22-23 Winter Europe

It’s amazing how two horrific places in history can feel different. Today we visited Dachau Concentration Camp. When we entered we both immediately noticed the size difference, Dachau was much smaller. Most of it was empty, simply surrounded by wire fences. The basic layout was the same as Sachsenhausen but wasn’t designed as intimidating.

As we walked through the buildings, most of them were recreations as the originals were demolished or had fallen apart over the years. The majority of the memorial was housed where the former maintenance building had been placed. This huge museum walked through the history of the camp and what happened there. The stories told were absolutely tragic.

However once leaving the museum very few buildings remained on the site. There were two recreated barracks which we found slightly more cramped than Sachsenhausen. The old prison stood intact. As we walked through the cold halls we could feel the pain of those imprisoned in those cells.

Beside the prison, the only other original buildings was the original crematorium and barrack x, which was the name of the second crematorium and gas chamber. These buildings were the most powerful part of the memorial. To think about the tens of thousands of bodies that had passed through the crematorium was sickening. The gas chambers were constructed at the end of the camp and were never used.

While the experience was different between the two camps the end result is clear: What happened here is horrific. How could this have been allowed? How can we make sure it never happens again? None of these are easy questions to answer but they must be answered or we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes again.Read more