A Bad Day at Dachau

 

Chuck Johnson, from Grand Falls, Michigan, felt sorry for the busy young barmaid and gave her a big tip and a smile as he paid for his drink, making her smile back. He took a pull from his beer and sat there in the bar of his hotel in Munich scratching his grey beard and pondering. His day at Dachau had not gone well. The concentration camp had simply not made the impression on him that he’d expected. He’d found the parade ground staggering because it was so vast, to accommodate the thousands of prisoners lined up there to be counted; and the ovens and the ‘shower room’ for gassing the inmates had a big impact on him, for sure. But apart from that, overall he’d been surprisingly underwhelmed, and now he was trying to work out exactly why.

Somehow the infamous camp was just ordinary, with that neat little entrance sign, and a main road running past it, and bus stops outside…Many of the buildings were just reconstructions. The barracks especially were inauthentic, showing the sleeping quarters for inmates of three different periods. And actually the place simply hadn’t measured up to the bleak recreations of camps in the movies… There’d been lots of people there too, with sensation-seekers clogging up the crematorium. Especially those crowds of students from local schools, made to go there and get information on the spot.

And those grotesque elements. Travelling by train to Dachau was macabre, and just before they got there that bland voice over the PA system announcing the next stop (‘nächster Halt – Dachau’). Then from the railway station in the town on to the camp itself by bus, with so many on the bus that they’d stood upright in a press of people, just like a cattle-truck… Yeah, and at the camp that thoughtless teen standing just outside the crematorium smoking!

A shocking lack of gravity generally. A bookshop and a restaurant there, for Christ’s sake. The state was right to make students go, but they were too young and self-centred to take in the things that had gone on there. A few were a bit subdued, but most were actually indifferent. Some of them had ear-buds in, some kicked stones - bored, for Christ’s sake - and a few even joked and laughed. It was a disgrace. And, worse, at the entrance gates beside the ARBEIT MACHT FREI lettering those people posing for smiley holiday photos!

Chuck finished off his beer, dejected because the visit just hadn’t lived up to his hopes, for all those reasons. Dear old uncle Max had died of cancer a few months ago, a long and painful death, and at the end he’d been a pathetic shadow of himself. Chuck had done his duty looking after him, feeding him and washing him, and he really missed him, him and his stories. Poor old Max had been in the concentration camp at Dachau as a young man and had told Chuck a lot about the place, so he’d thought if he went there, it’d let him into that part of his uncle’s life, so he could feel close to him again. But that hadn’t worked out at all.

He was very proud of his uncle Max, who’d been a colonel in the SS stationed there and had great stories about humiliating and punishing and executing Jews, gypsies and retards, but they simply hadn’t come alive there that day for Chuck. He’d taken lots of photographs and sent them to the Aryan Brothers back home; and he’d seen near the camp the apartment block where Max had lived, still standing and inhabited. But all in all the trip had been a disappointment for him. Chuck shook his head and reflected that life could be shit really.

He ordered another beer from the pretty blonde barmaid and tried to cheer himself up. The tours over the next two days of the beerhall where Hitler gave his first speeches, the building where Goebbels launched Kristallnacht and the Führer’s own Eagle’s Nest just had to be fascinating.

Chuck took a big swig of his drink, savouring the sweet, dark German beer, and smiled in anticipation. 

by Paul Murgatroyd