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Published: November 21st 2010
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Saturday
I had no idea when we crossed the border from Austria to Germany. All I knew was that the blanket fog along the way looked both eerie and fascinating. Deep pockets of fog and Bavarian forests rolled into little hamlets which skirted the base of the mountains. This is what shaped the scene along the way from Salzburg to Munich. The ICE train - long and sleek, a little like a bullet train, not at all English, cut through the countryside at a striking pace. At Munich station, after asking many times, I found where I should go for the train to Dachau.
At Dachau the freezing fog remained very low as if skirting the ground like a net curtain. It hung exactly in the concentration camp but not in the town itself.
In the museum, (the original old kitchen, clothing store, workshops and baths building) I joined the back of a guided tour – guided by a very knowledgeable lanky Irish man from whom I learned a lot about the beginnings of the concentration camp in 1933. When the group moved on, he came directly over and had a little quiet word with me
saying that ‘if I’d like to join his private tour, I was welcome’ at which point he lodged his marketing leaflet in front of me, under my elbow, on the glass cabinet. I didn’t want to be in a group anyway and, quite honestly, afterwards, he kept turning up intruding the silences with his Irish lilting monologues; where I was quietly reading.
In the museum sections 1 – 7, there was a fully explained history of Hitler’s rise to power and how Dachau was used for political prisoners from 1933 -39 and I read all the notes, looked at all the pictures, pieced together the history and moved through it. And, I worried because I didn’t feel anything. Then I began to be deeply affected by sections 8 to 12 – the war years. At one point towards the end, I thought I had a small hole in my heart where the air had rushed in and blown my heart up to the size of a rugby ball which I could feel bursting inside my chest. I became aware of a deep sorrow as if I had cried for hours but I hadn’t shed a tear only held whatever
it was in the well inside me.
Outside, it was bitterly cold and I was shaking inside a warm woolen coat and of course, I imagined what it was like to be a prisoner in one of those coarse blue and white uniforms that wouldn’t keep anything warm.
It was after walking through the reconstructed barrack blocks, past the original foundations of the demolished barracks, down to the crematorium block that I had a reprieve with a short lived break of being able to breathe properly again.
I thought I was sorted and all composed but when I walked into the crematorium building that deep well of sadness had only been latent because, at one point, I honestly thought that my heart had burst apart.
You may think that I’m overly sensitive here but the combination of being able to very clearly physically feel my heart from a past illness and from feeling things very deeply every day combined with being face to face with the reality of a gas chamber is overwhelming.
The room next to the crematorium furnaces Was a gas chamber. This room was camouflaged as a shower room, and in order
of prisoner’s use, the rooms went like this:
Remove your clothes room, (clothes go to be fumigated)
Shower Room (which was a lie and actually a gas chamber for up to 150 people) and crematorium (which were actually incinerators).
How could anyone EVER conceive of this idea let alone build it and use it? To me, it’s unimaginable.
In the gas chamber, I stood in a corner with my back to the wall and silently cried and felt sick and came to terms with a few things.
I can’t explain how I felt when I was walking away – there was this big ache in my chest and even now, if I dwell, I am still affected by what I felt.
This winter afternoon, I caught an earlier return train from Dachau to Munich than was on my ticket. No one checked.
I waited for Thomas by the compass rose on the floor of the station as we had planned last Sunday. I recognized his bike before him and as I walked over to him, he recognized me instantly. It was exactly 6pm.
He’d brought the bike, you see, because after I caught
the train back to Salzburg, he would go dancing until 3 in the morning, with his stick and his weights on his wrists and then cycle home. I could imagine him clearing the floor, which he freely admitted always does happen. I like him very much. He has boundless energy. We talked of endless things again – he articulately told me how his father was ingenious - that he could do anything except put the volkswagen back together. How he has had so few friends in life and how he’d learned to play the piano from the age of 5 from a teacher who was a concert player and when he and his brother went to see her play the organ in a bach recital, they both came out and wondered how they could live in this life when there was so much beauty like the organ playing in the next. At that time, he was 5 and his brother was 8 years old. How, when he was 19, he played Shubert in a piano concert and his father came to watch and marked every error he made during the performance. Thomas didn’t know this but found the programme later
with every error listed.
And I brought it all back to earth when I told him my intellectual theory that actually some things must be okay in Germany because the dogs are happy and when one was coming towards us, I proceeded to demonstrate my theory because I made a happy noise to the dog and he was excited and came running to me. This does NOT happen in Austria. The dogs are not friendly, do not react or notice anyone and sometimes they try to bite. And, of course, anyone who knows me well will know that I talk to dogs a lot. Even Dave will remember this from our travels across Tibet.
At the station just before my train was to leave, we tried to find a pen to exchange our addresses. Neither of us could find a pen. He offered me a bike spanner to write with at which point the train pulled out from behind me and I thought it was mine but he knew it wasn’t. Eventually, he found a pen. He wrote his address, which I cannot read and I wrote him mine – where I don’t live – yet.
His
parting words were “It’s been really good to meet you again and I warn you to never change.”
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