Placing a foot on the old confines of the Dachau concentration camp is like stepping through a portal to a time 80 years ago when the demons of Hell unleashed their fury and hatred on the Jewish race in this monstrous manmade construct of unbridled horrors. The specters of death left their mark there, and the haunts of the extermination camp can be felt as one makes their way onto the bedeviled grounds.
The senses get mixed signals, and the imagination of the visitor goes wild with the sights and sounds of the camp, plus the accompanying flashbacks of the atrocities committed here as previously viewed from the old footage of films and documentaries that detailed the cruelty and barbarism that ensued within this place and others like it.
Suddenly, a closing gate behind as one walks onto the property sounds like a heavy metal barrier slamming shut to lock one into this hellhole, with no chance of escape. Footsteps across the gravel of the grounds call to mind the sounds of jackboot heels forcefully hitting the surface, as depicted in those movies about the Holocaust. A nearby train whistle harkens back to the ghastly images of another load of the death-sentenced Jews arriving at their final destination of Hitler’s hellish Final Solution of the Chosen People.
Walking deeper into Dachau, a sense of foreboding is very apparent. A death shroud still looms over the encampment. It is an assault on one’s emotions when looking around and viewing where the old wooden barracks once stood and then off in the distance to see where the gas chambers and the ovens were located. Who needs a haunted mansion when places like this are available for touring?
The documented images of the horrors that took place in these death camps come flooding back, and it hits you that this is where those diabolical acts were carried out. How much suffering was inflicted here? How many souls were destroyed and haunt this camp?
One’s mind is overwhelmed with dread and incredulity as you tour further. Two barracks were re-erected at the very beginning of the open area where the former barracks once stood. It allows one to walk through them and to get a feeling for how the doomed Jews attempted to survive before their appointed time came to head to the gas chambers and ovens, led by their maniacal Jew-hating camp administrators.
There was no such thing as a “green mile” present between these barracks and the ovens, just a grey, somber death march a few hundred yards long to an area where they could already see the furnaces belching out the ashes of their former barrack’s mates.
The senses get mixed signals, and the imagination of the visitor goes wild with the sights and sounds of the camp, plus the accompanying flashbacks of the atrocities committed here as previously viewed from the old footage of films and documentaries that detailed the cruelty and barbarism that ensued within this place and others like it.
Suddenly, a closing gate behind as one walks onto the property sounds like a heavy metal barrier slamming shut to lock one into this hellhole, with no chance of escape. Footsteps across the gravel of the grounds call to mind the sounds of jackboot heels forcefully hitting the surface, as depicted in those movies about the Holocaust. A nearby train whistle harkens back to the ghastly images of another load of the death-sentenced Jews arriving at their final destination of Hitler’s hellish Final Solution of the Chosen People.
Walking deeper into Dachau, a sense of foreboding is very apparent. A death shroud still looms over the encampment. It is an assault on one’s emotions when looking around and viewing where the old wooden barracks once stood and then off in the distance to see where the gas chambers and the ovens were located. Who needs a haunted mansion when places like this are available for touring?
The documented images of the horrors that took place in these death camps come flooding back, and it hits you that this is where those diabolical acts were carried out. How much suffering was inflicted here? How many souls were destroyed and haunt this camp?
One’s mind is overwhelmed with dread and incredulity as you tour further. Two barracks were re-erected at the very beginning of the open area where the former barracks once stood. It allows one to walk through them and to get a feeling for how the doomed Jews attempted to survive before their appointed time came to head to the gas chambers and ovens, led by their maniacal Jew-hating camp administrators.
There was no such thing as a “green mile” present between these barracks and the ovens, just a grey, somber death march a few hundred yards long to an area where they could already see the furnaces belching out the ashes of their former barrack’s mates.
