Today I went to the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. Dachau was the model camp that most others were designed to during Hitler’s reign.
The picture you see is the surrounding fence that kept the “workers” inside the walls. The combination of barbed wire and electric fence made it impossible to escape, if one even got that far. The moat to the left is preceded by “no man’s land,” a small strip of grass surrounding the camp, that held certain death for anyone that crossed into it. Prisoners were often times forced into this area by guards. They were then shot from the towers as they were supposedly attempting to escape.
The blatant lack of humanity exhibited by the Nazis is very difficult to come to grips with. Starving, sick people were worked, beaten, and tortured on a daily basis to the point of death. Images of piles of corpses and stories of innocent people losing their identity, dignity, and ultimately their life were forever imprinted into my memory as I walked through the museum and grounds. How this all could have possibly occurred such a short time ago, in a so called advanced society leaves so many questions…How? Why? These questions, though, have no answers.
There is a monument inside that says NEVER AGAIN in 5 different languages. It is inspiring, but it is more of an aspiration than a statement of fact. Genocide continues to occur in various parts of the world. The extermination of the Jews (along with others) during the Holocaust was a genocide that we are all somewhat familiar with on one level or another and understand as being evil, as being something that would not occur today…but it does. People continue to be mercilessly killed simply for who they are. Darfur comes to mind.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the world’s genocides, and I am not actively involved in helping these situations, but I urge those reading this to really take a step back, look at your life, and be thankful for the gifts you have been given. None of us knows what torture feels like, what being worked to death feels like, what losing everything you own, even your name, feels like. We can, however, understand and recognize when things are not as they should be, when a level of humanity is being removed from society. All it takes is a little perspective, and I gained a lot today…