Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Dachau

This is worth a post on its own- Even though it was part of the trip to Munich. Dachau was an experience I will never forget.

We went to the Dachau Concentration Camp (male labour camp) in the afternoon after the Third Reicht tour in the morning. Throughout the entire tour, I didn't take a single picture with anyone's face in it. (Not on the Third Reicht tour too) Dachau is just not the kind of place you can say you enjoyed yourself in, not the kind of destination you can go all trigger happy in and smile for the click of a camera. It's not that I went there just to feel ethereal pain, within the confines of one of the 1st Nazi Concentration Camps ever built. It's just that the things you learn there are the kind of things you instantly look heavenward and thank God that you didn't have to live through, and you get to feel just a microscopic fraction of the pain of being an actual inmate there.

When we arrived, the first thing that I thought was: Why is everything so grey? Grey was the gravel that we stepped on the moment we entered the camp grounds, grey was the bunkers they slept in, grey were the walls, and even the sky was grey. Some kind of setting huh? So apt..
The iron gates that closed the prisoners in read Arbeit Macht Frei, that means 'With work you will be free'. Such a perverse promise, when all they wanted was to curb their freedom, compromise their dignities, and work them to death.

What I found on a grey wall:
'May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men'

We went to the Maintenance Hall, which has now been converted to a museum. I only regret not having an entire day there, because there was just so much to see, and so many accounts to read. I would have pored over every excerpt, every article and every display if I had time on my side. This is my long and draggggyyy account of the place. Which for the sake of the eyesight of the people who bother to read this- I will segment into parts, and caution you to read this in different sittings.

A life no more
The entrance room was called the Shunting. That was where the inmates had themselves registered and their personal belongings taken away from the officers. There, they lost their names and were given instead, arm bands and coded triangles for their identities. We saw identity cards, passports, letters fathers wrote to their babies back home, stamps, permits, passes.. Everything that acknowledges an indentity, everything that defined who you were as a person. At Dachau, the prisoners were labelled with coloured triangles and other symbols. It was worse in Auswitz (an extermination camp in Poland), because there the inmates had their identity numbers tattooed into their arms. It was as if the Nazis had condemned them to a life of imprisonment, and inked into their skins the fact that they were sub-human. In Dachau, homosexuals were given pink triangles, political prisoners red ones, capos (prisoners assigned leadership over their other prisoners) green triangles, among others. And a red circle with a dot in the middle meant they thought you were a likely escapee. So life could be made hell just by officers looking at the striped sleeves of inmates, bearing the symbols that represented who the Nazis insisted you were.

Roll Call
Every morning when they woke, before they were sent off to work, they had to be present at Roll Call. This could be as quick as half an hour, and it could take as long as 24 hours. Even sick people were dragged out in the open to be counted. Corpses of men who had died during the night were laid out to be counted as well. Numbers over lives. They had to stand at attention with their arms at their side, never looking a Nazi officer in the eye. In the later part of the war, the Roll Call system became less brutal because the Nazis needed the men to work as much as possible, with the lack of manpower (they had killed off so many) and the pressing amounts of labour and work to be done. They wanted the men put to work as soon as possible, and Roll Call became less stringent and precise. It became apparent to me that human lives weren't valued here. If this were a game, they were not the opposing team playing against the Nazis. They were the pawns in a chess game, the ball kicked around in a soccer game, and the hanky thrown around in Tag.

Living Conditions
We looked at the living conditions in the barracks where they lived. What was built to contain 50 men housed 400. With diseases spreading so rampantly and people dying all the time, this was horrific. They slept in bunk beds, and our guide told us that the men sleeping at the top bunks tended to have a better chance of survival than the ones at the bottom. For one, it was warmer at the top. But more importantly, with diseases like dysentery, bodily fluids and infected liquids dripped from the top to the bottom, infecting the ones at the lower decks. And the barracks had to be in prime conditions at all times. The wooden floors had to gleam, and the inmates weren't given anything to shine them with. Unreasonable demands as such made their lives miserable. And if a spot was found, or the blankets weren't placed in perfect triangles, you could be tortured or executed for that. You could say I was shocked at the complete disregard for a human life, and the complete disdain for dignity. I think Meng will quit complaining about the pain of NS life now. Stand-by-beds never got you killed, at least.

Medical Experiments
Another thing that was painful to look at was the display on the Medical Experiments conducted by the Nazi doctors on living inmates. Like the kind you would do on lab rats and toads. They did pressure experiements that made them cringe in absolute pain, they plunged their bare bodies in icy water to 'ascertain at which point death occurs', they carved them up like lifeless pieces of stretched skin, and bent their bony bodies in unnatural mangling. I read that the head of all these experiments was Josef Goebbels, one of Hitler's right-hand men. In the end he committed suicide with his entire family when the Nazi reign came to an end. A death much more painless than what he had subjected his victims to.

