Visiting a concentration camp was the biggest reason Germany was near the top of our "places to go" travel list.  It's hard to call it the "highlight" of our trip, but it was certainly the most important.  One of my favorite movie scenes of all time comes from Good Will Hunting. 

Robin Williams lectures a brilliant "punk kid" (Matt Damon) on the value of real-life experiences:
"So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written... But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.  You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that... And if I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, 'once more unto the breach dear friends.'  But you've never been near one.  You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.  If I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet.  But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.  Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you."

We can read the WW II history books all we want; these accounts are obviously invaluable.  But there is something different about (if given the chance) the opportunity to actually walk through the gas chamber at a concentration camp.  There's something there we can't read about.  And that something hits people in different ways, I'm sure.  But beyond keeping the memory of those who suffered unthinkable atrocities, I think it's just as important to learn from this tragedy in order to keep this evil from rearing its ugly head ever again.

Before commenting on those lessons, a little history:  Just outside of Munich, Dachau was the first and longest running concentration camp.  It opened 7 weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 and was liberated by Allied Forces one day before he committed suicide in 1945.  Although 45,000 people died there, Dachau was not considered an "extermination camp."  Many came through Dachau en route to other infamous death camps like Auschwitz.

I believe it was no small coincidence that the new priest in my hometown handed me a book about Dachau a few days before our flight to Germany.  Priestblock 25487 is a memoir from Fr. Jean Bernard, a survivor of Dachau for 14 months.  I'm embarrassed to say I was not aware that the 6 million Jews killed in the holocaust represent half of the total murdered.  And many of the "other half" were Christian leaders opposing the Nazi regime, including countless Catholic priests.  Dachau is where thousands of Catholic priests were sent and kept in one barrack together in order to prevent them from spreading their Christian hope.

                              
A statue of Our Lady from the "Priest Block."  Hard to believe that at certain times the SS
allowed this.... and Sarah at the entrance to the camp.

Walking through the gate into the camp is indescribable.  The iron gate was complete with the same fascist lie scripted on every camp entrance: "Work will set you free."  The first stop of the tour was a museum full of plenty of depressing information about the holocaust.  Then we progressed through various administrative rooms.  Among them was where brutal punishments were carried out.

                              
Where prisoners would receive their lashings.  Had to learn to count in German; if they erred?  Start over.
On the right is where they placed wooden beams with hooks in between these arches.  They would chain the
hands of a prisoner behind his back and hang him by that chain on the hook.  You can only imagine the grotesque
mayhem this would unleash on the joints.  Some did not survive.  This was described in Fr. Bernard's book.  To
mock the priests, dozens of them were "hooked" on one Good Friday.

From there we toured the barracks.  Most of them were torn down, but a sample was built in the '60s at the pleading of survivors wishing to build a memorial.  The samples showed 3 phases of life (or death) in the camp.  In the beginning, each prisoner received a straw mattress on a wooden bunk bed (3 high).  In the second phase they had to double up, and by the end they removed all partitions and crammed dozens of bodies on top of straw.  Barracks built for 250 were housing 2,000 starving, disease-ridden, dehumanized men!

Next came the most sobering part of all, the gas chamber.  Like everything else, the gas chamber at Dachau served as testing for all other camps.  It is not known how many people died in the gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for the mass killings like at Auschwitz.  The chamber was made up of 5 stages.  1.  Disrobe and disinfection.  2. Waiting room.  3.  Gas chamber.  4.  Another waiting room (for dead bodies).  5.  Crematorium. 

Prisoners thought they were given the special privilege of a shower.  The entrance to the gas chamber had the word "shower" posted above the door.  And in the gas chamber ceiling sat fake shower heads with no plumbing behind them.  Once the gas flowed from one end of the room and the air from the other, it took about 20 minutes to kill those inside. 

                        
"Shower" marks the doorway to the gas chamber.  The German "Brausebad" has been eliminated from the language
because of its association with the holocaust.  Germans now use the French word for "shower."  On the right is the crematorium, where the bodies were burned and the ashes thrown out the back door.

After experiencing the morbid gas chamber, we made a much needed stop at the memorials.  The Catholic memorial had an active Carmelite convent behind it in which the nuns make it their life's mission to pray for the souls of all involved in the holocaust.  We also visited the Russian Orthodox, Jewish, and Protestant memorials. 

If it weren't for the opportunity to experience this important history lesson, we would not have made a 7-day trip to Europe.  No doubt, we enjoyed other parts of our trip, but this is the experience that will stick with our souls forever.  Last summer we stared up at that Sistine Chapel and knew exactly what Robin Williams meant.  This summer, the smell of the gas chamber taught us more than any book ever could. 

Making the silent walk through the grounds of Dachau, the word that kept popping into my head was "How?".  How did Hitler come to power?  How did he ever pull this off?  How did the people of Germany (and beyond) let this happen? 

And given today's current state of affairs, the most important question of all:  How did western civilization fail to learn from this... and let many of Hitler's ideals win-out in the end?

More on that terrifying reality later.