On Friday, we went to the Dachau Memorial. I was pretty excited for this site because my great grandmother was in a concentration camp with her brother & his wife during the time Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union. They got out & moved to England where she eventually met my great grandfather. She never really talked about it but I remember my mom telling me about it & basically not to bring it up. I was very curious to see something related to how she would have lived during that time & what she had to go through because I could never ask her.
I like that our tour guide was honest with us that basically parts of Dachau were just propaganda. I had never thought of those parts as that so it was very enlightening.
It was very interesting to me that German students have to visit the memorial. After our tour guide told us this you understood why some kids were just not paying attention to their guide or being rudish; they were forced to be there. Also, when our tour guide told us that some students don't see it as "that bad," because they have the radiators in the prisons I was appalled. What the victims had to go through was horrible & for them to brush it off bothered me.
What I didn't expect was to feel like they were toning it down. I've been to the Holocaust Musuem in Washington D.C before & it's really in your face with sadness and it's really traumatic. Plus they really focus on the most horrible parts of the history opposed to how I felt at Dachau. It was still saddening & eye opening but I felt like it wasn't horrible or traumatic; they just tell you the simple history. Not saying that the history itself isn't tragic & horrible but they just didn't play solely on that. I don't know if it's because it's simply a memorial or if it's because we're in Germany, and they don't want to delve too deep into how horrible it was.
Overall, it was a great experience & it was interesting to see the history of Dachau even though it was not what I expected.
I have also been to the Holocaust museum and I was expecting Dachau to be more traumatic. I think that I expected the concentration camp to be in the same condition as it was when it was liberated, not that it would have been used for different purposes throughout the years and that some people would want the structures to be torn down.
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