Punishment
There was a hall set aside specifically for punishment. Although this wasn't the only place it could happen. Anywhere in the camp, subject to the perverse creativity of the Nazi officers, torture was carried out anywhere. There was the bullwhip, to be cracked in a seemingly simple command of '25'. Inmates had to count each stroke out of 25, and if they passed out, the whipping started from 1 again when they woke up. Inmates were also suspended from the ceiling beams by metal chains. This caused shoulder dislocations and sometimes, a slow and painful death.
The green lawn at bordering the fence of the camp was forbidden ground for inmates to step on. Men from the guard towers would fire instantly if they saw inmates on it. Sometimes the Nazis used this to finish off inmates they wanted dead. They took the caps of the inmates and threw them onto the lawn. Being without a cap at Roll Call the next day meant that inmates would face severe punishment or torture or even death. So either way, the guy was dead. Some prisoners simply stepped onto the lawn, and awaited the instant bullet that would kill them, because they knew what it meant for them.
To prevent escape, the camp was surrounded by barb wire fences that were charged with 10000 volts- instant death upon touch. And there was a dry moat and a wet stream that detered escapees. And even if you managed to get over the fence, the Nazi Headquarters was positioned menacingly right outside the fence.

Brotherly Love
Our guide told us that what helped many of the inmates survive such gruesome torture was the solidarity they got from their brotherhood. At mealtimes, you wouldn't want to be first in line because the top layer of the soup was simply nutritionless water. And you wouldn't want to be last too, for fear everything ran out. You would want to position yourself somewhere near the end so that if there was meat in the soup, it would settle near the bottom. For some inmates who knew they were fitter than others, they voluntarily went first to drink the skimmed water just so their compatriots who were sicker could have more nutrition. Dachau was a male camp with very few female inmates. The few women who were there were forced to become become prostitutes. The Nazis wanted this to be an incentive for the males to work harder, so they offered them such 'incentives' occassionally. But out of solidarity and for not wanting to be mocked by their fellow prisoners, these services were very rarely utilized. And also because they wouldn't want to subject their fellow inmates to the same type of humiliation and abuse they themselves knew only too well.

It reeked of death
Dachau was not an extermination camp. The Dachau occupents who were sentenced to the gas chambers were sent to nearby Flossinberg. There were gas chambers built at Dachau, but strangely they were never used. We went in to take a look at what the Nazis termed Brausebad. This means 'showers', and they used to tell the inmates that they were going into the gas chambers to take showers, just so they wouldn't meet any resistance. Now the Germans don't use the word Brausebad to mean showers anymore. There are simply too many bad memories of the Holocaust associated with the word. Now they use the French word Dusche for showers. Once more, a Never Again conotation. Cyanide pellets were placed in containers and let into the room from the side, while warm air filled the room from the ceiling, so that the poisonous reaction would ensure the inmates died as soon as possible. They disinfected them before they entered the showers, simply because they wanted their striped uniforms back for repeated use. To think, a uniform was worth more than a human life. And next to the gas chambers was the new crematorium, called Barrack X. This was built after that old one couldn't take any more bodies. Prisoners were forced to cremate their fellow inmates and because the Nazis didn't want the massive number of deaths to be known, the work here was very secretive. That only meant that the people working at the crematorium were conveniently put to death by the officers after their shifts were completed. Hooks still hang from beams suspended from the ceiling, from which it was common for the officers to hang people.

Keeping Vigil
The Dachau Camp is the only camp with 4 different religious monuments in it- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox. Such was the extent of the need to remember what happened, and to pray that such a horror would never be repeated. In the Catholic Memorial, there is always someone praying inside. Every minute, every second, every moment., even up til today.

Remembering
Wreaths line the walls of the sign that marks the reign of terror of the Nazis in the Dachau camp: 1933-1945. People from different parts of the world come here to share the grief of those who passed here. There is a huge structure constructed in memory of the inmates and their pain. It is a frame of bent bony bodies suspended on a barbed wire fence. It says a million things. And represents a million more.
There is also a sculpture on the walls near the wreaths. This is of 3 linked chains, signifying imprisonment. Different triangles surround these chains, symbolic of the different inmates who were once in Dachau. There are no pink triangles though, because the acceptance of homosexuality was not passed in Germany until 1967. This was created before that. Green triangles were also missing, because they represented the capos. Some capos treated their fellow inmates brutally, and they were despised after the war. In my opinion, their suffering should not have been undermined by excluding them from this memorial. They probably did what they had to do out of necessity, for they had to learn to survive too.
Near the gas chamber and the crematorium, there is a sculpture of a liberated inmate, significantly placed there to show the paradox between the living and the dead. This figure is a gaunt man with his hands in his pockets, one leg placed before the other, and his face tilted up to look another person in the eye. A very different picture from the man who would be in the Roll Call position.

Never Again
All in all, there were so many memorials and things to remind anyone visiting Dachau that such a horror should never be seen, or felt by a living being ever again. Dachau was shocking and it was disturbing because a single human being had the power to make this all possible. Things that ordinary people would cringe at, or even tear at if they were to merely listen to the accounts of what went on in the camps.

Never again.


Laid bare at 4:51 pm
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