Dachau Concentration Camp

After the hour long bus ride from Munich my school and I reached Dachau. Missing the turn in the museum parking lot, we were left silently staring at a thick, tall, white wall that surrounded the enormous prison that held millions of people before they were sent away to be “exterminated” from the world. We eventually turned back around and entered the parking lot. When we got out of the bus we were greeted by a beautiful pathway with white rocks and surrounded by beautiful nature – in contrast with this horrible place.

This was a very weird thing to see because you would imagine that entering a concentration camp would be very dark and filled with terror. Once the path ended we stopped at the entrance which had two huge watchtowers on top and a metal gate. Behind the entrance was an abandoned train station and platform that was used to bring Jews and many others into the camp. As I walked into the camp and through the welded metal entrance I finally realized how big this operation was. Right in front of me was an empty space as large as one football field. This is where the prisoners were lined up to ensure everyone was accounted for. To the right of the entrance the SS slept and conducted daily operations over the camp.

Behind this large building that spanned the entire length of the camp was a thin, but long building that contained isolation rooms for those who resisted or did anything that the SS thought was disrespectful. Most of the rooms had a small window, a toilet and nothing more but a cold cement floor to sleep on.

Some of these rooms had no windows. Horrifying punishments were executed in these prison cells. There was a metal clasp that tied your hands together and made you hang from the ceiling for a night. Those subjected to this kind of torture lost functionality in their arms and were later punished for not being able to make their beds in the morning.

On the left side of the entrance was about 20 rows of barracks with two on each side of the central road. Only two of the barracks were kept for display and the others were outlined with the foundation. As I walked inside these barren, wooden barracks, I saw four separate rooms.

First there was a fairly large room that was aligned with beds stacked on top of each other to sleep more than 100 people. The next room was a small bathroom stall that had toilets with had zero privacy and showers with no barriers. The next room was another bedroom with around 100 more beds. This room was followed by a locker room that was assigned to the prisoners to keep their limited selection of possessions, and then, another bedroom. If their bed was not made perfectly and their locker was not neat and orderly, they would have a problem with the guards and probably be tortured and sent to the isolation rooms.

There were two main forms of propaganda employed by the Dachau Concentration Camp. The first was at the entrance where there was a sign in the gate that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which directly translates to “Work Will Set You Free”.

This is one of the biggest lies among all the concentration camps. No one was set free if they worked hard enough. They were sent there to their death, one way or another – from being overworked in those terrible conditions, or by a more horrific and orchestrated means. The second form of propaganda were the videos that Nazis would create in these camps to show the public what they wanted them to see. In these videos people would be smiling in the barracks, happily making their beds, and eating a loaf of bread as if they were being treated well. This gave peace of mind to many countries and turned many into bystanders by convincing them that isolating the Jews from society was the right thing to do.

The last building in the concentration camp was right outside the gates into the rectangular, organized prison. This building was the crematorium. Here they would burn all the bodies of those who had been killed by the Nazis and throw away their ash. When I walked in, it was more like a cemetery surrounding a building that held a large crematorium and a gas chamber that was never used.

Surrounding the building were beautiful, colorful flowers and gravestones for those who died and wished to be buried here. Dachau had so many dead bodies that its crematorium could not handle the overflow, so instead they dug large pits in secluded areas and started to dump bodies there. These pits were later found however there was not even a tag on the bodies to indicate who they were. This was my first time being in a place where a group of people committed mass murder.

This experience was extremely frightening and made me see the importance of sticking up for what is right and painting my identity no matter what the cost is.