Opened eyes to the horrors of the Holocaust

Under the brilliant blue of the endless skylines with the crisp oranges and reds of Fall, the world seemed so peaceful and still in Dachau, Germany today. If I hadn't known what I had gotten myself into, I would have commented on the gorgeous scenery and the wide open landscape that was painted before my eyes. About 75 years ago, the atmosphere and the tranquility of this space couldn't have been any more different. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party opened the gates to the first of countless concentration camps in Dachaull with the support of the German government. This serene piece of Earth left me feeling quite uneasy and unsettled by the offsetting of the beauty of the land with the terror of what happened on its soil.

In choosing to tour a place that housed, tortured and slaughtered tens of thousands of human beings, one is painfully and sorrowfully aware of the horrors that were lived out but I was unprepared for how It would make me feel walking the same path that  a prisoner might have walked. Moving along throughout the various parts of the camp from the iron gate with its solid, iron-clad motto "Work shall set you free," to the initial shower room, from the barracks designed for 50 but eventually held over 2000 to the large square where the role call would be completed and finally from the crematorium to the gas chambers, today I lived at least a few moments in the depths of a history so full of shame and hurt that it's impossible to fully grasp the extent of the damage. Standing in the same room where innocent people guilty only of being themselves were tricked into voluntarily walking and stripping down for their own tragic death by gas made the weight of all of the images of the broken down people become so much more than just stories or moments from history; it overwhelmed me with emotions and made me see things from the other side of the story. By seeing these things for myself, I awakened a sense of duty to these victims and these survivors that I do everything in my power to honor them and standing up for what I know is wrong, even if the cost is high. 

The Holocaust is something that I've always known of and have always prided myself in "understanding" and being interested in. After seeing for myself the destruction and the unfathomable horrors, I realize now that there is no "understanding" it. It's not something to be interested in but rather something we should be interested in preventing from ever happening again. By painfully remembering the people lost and hurt during the Holocaust, we can hope that the world has evolved into a place where mass genocide and crimes against humanity would just be things in a history book. 

Walking through Dachau today, I experienced intense emotions of guilt, shame, anger, confusion but mostly, just sadness. This is an experience that I will never forget.