Wish You Were Here: Dachau

You may remember that we didn't think Em was ready to go to the Anne Frank House when we were in Amsterdam last year. Well we decided that she's old enough to hear more about that part of history now. She knew a little bit, but not really any details. We were thinking about going to Schloss Neuschwanstein, but when I was looking at the map, I saw Dachau was about the same distance away from us, so we decided to go there, instead. Since we're going to go to Israel this winter, I thought seeing a concentration camp might give Em a better idea of why Israel was so important to the Jews.

So, we went to Dachau. I'm going to tell the story with pictures, because I think it's more effective. I'm using the same captions as on my FB, so if you've read those, you can skip this post.

The guard tower/gate to get into the prisoner's camp. Dachau wasn't originally built to house Jews, it was for political prisoners. Though, by the end, Jews were the majority of the prisoners here. Dachau wasn't a death camp like Auschwitz, it was a work camp. So, instead of being gassed to death, they were worked to death. Conditions were horrible. They were given two pieces of bread a day, as well as a bowl of thin soup for dinner. In the 12 years Dachau was used as a concentration camp, about 42,000 people died there. In the 5 years of Auschwitz, about a million people were killed.

The gate in the guard tower. It says "Arbeit macht frei," which means "work will make you free"

I know all you can see is me in this one, but it's everything a prisoner was issued when he came to the camp. A pair of pants, a shirt/jacket, and a pair of slipper/shoes

The guard tower from the inside. The camp was built to house 7,000 prisoners, but when the Americans came in 1945, there were over 30,000 prisoners there.

A sculpture (from the 60s) representing the prisoners who "escaped" from the camp by touching the electrified fence.

One of the barracks. The real prisoner barracks were torn down, but they have rebuilt this one. Each one was built to house 280 people. By the end, due to severe overcrowding, about 2,000 people were in each one.

A bank of beds. The barracks were rebuilt in 3 sections, each to represent a different period in the camp. This is from the first part, before it started to get crowded. Each prisoner had his own bed section. They were issued mattresses, a blanket, and a little pillow

Here, you can see that the bank of beds was two-sided

The second section of the barracks. Here, they had 3-level bunks that could be separated or pushed together, based on need. Here, they had the bunks in sets of two. %-6 prisoners would sleep on each floor of each set of bunks.It looked about the size of a queen bed. Regular mattresses were gone, replaced by straw ones that bred disease

At the end, there were just these three story sleeping bunks. People slept in piles. Every once in a while, they would all wake up to make sure the people on the bottom weren't suffocating. There were no mattresses at all, just wood.

These foundations were all barracks, save the first two. The first two were a cantina and a sick bay. The sick bay wasn't where people would go to get treatment, it was where they went to be isolated from the rest of the camp. It was also where the SS doctors would do experiments on prisoners. It was the same way on the other side of that little lane you see at the left of the picture.

The large crematorium. You can't see the whole thing here, because of the tree. It's about twice this long.

The small crematorium. They were unable to burn all of the corpses in here, so they built the large one

The ovens in the small crematorium

The "shower room" in the big crematorium. It wasn't really for showers, it was for gas. The shower heads were all for show. This was built to be a gas chamber, just like Auschwitz. It wasn't used for that, though. It was used a couple of times to do experiments on war gasses. I don't remember how many people the tour guide said died in here, but it was less than 50.

The ovens in the big crematorium. Each one could hold 1-3 prisoners, depending on the condition of the corpses. Even with the 4 new ovens (there was one behind me), they couldn't keep up with burning the bodies at the end. When the Americans came, there were bodies piled up in the rooms of the crematorium, as well as bodies in piles all around the camp.There were thousands of bodies, in addition to the 30,000+ people liberated