Much as I try, I can’t find the right words to properly convey what I thought and felt when visiting Dachau last weekend. As I walked the same grounds that thousands had before me, I kept thinking about Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Anne Frank, and all the other authors whose works have impacted me. I thought about how cold I was in my winter jacket and thick socks, and how cold they must have been. I felt a weight on my shoulders as I walked between the buildings, but above all, a sense of duty and determination: learn, face reality, and use it to make good.
6 million is too devastatingly, abstractly large to fully comprehend. It’s both easier and harder to grasp by thinking about an individual, then a room of individuals, then slowly expanding until it becomes impossible to imagine. I feel it is our duty as human beings to acknowledge and remember the atrocities of the past. As a student of history, as someone living in Germany, as a young person affected by global politics, and simply as a human being, I knew it was necessary for me to visit Dachau as soon as I had the chance.
Once I stepped past the bus stop and onto the actual grounds, I didn’t take any photos. Some people did. I didn’t want to. It’s a memorial, not a zoo.
When I visited, I participated in a guided tour of the grounds. Related to Holocaust survivors, my tour guide was knowledgeable, composed, and empathetic. I am extremely impressed and humbled by anyone who chooses to work at these memorials. It requires a strength that few possess.
A normal city exists by the memorial. While on the bus to the site, I passed neighborhoods, shops, mothers pushing strollers down sidewalks. For some reason, this gave me cognitive dissonance. To me, it felt like a town living in the shadow of history, dwarfed by its past. Yet somehow, life goes on. People move on and people move in. Maybe it isn’t so strange and I’d simply forgotten how close regular citizens were to the actual mass murder. Maybe it’s a bit easier to stomach to think everyday people didn’t know the extent of it, if they were too far away to see the smoke. Unfortunately, that’s not true. As the tour guide said, they knew, but decided they didn’t want to know.
There’s a certain barrier that came down for me now that my German skills have improved. When I wasn’t looking for a translation at the bottom of the screen or an explanatory text, I found the language impacted me more deeply than expected. I hadn’t realized it before, and it’s so simple, but understanding the language of the Holocaust directly as it was hit me like a gut-punch.
No matter how much you study, nothing–no amount of memoirs, classes, documentaries, anything–will compare to walking across the grounds and through the gas chambers where it happened. While the old adage of those who don’t remember or learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, I think it’s possible to know the past and still fail to prevent similar tragedies. As the number of living survivors wanes, it is essential that we all pledge to never forget.
A special thank you to all the teachers and professors who taught me about the Holocaust. In particular, I want to thank Mrs. Painter and Dr. Mirna Zakic. Night by Elie Wiesel, The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton, and Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning are three of the most important books I’ve ever read. I still remember the hole I felt the day Elie Wiesel died in 2016. I’ll forever carry his story with me.
I want to end with a quote by Anne Frank. Knowing her story, no other words consistently make me as immediately emotional as these:
“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
