I remember thinking that the fact that I only had black and white
film would be no loss; the gray rain and fog had reduced what little
colour there was to muted pastels. The entrance gate was familiar to
me from old photos and from films of the American liberation of
Dachau. But to be there, to open that same gate myself, to imagine
how it must have been for the over two hundred thousand desperate
people who faced these notorious gates and never read the motto
right-side-out again, was a crushingly moving experience. Arbeit
Macht Frei. Many
worked dawn to dusk, day after day, with short rations of bad food,
in rain and cold, within these walls and on chain-gang excursions to
various construction sites. Their reward was the freedom of death.
Later,
when overcrowding, disease and the demoralization of the Nazi’s
reduced conditions in the camp to a level characterized by
indescribable pain and misery, horse drawn wagons loaded with
emaciated corpses would creak through these gates, on their way to
the Krematorium and
later to the
Leitenberg, an
enormous mass burial site near the prison.
I
took my photos of the gate and left.
Only
two barracks stand in the massive housing area, and these are
reconstructions. A sign apologizes for the fact that only
foundations remain of the other thirty-two barracks. The
reconstructions include the double-decker bunks into which prisoners
were crowded. Near the beds are rough wooden tables and benches, and
in an adjoining room, latrine toilets, all public, and a gang washing
apparatus. The walls are thin; there is no sign of a heater. I feel
very cold, and leave after taking a few photographs.
Standing
between the two reconstructed barracks with your back to the
Wirtschaftsgebäude
(administration buildings), you look down the Lagerstrasse
(camp street). It’s lined with poplars planted by the prisoners and
as you begin to walk down Lagerstrasse,
you hear the ghosts of the camp as it must have been. Old pictures
of this street can be found, crowded with hundreds of starved
prisoners in convict apparel marching to Appell,
or sitting, leaning against a barrack wall, scraping the precious
last bit of gruel from the bottom of a tin bowl.
Had
you walked down Lagerstrasse sometime after 1933 and before 1945,
when the camp was liberated by the allies, you might have observed
the following:
The
first two barracks you pass on your right are infirmaries. There is
room here for 400 sick in a space that by modern standards would not
accommodate a 30-bed hospital. On your left is the canteen. The
second building on your right, besides being an infirmary, contains
the Totenkammer
(morgue) in which, later in the camp’s history, bodies were stacked
like cordwood.
As you pass the Totenkammer,
you note the screams coming from the fifth building on your right,
screams heard by all the “regulars” in the barracks in between.
Block 5 serves as a laboratory for a Doktor Rascher who subjects
prisoners to incremental atmospheric pressure until their brains
implode, or subjects them to extreme cold until they seem to be dead
and then tries to revive them. The barrack looks like all the
others, and is next door to the others. The doctor must be immune to
the noises of pain; he writes up his data meticulously and can’t
resist gloating a little over his successes.
A
few barracks further down Lagerstrasse, you notice three separated
from the others by barbed wire. These are the Strafblöcke
(penal barracks) for rearrested prisoners. They, because they have
had the temerity to remain dissident, or gay, or Jewish, or
communist after having been previously released, are now segregated
for “severe treatment”.
You
near the end of your walk. On your left is the Priesterblock,
a building reserved
for arrested clergy, and you remember that even the testimony of
God’s witnesses was silenced by this horror. And you remember that
Dietrich Bonhöffer was hounded to his death under these conditions.
Finally
you emerge from Lagerstrasse. Here is a market garden where
prisoners pull weeds and harvest the vegetables that will keep the
strongest alive through the winter. A building against the wall to
your right reeks of disinfectant. Here, new prisoners are sent to be
disinfected, relieved of their clothes, their dignity and their
freedom, thence to be herded into the baths like sheep and then
issued their prison garb.
And
to your left, a gate. It leads to the crematorium. The road through
the wall there is well trodden.
You
hurry back down Lagerstrasse,
past the Priesterblock,
the infirmaries, across the Appellplatz.
Now you face the administration building. Here are the kitchens,
the SS headquarters, and the notorious shower rooms where SS officers
punished prisoners by whipping them or hanging them from rings in the
walls.
And
if it is now, 1987, that you go there to see the administration
complex, you will face first a grotesquely beautiful sculpture, a
massive intertwining of writhing, suffering, naked human bodies,
twisted together in a metallic display of agony. And if it is now
that you enter this building, you will find row upon row of enlarged
documents, photographs, decrees, artifacts of torture, all telling
you how it was. And there will be a film, a black and white
documentary about Hitler and the Nazis, and the hatred of Jews linked
with the excesses of heady imperialism.
And you will notice many
like you, walking about in a silent daze, some with tears in their
eyes, some weeping openly, all with an expression of helpless,
hopeless futility, knowing that on another day and place, they might,
God forbid, have been called upon to be either villain or victim in
this unspeakable drama.
Behind
the administration building is the still intact Lagerarrest
(the jail). I went to
see this alone, but it was locked. I peered in through the bars of
the entrance and saw a range of small cells with small windows. “Why
would you have a jail in a concentration camp?” Agnes asked when I
described it later. A very good question. Inside the jail, no
doubt, are even more strenuously punitive cells. Jails within jails
within jails, like Russian eggs.
The
brochures fill in the significant facts:
1. Rudolph Hess, who is the only
occupant (now a very old ex-Nazi) of a jail in Berlin, once worked
here as a young SS officer.2
2. 6000 Russian POW’s were
shot at the rifle range just outside the camp.
3. A gas chamber was built here
but never used; prisoners from Dachau who were to be gassed were sent
to Linz, Austria to the Hartheim Castle Gas Chamber.
4. Just before Allied
liberation, the Nazis went on a killing spree at Dachau, and at least
7500 prisoners were killed or died of disease and starvation in the
last few weeks of the camp.
And
statistically, it goes on and on.
Joe
and Julie weren’t sure that Reuben should see the film. He
pressured, and they relented. If he had a response that was
specific, he didn’t share it with me.
On
the way back to Eichstock, we stopped at a quiet inn in
Markt-Innersdorf for coffee and Bavarian Apfelstrudel
with whipped cream.
We were subdued, silent, as if there was no topic worthy of the
effort of making conversation after a morning in Dachau. No one
seemed inclined to curse the dismal weather either.
The rich, hot
coffee they served us, I remember, was some of the best I’d ever tasted.
1
Arbeit macht Frei.
Work will set you
free. This apparently appears on the gates of many of the
concentration camps and one visualizes the mentality that placed it
there. My intuition tells me that it was conceptualized at a time
preceding the “final solution” and was intended to admonish
prisoners to make up for the harm they had done to the state by
offering their sweat and energy, thus regaining their freedom.
2
The Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced Rudolph Hess to life imprisonment
in 1946. From 1966 – August 17, 1987, when he died, he was the
lone occupant of the notorious Spandau Prison in Berlin, an
institution originally built to house 600 prisoners.
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