We go inside the building and take a self guided tour of the tiny place, find a bulletin board for the ward, and it's all written in English. Hmm, again.
We go into the chapel, people greet us, and congratulate us on finding the international (English) ward. Haha, wasn't our intention, but I did understand the entire meeting. The bishop was even Asian, I felt right at home. After Sacrament meeting Dad offered to go ask a super tall dude sitting by himself if he was single. I declined. Good grief, I think that's taking long distance relationship a little too far, no thanks.
After church we went to Dachau Concentration Camp. I knew it would be sobering, and cause for reflection, and seemed appropriate for the Sabbath. We went from hallowed ground at church, to ground hallowed by human suffering. A notable "coincidence" occurred with the weather - it was supposed to rain the whole time I was in Germany. It didn't. The only rain we encountered was while at Dachau, and it only contributed to the misery, and authenticity, of the experience.
We got there and went straight into a short movie, as the English showing had just started. Interesting to learn the history of this camp, and haunting to see the images. Apparently the German people living in the surrounding area had no idea what was going on there. And when the allied troops liberated it, they forced the locals to come witness the piles of skeletal bodies, and even took wagon loads of them through the streets.It was a lot to take in. The misery, the suffering, the barbed wire cage. The idea that if they went near the fence they would be instantly shot, and honestly, I wondered why they didn't all take that road out, and immediately end their suffering.
I held my emotions in check until we came to a room next to the crematorium. It was a room that had been shown in the video - piled high with bodies. It was the room where the soldiers paraded the locals through to see those lifeless forms. And as I stood in that now empty room, I saw in my minds eye that skeletal pile.And I cried.
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| Plaque on wall in room |
I've never had a fear of death.
There's no place I love more than my own home, and my own bed - I'm not a big traveler. And in the eternal scheme of things I kind of look at mortality as a trip. At the end of it, when I've gone through deaths door, I get to go home. I look forward to the finish line. I think I've always been a bit homesick for heaven.
It's life I fear.
The pain and suffering and humiliation and maiming of mortality. And I pondered as I walked the paths of Dachau, had I been a prisoner in such a camp, would I have had the will to endure each day? I am stubborn, and a fighter, and I do not quit. But I don't think I totally comprehend how precious life is, that they would endure so much to keep it. Why?...
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| The remaining foundations of the buildings - and the paths |
I know that suffering is a big, and necessary part of the mortal experience.
Elder Orson F. Whitney said, "No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.”
I was also reminded of the sufferings of the Mormon handcart companies, and the quote from Francis Webster, given when a group of people were criticizing the venture:
"We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of
exposure and starvation, but did you ever hear a survivor of that
company utter a word of criticism? Every one of us came through with the
absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with Him in
our extremities!
"I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and I have said, I can go only that far and there I must give up for I cannot pull the load through it. I have gone to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me! I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart, but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the Angels of God were there.
"Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No! Neither then
nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted
with God was a privilege to pay and I am thankful that I was privileged
to come in the Martin Handcart Company."
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| "Labor makes you free" |
As I pondered the place and the prisoners of Dachau, I knew that I was on sacred ground. Walked not only by the sufferers, but by the angels who bore the innocents up in their suffering, and I could imagine possibly by even the Lord Himself. And I knew that those who did succumb to death were instantly encircled in the arms of the Lord that they knew so well, as they had become acquainted with Him through their suffering. The Atonement is infinite, and eternal. All the suffering of all the children of God in all ages and times combined, "The Son of Man hath descended below them all."
(Doctrine & Covenants 122:8)
(Doctrine & Covenants 122:8)
In the end, I'm glad I went to visit Dachau. Grateful for the thoughts and emotions I experienced there. I still ponder the will to live exhibited by those extreme sufferers. And how precious the gift that life is. And how much I am truly blessed.
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| Beauty of the place in contrast to the horror |
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| Where cremated ashes stored |
When I got home I happened to see an episode of the Twilight Zone about a guard at Dachau returning to the camp after the war and being driven mad by the ghosts of his deeds. Since I'd been there I knew the set of the camp wasn't at all like the real place, but I'm not sure how much access they would have had in 1961 to authenticate it. The last part of the episode I'd like to share:
Twilight Zone Episode: "Deaths-Head Revisited"
"Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"
Rod Serling's closing monologue: "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's earth."
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| Haunting sculptural memorial in the courtyard |
The plaque that stands now as you walk into Dachau states:
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