The Unheeded Warning

A relative asked me why Dachau is on our to-do list. I was a bit taken aback. Shouldn’t we visit to keep the horror of the Holocaust fresh so we never repeat it? At the same time, I understand why some recoil from standing on the grounds where their ancestors likely perished.

When Tarun and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial this morning, we saw the guard towers, crematorium and maintenance building which now houses a museum. The barracks were torn down in the 1960s and two out of the many were recreated for visitors.

The movies we have watched and the books we have read did not steel us as we approached the entrance to the camp. Walking through the museum and barracks, seeing the death logs and imagining that the ones in the photos once worked in the halls where I was standing made me drown in emotions and questions.

How on earth, can humans be so cruel? How is it possible that what looks so calm now was hell on earth once? How did the Third Reich go from rounding up criminals to exterminating nearly 40,000 prisoners at Dachau and by some estimates 17M in all, including 6M Jews? Where was God when all this was happening?

A poignant statement on a memorial at the crematorium in Dachau reflects our collective inability to find answers: Den Toten zur Ehr den Lebenden zur Mahnung. In English it means - To honor the dead to warn the living.

Sadly, we have learned nothing.

There have been numerous genocides since the Holocaust: 500,00 Darfuris killed in Sudan, 700,000 Hutus and 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, 200,000 Isaqs in Somalia, 3,000,000 killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The list goes on and on.

The perpetrators often start in innocuous ways. In Germany, they began with the pretext of rounding up criminals and quickly escalated to the internment of numerous other groups and eventually to the extermination of the Jews.

Dachau was one of the first concentration camps. Built in 1933, it operated uninterrupted until 1945. Able bodied prisoners were sent here and used for hard labor as they battled depravity, malnutrition and disease. Brand names we look up to - like BMW, Daimler, Agfa and subsidiaries of US companies like IBM and Ford - used these prisoners for manufacturing operations.

Towards the end of the war when prisoners in Dachau were dying in droves, the Nazis transported prisoners from other camps to keep the supply chain going. Before the Allied troops liberated the camp in 1945, the Nazis tried to erase evidence of their cruelty. They drowned prisoners and killed many while marching them long distance.

As we departed, my thoughts ricocheted to the current day and to the operatives wanting to round up political opponents and imprison them once they can dole out retribution. Our visit to Dachau reinforced that this kind of language and sentiment is rooted in nothing but unimaginable evil.

With humble prayers for those who perished, we left Dachau feeling the gravity of the unheeded warning from the survivors of the Holocaust.