Dachau

His name was Norton. He was one of those oddballs that one is kind to, the way one is kind to stray dogs and pushy children, because the world is better for a little kindness. We’d been sent on a couple of assignments together, so hanging out in Heidelberg or Mönchengladbach or pulling 12-hour shifts during a training exercise counted as a sort of bond.

During the last few months of my assigned time at the 204^th MI BN in Augsburg, my husband had already moved back to the states with the dogs, I was staying in a friend’s apartment, and my free time hung heavily on my hands. So when Norton said “you should see Dachau before you leave” I agreed to a Friday excursion with him.

“You’re going to Dachau?” asked Tom, the blond Midwesterner on my team. “You know, the Holocaust is a lie. They hide the truth, but that gas chamber at Dachau was never even used.”

Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D./Global Photo Archive/Wikimedia Commons

“Tom, go fuck yourself with a cactus,” I replied.

I’ve never let professionalism get in the way.

Usually I remember things very clearly, like photographs or video in my head, but there is much about that day that has disappeared into the fog of time. I think Norton drove. I may have already shipped my car back to the states by then. I remember reading a lot of plaques in German. I remember a stark metal sculpture like black ink against the gray sky. I remember thinking how odd it was to see cheerful little beds of flowers planted over the ashes of the bodies that had been dumped on the ground. I remember the gas chamber with its sign clearly stating that it had never been used. I remember the row of ovens, heavy gray metal canisters of death, doors open so that visitors could not pretend not to see and understand.

It was a drizzly chill day, as it often is in Germany. But one gets used to the weather, dresses for it, disregards it. The cold seeping into my bones as I stood in that place had nothing to do with the weather. Grief and sympathy for the suffering and despair, but over that, the heavy awareness of the evil that caused the suffering and the knowledge of how many, like my overfed colleague Tom, would, in spite of all the lessons of history, gladly enable or even perpetuate such evil if given the chance, while steadfastly insisting that evil doesn’t exist at all.

There’s not much to do at Dachau. One walks, reads, looks, thinks, stands there in the rain feeling like there should be a thing to do. You are helpless to change the past. You are so immersed in the present that you cannot even see it. So you say “never again” as one does, without quite knowing what that commitment means.

By silent consensus we decided it was time to leave. We walked back to Norton’s car, unlocked the doors, got in. He started it up and pulled out of the parking lot.

“So, a beer?” he asked. “I think I need a drink.”

We ended the day’s adventure at a Gasthaus, hands wrapped around glasses of Spatenbräu, nibbling at a sausage plate. This too, this Gemütlichkeit, warmth and beer and the blue and white flags of Bavaria on the walls, are part of the culture that had murdered millions of Jews and tried to violently take over the world. The waitress, sturdy in her Dirndl and practical shoes, brought us another beer. Were her parents and grandparents victims or perpetrators, resistors or enablers? There were no bystanders. Germans know this. The rest of the world would do well to stare into the open door of the oven and learn that lesson too.

Not a Patriot

There’s been a bunch of really vile human beings labeling themselves as patriots lately. They’re loyal
to a country that doesn’t exist, a fascist state where men are men and women are pretty and guns and money are plentiful if you’re white and the rest of us are just targets for their lust for rapine and blood. Not a pretty place, the America of their dreams.

Whatever a patriot is, I’m clearly not one.

My ancestors sailed to this place before it was a "country." They fought in every war. They founded cities and plowed farms and built houses and branded cows and sweated and gave birth and died and were buried in graves from Yorktown to California and all points between.

At the University of Oklahoma, the son of a dustbowl rancher and the daughter of kings met and married and had me. They brought the secrets and trauma of generations to an unhappy home and eventually divorced, leaving me a latchkey child who walked home alone after school and listened to The Who and The Cars and Led Zeppelin as loud as my transistor radio would go.

I escaped into the Army where I low crawled and sweated and worked my way to a sergeant’s rank, traveling around the world and spying on the USSR in the senseless game we called the Cold War.

I raised horses and I raised children and hiked and biked and drove the roads and trails and forests and deserts of America. I slept under a sky full of shooting stars while park service mules grazed beside me. With trembling legs I stumbled over stones and boulders and sloshed through mud and manure to stand on mountains covered with spring flowers and icy cold creeks and a million black flies biting. I’ve crawled out of an frosted tent on a frozen morning to wrap numb fingers around a metal cup of steaming coffee and watch with silent awe the morning dance of deer and birds and prairie and sky.

Now in my middle years, I watch my children grown and facing an uncertain future, and I remember me at 19, full of life and power and dreams as wide and wild as a Montana morning, and I hover between tears and rage. Rage at the ever-diminishing horizon for opportunity and joy in a broken economy in a dying world. Rage at the greedy bastards who stole that from us. Rage at all the people who refused to see the obvious until it was probably too late.

And still I do my work and raise my horses and tighten my fences and plant the seeds and gather the eggs and stack the hay and force my not-quite-as powerful-as-it-used-to-be-but-still-game body onto the treadmill or rowing machine or bike and try to quiet my mind with burning lungs and sweat.

Tonight I’ll go to bed and read some silly mystery until my body finally forces my brain to sleep.

I’ll get up tomorrow to a purring lap cat. I’ll drink a steaming cup of coffee and pull on my barn coat and walk across sparkling frosty grass to the eager morning neighing of horses. The sky over the barn will be pink and lavender and full of birds.

But the joy that should be there will be flattened and forced. Because hate and greed and ignorance are winning. Because my children cannot dream and fly.

I’m an American, but I’m not a patriot. I’m just a human being. Standing here on a muddy frozen farm in Virginia.

A human being who’s forgotten how to cry.