Thursday morning, my fellow travelers and I packed up our
stuff and drove to Munich where we stopped at the Deutsches Museum. The Deutsches
Museum is a huge museum full of lots of different things, including a whole
floor dedicated to kids. The kids floor, called Kids’ Kingdom, was full of things that Sydney discovered including musical instruments, a fire truck and water
works. Her favorite thing, though, was watching the other kids play! They were just so
interesting!
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| Sydney on the fire truck. |
The rest of museum was full of mainly science and machine stuff. There is a physics section, so of course that’s where Mom and
Dad took me first. It wasn’t that bad, even though it wasn't all in English and
the live experiment that was supposed to happen was canceled. We wandered through
the Physics section and learned about magnetics, electric currents,
temperature, etc. Truthfully, it was Mom who wanted to see another part of
the museum not me! Then, we went and looked at the x-ray and optic section
which was really cool. The optic section had lots of cool eye tricks and fun
color blending wheels. Your eyes are super awesome, they can do so much! After that, Mom and I went to the musical instrument section
and saw a glass harmonica which was crazy and heard one of the
tour guides play a harpsichord. While listening, we realized we had lost Dad
somewhere alongthe line! Whoops! So we found Shannon, Ryan and Sydney and went down
to explore the Kids’ Kingdom. After a while, Dad joined Shannon and I to look
at the ceramics, glass blowing, and paper making. It was a huge museum; We
looked at ton of stuff and when we left there was still tons more to look at.
After we left museum, Shannon with her Ipad map got us lost, I
mean, took us on a
tour of downtown Munich where there are lots of dead ends and people running around. It wasn't that bad and eventually, we found our way to the right highway.... and into rush hour. Haha, oh
well, Sydney had a nice nap on the way home and we made it there safely without
squashing too many people. Then, we ate
some delicious homemade gyros, got settled and went to bed which was nice after a long travel day.
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Sydney driving the fire truck!
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Yesterday, we bundled up and went to the Dauchau concentration camp.
It was very sobering. When we got there, we went on tour of the camp.
Everything we saw there was interesting and heartbreaking. Now, Dauchau wasn’t
specifically an extermination camp but still so many people died there. Dauchau
was also the very first concentration camps; So it was a model camp. New ideas for concentration camps were usually put into practice in Dauchau first.
When they decided to use this
old ammunition factory as a concentration camp, they thought they would only be
using it for a couple of years and then not need it anymore. At first, Dauchau was used for
only political opponents, Germans who were out of line and as a scare tactic. But as things
started to heat up for World War 2, the prisoner population grew beyond that til there
was 8 times as
many people as the camp was designed to hold!
As you approach the actual camp in the gate is written,
“Arbeit Macht Frei” meaning “Work will make you free”, which shows how cynical the Nazis were. For most people who entered that gate, it meant never seeing your family again and death either in this camp or the next. There were some people who were allowed to leave as a holiday gift but
those were mainly so that the Nazi could take pictures and say that lots and
lots of people were going home. Can you imagine how much their life would have changed? How terrible their nightmares were? Even though they were physically free from the camp, I doubt they were ever mentally free. As I looked through that gate, I was
overwhelmed just at the thought of what I was about to enter and see. There was just
so much injustice that happened inside that gate. As you walk through
the gate, you stand in a huge courtyard with the barracks and crematorium to your
left and a huge building which was an administration,
registration and maintenance building but is now used as a museum about the
camp to your right. As I was standing in the courtyard, in the semi-cold, all bundled up, I thought
about the prisoners who were made to stand out here in their sparse clothes or
no clothes in frigid weather or boiling summer heat for hours and reality of how horrible
the conditions were settled in.
When you enter the registration building, you see a huge map
of all of the concentration camps. It is outstanding how many camps, big and
little, there were. As you move deeper into the building, you see where the new prisoners were
“welcomed” by being made to hand over everything while being insulting and
yelled at. They had to give over all their belongings, their clothes, take a group shower
and get dressed in their uniforms. Reading about what was yelled at them, I
felt so disgusted and heartbroken, they were told things like, “You are without rights, dishonorable and
defenseless. You’re a pile of shit and that’s how you’re going to be treated.” These are human beings that were told these
things. Human. Beings! They were being stripped of everything including their dignity and humanity!
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| The tables where they were made to hand over everything |
The next building was the prison.
Wait, a prison? In a concentration camp? Yes,
a prison, and it was probably one of the darkest places in the
camp. It’s where special prisoners were sent, they were the religious leaders, the rebellious, the victims. They lived in solitary
con
finement awaiting their death. Most who went in alive came out dead. The few that did survive punishment in the prison were very weak and would often die soon afterwards. In the prison, they were given very little
food and were keep in dark, small cells. Some were even keep in
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| The Prison Hall |
standing cells.
I mean can you imagine... you're starving, your stomach is clawing at you for any kind of substance, you've been standing on your feet for weeks, all your
weight, even though it's not much, is crushing your feet, just waiting for your death? It’s terrible, I
can hardly go for a couple of hours on my feet, and that's when I can walking around! Erwin Gostner,
a prisoner who stayed in the prison at Dauchau said, “Four months in this Bunker, four
months detention in darkness, four months with hot food only every fourth day!
Time crawls by. I only count every fourth day, and I am amazed when the food
comes and wakes me up, I am in a state of trance.”
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| An original toilet in one of the cells |
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| Beds in the Barracks |
Of the 38 barracks, only two have been reconstructed because
reconstructing all 38 would have been very expensive. The barracks were packed
full of wooden beds that the prisoners had to make. All of them uniformly made.
