The black spot

This all happened before I was an unwitting street performer, and before my adventures with prostitutes.

A lot of people who are more talented than I am have described what it means to walk on the ground where terrible things happened, and I know now that they too found words to be too clumsy a thing to express the meaning and movement of the whispers you hear. At the risk of digression, I suppose in a sense that proves the value of experiencing your own life. Ultimately, no one, no matter how eloquent, or empathetic can ever properly and wholly explain to you what it means to feel something.

Dachau is a twenty minute train ride from Munich hbf. These days it looks like a military barracks, the grass is green and well tended, in the front a flag pole stands proud and unaware the dark history over which it stands vigil. In America and almost every other place the children are taught about the Holocaust, and they are taught about Hitler, and the numbers are enormous and they seem not real. I grew up in an age of hyperbole, of fantastic action movies where an enormous body count was part of the drama and skillfully severed from the actual meaning of a life ended, who is hurts, how it affects the world; except for the parts designed to make you feel them. To me WWII was this great battle of good and evil, and good won, and so it was okay. Like an action movie, the enormous numbers of dead were like a plot device to make the enemy darker, and more redoubtable. The Holocaust was a giant statistic, some disturbing photos of piles of dead in black and white, gaunt faces and ribcages, and deep sunken eyes that stared into the very face of a monster. Images that were only slightly more real than the films I grew up on, and thusly I was insulated by all that damage and pain. I was outraged, but only because I was told I ought to be. I didn't understand.

I believe in the power of the energy of emotion. I think if enough bad things happen someplace, those things change the place. There is no sound at Dachau, I didn't hear any birds, or the natural ambient sound of the world happening around. There were just soft steps and softer words. Tour guides would speak the loudest in respectful tones. We were led to where the roll was called every morning, the barracks, the gs house, and the oven. Even typing it now makes me shudder. When you stand in front of the yawning portal where so many screaming people were shoved in terror. I imagined myself in there, or someone I love, or anyone, and I started to cry. I felt a thimble full of the rage that causes the Israeli government to chase the last of the SS to the ends of the Earth where they are in repose in filthy apartments, or retirement homes, pretending it never happened. How could anyone throw anyone to be immolated, to be cremated alive? How can you die that way in any dignity, stripped of your family and possessions and worked until your very body betrays you and you are thrown into the fire?

Imagine the smell. There is a film they show of the people who survived and the piles of people who did not. It is something you cannot unsee. Even when you turn away, and everyone turns away.

Dachau is green like a park, and I salute the people of Germany for maintaining their shame. Keeping it as a reminder what it means to fall into the darkness of not questioning what you are told. By doing horrible things in the name of self preservation. If one SS had said enough, he was next in the fire, and I am sure it happened. But if all the SS had done it... They couldn't have all been evil, bad people, could they? They too were dehumanized, but they did ultimately have the choice. What would you or I do to survive? Would you leave your wife a widow, your children orphans, and your parents bereaved to do the right thing? How many other doomed lives would you personally destroy to save your own? Would you escape and leave the ones you loved behind to be gassed and shot and burned and starved? When the forces of evil have truly taken us there is pain and loss in all directions. When the darkness is complete, you can't see where to run to the light. Dachau is one of the places in the world that was plunged to the sightless depths, and the shadow will never quite be off of it.

Being there, or any concentration camp, you can feel it and it works its way into your bones and eyes and you never forget. You can't forget, nor should you ever ever forget. It can still happen, and it still does happen, people are rounded up and tortured and shot. It made me thankful for what I have, and why should I be so lucky? It made me angry, that we have as a race abided such actions and still do. The only thing that keeps us from slipping into barbarism is ourselves.

I quietly wept there, and said a small prayer for the dead though I cannot recall the last time I ever prayed. I was so far away from all of you who care about me, and I had to make do without the comfort of being close to the people I love. It was the time in my trip so far that I missed my home the most.