Munich 3 – The Historical

On our last day in Munich before we caught our train back to Vienna, I really wanted to go to Dachau, which was the first concentration camp. I do not even know how to begin describing what it was like to be there. It was sad, eerie, thought provoking…I couldn’t help but feel what had happened there. While there, I took out about twenty minutes and literally just sat in the main square and tried to imagine what it was like. The fact that such awful things had happened right where I was standing was scary, to say the least. Despite all the tourists around me, it was not hard to feel the suffering that had gone on – the ground was simply gravel, the grass was overgrown with weeds, the buildings were cheap, and the paint was peeling. It was still the exact same camp that it was during WWII. I did not feel distanced at all from what had happened, despite the fact that it is about seventy years earlier. For one thing, it definitely made me feel less sorry for myself for being cold the day before during the David Guetta concert! The amount of unbearable torment that occurred there is overwhelming just from looking at the stats, but actually stepping on the grounds had another, deeper impact on me that will be hard to forget.