If a prisoner made a bed that wasn’t exactly uniform, they would be punished
severely. For example, when a bed was not uniform the prisoner would sometimes be hung from a stake for an hour by their arms
which were tied behind them; So all of their weight was on their arms. Such excruciating pain I can't even imagine!
The last and probably the hardest building I have to talk
about is the crematorium. The crematorium is separate from the actual camp but it
was only a minute’s walk away. There are actually two crematories, a small one
and big one, but we only went through the large one. Right before you go into
the crematorium there is a board explaining some of what went on in the crematorium but there is also this picture of all the bodies that right before the end of
the war weren’t burned. During the end of the war, Dauchau didn’t have enough
coal to burn all of the bodies so they just left them lying around.
When the
American soldiers came through the camp they gather all the bodies together to
be buried. As you walk into the crematorium, you look into five disinfecting
chambers where they would
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| The gas chamber |
“disinfect” the dead prisoners clothes with prussic
acid poison gas. Then, you walk into the waiting room where the victims were to
be informed on using the supposed “showers.” Next, you walk into the disrobing
room where the victims were to disrobe before entering the gas chamber
disguised as “showers”. Their clothing was to be brought to the disinfecting
chambers before the next group could enter the room. The next room was actually the gas
chamber, surprisingly, they never used the gas chambers in Dauchau. Although some prisoners were sent to Dauchau specifically for execution, the gas chambers were never put into use. Victims were
often either worked to death, starved to death or used in useless “medical
research”. As the prototype, the gas chamber was the center of the potential mass murder. The
room was disguised as “showers” to prevent the victims of suspicion or refusing
to enter the room. During
a period of 15 to 20 minutes up to 150 people at a
time could be suffocated. It was here that my heart broke. Here in a room just
like this people were killed like they were nothing. Like they had no souls, no
family, no future, no feelings. These oblivious people were waiting for water
to pour out of the shower heads and when none came their fate was sealed. There
was no goodbyes to people outside of the chamber. Just terror at the
realization of what was happening. Men, woman and children were killed in
chambers like these. Lives, 100s and 100s of lives, were taking in chambers
just like this. It wasn’t because they had done anything wrong either, not that
it would make it right, but these were people who were killed just because of
their religion, race, or sexuality. People who had relatives and thoughts.
People who were just like you and me. People who were just like the same people
who put the gas into the chamber. It makes me question where the perpetrators
humanity had gone. Where were their heads? Had their mind just gone blank, all
feelings of compassion and right and wrong gone? I don't know.
The next room was the actual
crematorium where they cremated the bodies of the already dead or almost
dead. That screwed with my head a bit, that not all the people who were put
stretchers and burnt were dead. Some were hung just before getting burnt, some
had died from the medical experiments, some had died from starvation or work.
Then, there was the fence around the compound, first there
was the death zone and if a prisoner made it through there, they had to make it through
a trench with traps in it over electrified barbed wire bush and fence and
through a river. Did you know only 1 out of the thousands and thousands that
were in Dauchau actually escaped? True fact. Also, another true fact, only 20
perpetrators were actually prosecuted and punished! Oh, the injustice, it
hurts. It hurts. The only consolation I have is that they have to face a
greater ultimate judgment. Like my mom said, “They helped with this camp which
they though was bad, just wait
until they go to hell.”
Today has been a tough day as it should have been. So many
feelings, I may be slightly depressed for a bit. These victims had it so much
harder than me and I complain about little things. I am definitely going to
work on being more thankful for all the things I have. I am not persecuted for
my beliefs or for my race. I feel the pain of the victims and a weight of
sadness that is overwhelming. I believe that we all see the evil that happened
in these concentration camps, and I believe we need to take that heartbreak,
that sadness, that want for justice and look around our world to see where evil
is alive and well today.
Now, you may be saying there isn't any evil like this in our world today, that we've moved past all that craziness. Ah, friend, that is
where you are wrong, evil is lurking around every corner. We just aren't
looking for it, we are just ignoring the facts, we pretend that we can’t see it
there in the corner. There is evil everywhere in the world, like in Africa where kids
don’t get feed a decently meal for weeks and Americans eat three full meals a day with leftovers to spare. In America, we have our own evil
that we don’t like to address.
Sure, maybe, in Africa and other developing
countries there is evil but not in America. We are all put together and better
than everyone else, look at us! Oh really, tell that to the girls who are put
into the sex slave trade every day in America. The 12 year old who is sold into it by her uncle. I want to look around and see
the evil that’s in the world and to make it stop. I may not do anything great
like cure cancer or whatever. But if I can touch one person life, make them
forget how they are suffering, I have succeeded. And if you join me in casting
out the darkness and evil in this world and we both just touch one persons
life, then that’s two people who have
been helped. Even if you can’t tell if it will help, or if it’s awkward, I believe
it’s our duty, Christians and non-Christians alike, to rid our world of evil as
much as we can. And if I touch one persons life and you touch another, and that person touches another, and so on, we suddenly begin to add up and soon we
are one big mass of people touching other peoples lives who in turn touch other
peoples lives! It may be awkward to make eye contact with the homeless man or
to ask how he’s doing. It may be uncomfortable to invite your dirty, loud,
crazy neighborhood kids into your home for dinner, but I believe that what we
have to do. That’s how we show Jesus’ love one step at a time. We aren't called
to take big steps, that’s not our job. Our job is to take small steps, holding
God’s hand, trusting him to show us what to done
and making a difference in our world.
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| Me looking out the window in the barrac |
