The Dachau concentration camp in Germany is located 15 km north-west of Munich in the country of Dachau. Admission is free, the guided tour is € 3 and the audio guides are € 3.50.
This is the story of an emotion. Strong and indelible. Strange at times. An emotion that bears the name of Dachau. A concentration camp, the first. A little different from the others. Here people did not kill, but they died. Yes, because the crematoria and gas chambers were not there, at least during the first years after its opening. People died of hunger, cold, disease, pain, hardship. Not gas.
Little remains of what it was today. The blocks, numerous, were shot down to give way to empty expanses and numbers engraved in stone. Our guide told us that the material from which the blocks were built was so small that it could not stand the test of time, the shacks were already unsafe at the end of the war and would have collapsed shortly afterwards if they had not been previously demolished. . But the truth is another. More raw, more calculated: he wanted to destroy in order to cancel the evidence, for denial, for the extreme attempt to "save face". It didn't help much, fortunately.
There are only two blocks in the field, not the originals but faithful reproductions. What is most striking are the beds. At the beginning as a kind of single beds, separated by wooden bars in which two or three people could sleep. Over the years, those single beds were transformed into full size beds, equally separated by wooden bars, but able to accommodate up to 8 people, piled on top of each other. The latest evolution of those beds was the disappearance of the wooden dividing bars, so that dozens of people could cram themselves into those makeshift shelters.
Today, in a more peripheral area of the camp, you can see buildings with chimneys, those of the crematoria which, built in the last years before the end of the war, were occasionally put into operation. And, outside those same buildings, there are slits that were used to introduce deadly gases into the showers. During one of the many showers, during one of those massacres, a mother held her baby in her womb. He did not want to part with him and, close to her breast, he embraced him until he exhaled his last breath.
When the men of the sonderkommando had opened the room to free her from the deceased bodies, they had found the child still alive (the mother's body had protected him from the gaseous exhalation). They didn't know what to do with it, how to behave. They were Jews too, albeit in a leadership role. They were men and had not yet completely lost their humanity. They had decided to lead him to safety, perhaps to entrust him to some woman, there, in one of the blocks, but an SS arrived on the spot before the mission was completed and, cold and merciless, killed that little one with a pistol shot.
You will find this and many other stories enclosed in those walls, between stones and stones, on this side of the gates, on the other side of life.
THEinput at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site it is free and allowed every day from 9:00 to 17:00.
If you opt for guided tours, the ticket is 3 euros, the one for the audio guides 3,50 euros.
