I had an idea this morning, that I could make this blog more comprehensive if I bought a small notebook and jotted down ideas in it as the day went along, so I could be sure not to miss anything while typing things up at the end of the day. I bought two of the smallest Moleskines that you can buy at the train station, and my life was forever changed (provided I can afford to keep buying these 2.50€ notebooks). I’ll never lose another thought. Previously I had insisted on using my smartphone for this task but it proved to be unwieldy. I had rejected using a notebook before because I found them difficult to write in, but it turns out that if you write in shorthand they are perfect.
Random strange fact about Europe: cars drive up onto the sidewalk all the time. Most of the curbs are a few inches or shorter, so they just drive right up to the doors of shops to make deliveries and drop people off.
Another thing: money changers won’t change coins. We are stuck with about $4 worth of Czech korunas because none of the changers will accept them. We will be giving them away as gifts when we get home, because we can’t afford much else.
For our day trip to the concentration camp Dachau we had an Englishman for a guide. He was friendly and knowledgeable. Apparently in the old days a separate set of tracks ran to the camp in order to keep the traffic to and from the camp away from the normal civilian traffic. Nowadays the tracks are all the same. We took a commuter train to the town of Dachau and then took a bus out to the camp itself.
It was a day of irony – in such a horrible place the plants and trees were blooming and the birds were singing. A further irony is that apparently the camp used to be spotless and shiny, because the prisoners were made to spot clean the entire place, polishing the floors three times a day, not only to make the camp appear like a nice place to the outside world but also as one more way to work prisoners to death.
The most moving part of the camp was the religious memorial set up by the Jewish community. It is symbolic of the journey of the prisoners through the camps: you walk past the barbed wire, into a dark brick building, and peer up through the chimney. It is better seen than described:
All in all though, the thing that disturbed me the most was how little I was disturbed by the camp. Perhaps it is because I’ve seen it on pictures, movies, and in books before. Perhaps the enormity of it is too great for a sheltered and spoiled bourgeoisie to comprehend. Evil, at its absolute worst, has become banal. This struck me as very problematic, and it points to the need for a deeper understanding, but where and how that is to come I am not sure.
I must admit I half expected to find a gift shop there. After seeing all of the gift shops littering everything profound in our world, nothing seems sacred anymore. To my vast relief, there was only a small bookshop that uses its profits for maintenance of the camp. Since we didn’t have time on our tour to read all of the exhibits, we bought one of the books.
Visiting Dachau was really a punch in the soul, but as I said, much less so than I expected.
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