Commentary: At Dachau, grim reminder of horror and atrocities

By Hannah Dougherty Campbell

I was standing in a gas chamber. Above me in this deep, dank cellar were rusty nozzles that once spewed Zyklon B. This was part of the tour our hotel clerk told us about - a visit to the Dachau concentration camp memorial to lay flowers for those who suffered and died during Adolf Hitler's Holocaust.

We were a group of Americans who had come to Germany for the 1977 Oktoberfest. The bus ride from Munich to Dachau was a short 10 miles, but the distance from gaily decorated beer tents to the ghostly gray grounds of desolation and despair was incalculable.

Our tour guide led us past a vibrant red-rose-covered brick wall where prisoners had been lined up and shot. The camp grounds were studded with 32 markers depicting barracks - each one tombstone-like to symbolize those who once rested on wooden bunk slats while suffering or dying.

Dachau was the first of the camps, opened in 1933 for political prisoners. But it would eventually include any and all those considered enemies by the Reich. More than 200,000 prisoners from at least 30 countries would be housed in Dachau, nearly a third of them Jews. About 35,000 would perish there and in the subcamps that grew up around it. Many were executed, and others died of disease, malnutrition, overwork, and medical experiments.

During our visit, a grim guard tower atop barbed-wire walls was silhouetted against the rainy October sky. There were three chapels commemorating Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. I entered each one to say a prayer. I paused at the display case with a dented tin can lid made by a priest to hold the communion host. Even in pain and peril, prayer. Out of about 2,500 priests imprisoned there, a thousand would not survive.

In the courtyard, there was a collection of diaries, and I recall one in which young Macha wrote, "A little bird comes to visit the camp; I watch as he flies from a tree into the grounds then flies away again. And it, it has the right do so so." How perfectly it speaks to the misery endured by the young and old in this empty hell on earth. The black-and-white newsreels I remember seeing don't capture the enormity of this ghostly grave. Anger rises within me. Why didn't anyone stop this? Did anyone help these souls?

In Dachau, liberation came on April 29, 1945, 71 years ago today. Members of the U.S. Seventh Army's 45th Infantry Division found about 30,000 survivors when they arrived.

I would learn later that there were many unsung heroes of this time. In the book The Righteous, by Martin Gilbert, I read about a man who hid a family in his cellar and covered the trapdoor with a rug. When Nazis searched his house, their guard dogs sniffed the rug area until he lured them away by offering them little pieces of meat. Women in various villages set loaves of bread on bushes along the trails leading to the camps so weakened prisoners would find them - and perhaps the strength to survive. Would we do the same? Risk our lives, our families, to save one person in peril?

When I met a member of the Dutch resistance, she told me that her parents hid intelligence documents under her bedcovers, and when Nazis came at night she pretended she was fast asleep. She also rode her bike to school with important papers in her school bag and boldly asked Gestapo members to put them on the classroom shelf since she couldn't reach it. Those papers would be picked up later by other resistance members.

So, yes, there were challenges to the Holocaust. Acts small and large by brave people who, along with the survivors, would share their stories. Now, it is our turn. First, we must never forget. Second, we need to educate ourselves and share what we, in turn, have learned.

Hannah Dougherty Campbell is a writer in Havertown. hannahdcampbell@hotmail.com