Revisiting Munich

400 steps.  400 strides, 400 separate displacements of gravel, perhaps more accurately 376 steps and 24 shuffles.  That's what it took for me to get from the gate of Dachau concentration camp to the barracks that still remain standing.  The amount of steps would vary person to person, or day to day, depending on height, footwear or mood, but the distance remains the same - not terribly far.  One can cross the stony courtyard in something like 2 minutes or less.  For me, 400 steps, or 2 minutes between entering the camp and entering the exhibit.  For someone walking this same path sixty years ago, those 400 steps and 2 minute block of time were between freedom and chains.  Humanity and hell.  Morality and depravity.

 When you're in middle school, you read the Diary of Anne Frank.  Maybe you read Night by Elie Wiesel, watch Life is Beautiful or Schindler's list, visit a Holocaust museum or Memorial, listen to testimonies of survivors, or study the political factors that allowed Hitler to rise to power and kindle a fire of genocide and torture.   All of these exposures spark thoughts in your mind about the horrors, bring a heavy weight down on the chest, feelings of sympathy for families, disgust at human nature, nausea from the images of piled bodies or emaciated faces.  But a place - a physical presence at the site of the real events - now that is an emotion all together different. 

Out of body experience is used so often that I hesitate to use it as a descriptor for the feeling of walking along the barbed wire fences where prisoners were shot by SS officers with the ease of a farmer shooting a rodent who has been a pest to his crops, or the chills that went up my spine as I stared at the furnaces in the crematorium where bodies were burnt, souls completely disregarded, or the sharp pain in my stomach when I looked at the remaining personal belongings of inmates including a letter announcing a new birth with a picture of an adorable smiling little girl, a little girl who probably never saw her uncle, or if she did, saw him with scars on his arms, back and in his eyes.  Pain, suffering and regret is palpable just inside the gates at Dachau, and it lingers like a thick fog.  Memorials and signs engraved with statements such as "Never Again" act as soft lights of hope, but still, the fog is dense. 

I visited Dachau this past weekend during my trip to Munich and this was the second time I walked these grounds.  The first time was the summer after my sophomore year of high school, at age 16.  Marcel Proust wrote that, "The real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."  At 20, I saw this landscape with eyes 4 years older, 4 years changed.  Back then, I felt the anguish.  I remember feeling angry, frustrated and confused, and I remember a silent bus ride.  I understood "crimes against humanity," I felt the hopelessness in the eyes of the prisoners in the photos, grasped the idea of hatred and inhumane treatment, pictured the horrible conditions in hygiene, nutrition and health care.  I resented the absence of humanity, asked myself how the hell this could happen, cried for the men women and children reduced to animals and eradicated for false and disturbing ideals.

So what did 4 years change?  I still felt similar waves of emotions, I walked the same paths, read the same panels in the museum.  But what 4 years changed in my vision, or rather what 4 years added to my vision, is responsibility.  I don't feel so separate anymore.  4 years ago I looked at reminders of a disgusting stain on world history, and thanked God it ended.  Yesterday I looked at the words "Never Again," and realized its up to me (and by me I mean us, our generation) to make that reality.  Hatred, abuse of power, torture and brutality didn't end with the liberation of Concentration camps in 1949.  Persecution still exists.  The Geneva convention didn't erase war crimes.  I think about the terrorism alerts that almost kept me from making my visit to Germany, and I see how close we are to the edge.  Dachau serves as a reminder of a hideous past, but what I saw yesterday was a warning of an equally monstrous future.  I suppose what I'm getting at is that my 20 year old eyes aren't just that of an emotional observer, but as an involved citizen of a world in danger of repeating its worst habits.

I'm a college student now, not just a kid.  I had an Ethics class today, and it came to my attention: I'm not just here to learn these things, I'm here to live them.  I'm not here to simply pass a test, I'm here to become an intellectual being.  I'm not just here to learn about history and its problems, I'm here to live in a way that hopefully takes a better path.  So as a 20 year old student, I didn't come to Dachau and see it through a tourist's eyes.  I didn't just take pictures of the past.  Standing behind the camera wasn't that 16 year old, but a 20 year old trying to figure out where she fits in the effort to make sure the landscape doesn't become a portrait of what's to come.