Janessa Bjornstad
The scene was like the feeling of devastation at Ground Zero after 9/11. The solemn silence was like the giving of respect at a funeral. The emotion was like the saddening tears of a mother losing her child. This was the experience I had at the Jewish concentration camp in
Moments before I entered the gate into the concentration camp, I saw the words Arbeit Dacht Frei staring at me. These German words translate into “Work makes (one) free.” This phrase represents the infamous worldview of Nazi Germany during World War II. As I entered the gate, before me laid rows of barracks with watch towers connected to a brick wall enclosing the barracks. The brick wall surrounding the whole camp was around 20 feet high with barbed wire fastened at the top. I realized that this is where over 40,000 Jewish men, women, and children had died. I was walking on the same ground where these innocent lives were taken.
I soon glanced over at one of the many watch towers at the camp, and I imagined seeing a Nazi soldier standing guard with his rifle on his shoulder, waiting to catch an escapee or to punish a prisoner making a mistake in his assigned task.
As I gazed over the two long rows of what were once barracks, I imagined what the barracks would have looked like if I were visiting the camp in 1945. A scene of old, grey brick buildings with barred windows was before me. I envisioned skinny, unhealthy men, women, and children standing outside the barracks looking at me with pleading, hurting eyes that cried out for mercy from the endless cruelty being forced upon them. I felt so hopeless, knowing that I could do nothing to help them.
Now, as I entered one of the barracks, I saw stacks of wooden bunk beds that certainly would not hold every prisoner that lived in the camp. The floor was dirty, and the beds looked as if they were made out of thin boards that were barely held together by a few rusty nails.
I left the barracks and soon entered a brick building with few windows. As I stepped inside, I walked down a hallway and entered a room that looked as if it were a shower room. But I realized that what I thought were sprinklers in the ceiling were really gas filters. This room was disguised as the shower house, but it really was a gas chamber where many men, women, and children were deceived into their death.
As I walked further into the brick building, I stepped into a large room that I thought was a kitchen because of the three large brick stoves. But as I continued walking in farther, I saw that these weren’t the ovens for cooking food, but for cremating prisoners who had died. I saw a small hole used as an opening in front of the stove with a wooden, cloth stretcher lying underneath the hole. Then, I noticed the three large brick chimneys connected to the top of each stove, stretching to the ceiling of the room. I glanced over to observe the reactions of my other tour members, and to describe it in one word –we were speechless.
I cannot even begin to explain how I felt as I walked through the concentration camp. Just to think of what took place there was more than I could fathom. My stomach was tied in one jumbled knot, and my sadness turned into anger. How could Hitler – one man – demand such cruelty? And how could so many Nazi soldiers just watch innocent people suffer, not feeling one bit of guiltiness or remorse? The concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, will always be embedded in my mind as a place where innocent people suffered. This suffering did not exemplify the Nazi party’s motto of Arbeit Dacht Frei (“Work makes one free). The prisoners’ work at the concentration camp really did not make them free, but resulted in them losing their lives. Arbeit Dacht Frei is a phrase that will always remind me of the Nazi’s deceitful way of leading their prisoners to their deaths.
