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 204th
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.”
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| Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D./Global Photo Archive/Wikimedia Commons |
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.
