As you approach you see the watchtowers loomb over the trees.
Through the gates you will walk. Half froze and starved. From there the hell begins.
From there you are stripped of your identity and given a patch on your clothing. Jew, Homeosexual, Communist, Traitor to the State. The Patches were your identification. They surved as a way to tell if you were an unruley inmate and as a way to degrade you.
Then it was on to your barricks. Wooden bunk beds stacked some times 4 high would hold up to 7 people per bed. No Mattress, no blanket, no pillow. Your only source of heat was the person laying next to you.
Your time here at Dachau is miserable. Barbed wire and electrical fences surround you. New prisioners are brought in everyday. Conditions worsen. The hard labor you do everyday leaves you hungry for a good meal. But you are only give enough to survive on. You start to lose weight rapidly and your body begins to look like a living skelleton. That is your pain here. You're working hard, and still cannot be free.
Everyday someone is hanging from the gallows. Everyday someone walkes into the electric fence to stop their pain. But you don't. You are determined to survive this horror.
People are whiped to death across the whipping bench. The wooden cain screams through the air and snapps across the victims flesh. The wooden bench is varnished in the blood of your people. The bitterness toward them grows stronger. But what can you do? They have the control, you cannot excape from them, so you don't even try.
This man is the leader of those who torture you. He sends orders to his minions to use the prisioners to build a crematorium. And you do.
The new Crematorium is finished. It has a gashchamber used to sanitize the blankets on this camp. Fear is rising within you. Your body is frail and everyone you had entered the camp with has died. You pray to your gods to spare you, to end the war as soon as they can so you can leave this awful place. But by the next day you're still in the camp, still living this nightmare.
The Soldiers are panicking for some reason, you don't know why. They rush many of the people you've worked with to the crematorium. So many people. Curious you follow them. Over the swiftly moving moat. Barbed wire can be seen in the bushes over the water, you know that there is more hidden under the flowing liquid. A soldier stops you at the bridge and tells you that you must go back. Without argument you turn and walk back to your barrick.
You go to bed that night and the next morning you wake up to find that they soldiers have all vanished. Tanks begin to appear. Rolling down the roads to the camp. More soldiers liberate the camp. They are Americans, Canadians, English, French, they are here to liberate us.
They secure the camp and show us what happened to our friends who crossed the bridge the day before.
The fires still burn in the stoves. Bodies hang from the little rope loops in the banisters. The bodies of our family and friends are stacked in two rooms ajasent,to the top of 11 foot celings they are piled. Rotting, waiting for burial. You come to the sick realization that you were one of the people who built this crematorium. You helped build the tool of your own destruction. It was only a manner of time before you would have walked across that bridge and been silenced forever.
From there you resovle to survive fruther. If only to pass on your story to one healthy individual who can pass it on to generations to come. Never to be forgotten.
To more plesant pictures of Germany
