Dachau

We went to Dachau while we were in Munich. It was an extremely sobering day but I'm glad we did it. Many of the buildings from the original concentration camp have since been torn down. Many of the grounds have been preserved however and the two and a half hour tour is well worth it. The tour gave visitors a thorough account of life and death in Dachau, and the political/social realities during the time of the Nazi reign. The visit hit especially home for me because my grandfather and great-grandfather were both prisoners of the Dachau camp in late1944. According to our tour guide that was the worst and most fatal time to be there. This place, that killed so many, killed my great grandfather and came close to doing the same for my grandfather as well. This place, made it so I almost never existed; and you could feel it too. The aura of the place is so grim that you can feel that bad things happened here. I truly cannot explain the feeling. You feel it in your heart and your mind takes on an almost numb feeling. Your thoughts don't run with the possible stories or of the horrors, it's all just numb. The pictures I took throughout the day, which at the time seemed to depict the despair seemed trivial when I looked at them later. They cannot even begin to describe the way effect of walking through the camp. As I cannot describe it, I'm not even going to try. Instead, I would like to dedicate this post to my grandfather and the horrors he saw in this camp and other ones like it.