Walking down the cold, narrow cement surface, I looked to my right and peered within the four walls of a tiny room inside the bunker. I began reading the description on the dark and weathered wall, but was disrupted by a tour guide stopping behind me and beginning his explanation to the other foreign tourists. I listened as the words began echoing quietly, but sternly from his mouth. “These rooms were constructed for torture. When the prisoners acted out, or if they allegedly broke the rules, this is where the Nazis would take them. They would separate this tiny room into fours, preventing the prisoners from sitting down. Yes, they had to stand here for days, in complete darkness and endure physical acts of brutality for merely being a Jew. After weeks of enduring physical brutality, they were given a blunt knife and a piece of rope, and were told to kill themselves by morning. If they refused, the torture would start all over again…” the guide began to move forward but I was struck with a sense of shock, and surprisingly I felt a tear fall down my cheeks. So this was Dachau.
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany in March of 1933 (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/dachau.html). I never imagined the morbidity of the camp on the 10 mile trip from Munich on the first buzzing subway that gave me butterflies when rapidly crawling through the tunnels, or on the touristy bus ride through a small neighborhood. I was filled with a sense of anxiousness and excitement upon entering the camp. Over the years Nazi Germany has continuously been talked about in school, whether reading about it in novels, listening to speakers, or seeing pictures in textbooks, I was in slight disbelief that I was actually going to visit one. However, as I stepped off the bus onto the gravel walkway, it was apparent the seriousness and reverence that was written on the visitors’ facial expressions. As I walked down the tree-lined road towards the camp, a chilling wind caused my own arm hairs to rise. Silence was unanimous as I walked through the gates and into Dachau.
As I began my excursion of the camp, I could not help but try to in vision myself as a prisoner of Dachau based on my religion or ethnicity. A person’s sense of place occurs from cultural artifacts that identify themselves in terms of their beliefs and ways of living. Religion is something that is prevalent and defining in most people’s lives, and was a crucial determinant of the lives of Jewish people in the mid-20th century. Jewish people in Germany were persecuted from 1933 to 1445 under the Third Reich, and Dachau especially sponsored killing, which by the end of the war was responsible for the capturing of 206,206 prisoners and at least 31,951 deaths of innocent lives (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005214). As I walked through the museum and observed the main halls, I read about the medical experiments that scientists conducted on prisoners. As a chill ran up my back, it dawned on me that Dachau was a lawless community run by the hatred and detestation of a certain religious group or any individual who was anti-German, or anti-Hitler. Within the walls, or boundaries of Dachau, the coalition of the National Socialist Party had the ability to fate any prisoner who was ceased and brought within the camp gates. German nationalism during World War II became fanatic, violent, and militant. Nationalism is usually associated with pride and adherence, the waving of flags, the pledging of allegiance. No one ever conceives that a strong and devout sense of nationalism will lead to experimentation, alienation, torture, and extermination.
Yet, as I roamed the narrow wooden halls of the barracks, I saw the beds crammed together, nearly touching the ceiling, and realized how dangerous a pious sense of nationalism can be. I was alarmed on how spacious the actual camp was, and was astonished to learn the camp had been divided by the camp area which consisted of 32 barracks, and a crematorium used to dispose of the numerous lifeless bodies there were merely numbers to the Nazi soldiers. Nationalism at is most extreme classified a group of people either by religious connotations or an opposition to the Nazi regime, and held them together by en electrified barbed-wire gate, a ditch, and a wall with seven guard towers, manipulating this instituted boundary for excessive violence.
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