Dachau: Never Again

Originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, October 25, 2002

Krematorium (Baracke X).

The sign printed in German beckoned, challenged, taunted me.

Juggling a reporter’s notebook and camera equipment earlier this month in the middle of what had been Roll Call Square in the Nazi-run Dachau concentration camp, I was certain I could go no farther.

“Can’t do it,” I thought.

Actually, I said it out loud, disturbing an elderly British couple studying the paper map of the concentration camp in their hands.

My feet hurt because it’s hard to walk on large pebbles in high-heeled Kenneth Coles. And I was cold and tired and sick from a bronchial infection.

And I had to drive 300 miles back across Germany to catch a flight from Frankfurt in the morning.

“I just can’t,” I thought aloud again.

I had already spent several hours wandering through the ghostly remains of the Nazis’ first concentration camp, where more than 200,000 prisoners, most of them Jews, were sent from 1933 to 1945. The camp’s official registry claimed just more than 31,000 prisoners died at the camp, but historians believe that number is grossly underestimated.

The walk to the crematorium at the far end of the camp was just too much.

Dachau is massive. From a distance, it looks like an aging industrial complex, perhaps even a school. On closer inspection, however, the razor wire and the moat that surround the camp, as well as the seven reconstructed watchtowers from which Nazi gunmen picked off emaciated prisoners like squirrels, proved that something else–nefarious, unthinkable, inhuman–happened here.

Every hair on my body felt as if it stood up on end when I saw the towers from my rental car for the first time. I parked a few blocks away and walked silently, as did most of the hundreds of other visitors, toward the camp’s entrance.

Crossing the threshold of the camp just as thousands and thousands of terrified prisoners had 60 years before me, never to cross it again, I wanted to throw up.

Most of the grounds of the Dachau camp are covered in pebbles. Not the small kind found on the edges of gardens or the bottoms of fish tanks. Not gravel. Small stones. Like the ones Jews place on memorials at burial sites.

Walking through the Dachau camp is walking on a grave. The three dozen main barracks, long, skinny buildings where prisoners were stacked in primitive wood bunks like livestock, are gone. Razed. Long stripes of pebbles have replaced them. A simple gray stone with the number of each barrack is the only identifying mark.

I stood at the edge of what had been Baracke 3, appalled at my own weakness. How dare I not go, walk the few hundred yards across the foot bridge at the edge of the woods and confront the crematorium? How dare I not see those ovens for myself?

So I walked, as thousands of dying, beaten, sick, freezing, barefoot prisoners had, across the death camp to the ovens.

Now I am a witness.

I can never say I don’t know what happened here. I’ve seen the ovens. I’ve seen the photographs of piles of bodies. I’ve seen the sign above the shower heads in Baracke X that reads: “Prisoners were hanged from here.”

I’ve felt the specter of death at Dachau, and the spirit of life. What happened at Dachau was like the terror of Sept. 11 every day for a dozen years. Just as millions watched the twin towers attacked and fall, taking thousands of lives with them, millions bear witness to the horrors of Dachau.

The camp has many memorials, some huge and evocative. Others are more stark, simple black words on granite.

One, next to the cremated remains of unknown concentration camp prisoners, says in Hebrew, English, French, German and Russian: “Never again.”

Another, at the opposite end of Roll Call Square, reminds visitors of the thousands of Communists and other political prisoners who lived and died at the camp. It reads, “May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and respect for their fellow man.”

Driving weepily past the manicured lawns of the town of Dachau on my way back to Frankfurt, I flipped on the stereo as Bruce Springsteen began to sing “Into the Fire,” an ode to the hundreds of firefighters and other heroes who perished rushing back into the Twin Towers trying to save others.

Springsteen sang, “May your strength give us strength, may your faith give us faith, may your hope give us hope, may your love bring us love,” as the towers of the Dachau camp shrank in my rearview mirror.

Never again.