Black Heart

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On a bitterly cold Friday morning in the Autumn of 1977, following a long overnight train ride from Naples, Italy, I stood at the main entrance of Dachau. In this camp, starvation, human experiments, torture, and death stood looming unmercifully as the order of the day.

The immaculate condition of the grounds immediately caught my attention, not so much as a cigarette butt or a rock out of place. Beautifully manicured grass skirting clean, concrete sidewalks. Carefully raked soil gave way to bright, colorful gardens.

A sharp contrast, I thought, from old photographs I had seen of tall wooden fences with the panels each flush against the other so a passerby would not have a view inside, nor could one view the prison from a distance, and nothing but dirt and mud for ground, pictures, I recall, that uncovered “the living dead,” emaciated corpses stacked here, stack there; surviving skeletons too weak to eat, standing knee deep in bodies.

A tall chain-linked fence now skirted the massive compound, then a gap, and yet another tall chain-linked fence, both topped with razor-sharp concertina wire. Powerfully built, wooden lookout towers equipped with giant searchlights and decks that traversed all four sides stood spaced at calculated intervals around the perimeter.

Inside, the compound’s layout resembled a small modern-day military camp, with row upon row of wooden barracks, each precisely aligned. Nothing was intriguing at the sight of these barracks; the significance lay inside, where prisoners were forced to lie on shelves that passed as beds, with no mattresses of any sort, no pillows, only hard wooden planks.

Each space was body-length deep, ten to twelve feet across, and three feet high, so if you were to walk through, you would only see heads facing the isles. Prisoners were stacked side by side, one atop the other, until every cubic inch of the small space was taken up by flesh, making breathing nearly impossible.

So tightly were they packed that moving a hand or foot for a bit of comfort resulted only in the discomfort of another. Forced to lie in their feces for days and weeks, thousands died of disease, starvation, or suffocation, and even then, others were frequently forced to lie among the dead, rotting corpses until the SS had their fill of the stench.

Only then were they removed to the crematoria for burning. My skin crawled at the thought of the sights and smells that must have lingered within these barracks walls, the endless pain, and suffering that only those who survived could define.

I also thought this could have been a haven for the prisoners, where at least they could die together, spared a more brutal death.

A beautiful architectural, brick headquarters building at one end of the compound stood centered overlooking the barracks, which housed the SS and other privileged  persons owing allegiance to the “Supreme Race.”  The building is now a museum representing the atrocities of the Holocaust, specifically, the atrocities of Dachau.

Upon entering, I noticed locked doors and barred corridors denying stray access throughout most of the building. I was taken aback by the endless array of photographs, torture devices, diaries, and written accounts displayed for the world.

Doctor Schilling infected eleven hundred prisoners with malaria to observe malarial behavior and to try out cures. Doctor Rascher used prisoner “guinea pigs” in experiments to find out what happens to pilots who lose cabin pressure and oxygen at high altitudes. Rascher also conducted other experiments to find out how to warm up pilots shot down over the ocean and exposed to near-freezing water temperatures to determine the physical effects of drinking seawater.

In all cases, the experiments led to death or horrible pain for those involved. My heart sank to my feet as I stood fixed on a display table showing shrunken heads, lampshades, and other tattooed human skin items and preserved organs collected by the SS. I was repulsed and embarrassed; why hadn’t we prevented this?

Looking out across the compound from the top steps of the headquarters building, I spotted towering, factory-like brick smokestacks rising from a wooded area beyond the perimeter. A closer look revealed a place where pain, suffering, horror, and finally, peace culminated as one, the crematoria.

The small wooden structures weren’t much to look at. They were quaint, much like a small hunting cabin. Entering, I saw the ovens. They reminded me of the many bread ovens I had seen throughout Italy, except these weren’t dome-shaped; they were heavy-brick, iron-reinforced, and linear with heavy iron doors. Large black body racks on rollers slid easily in and out of these body furnaces.

Directly overhead, tightly wrapped around massive wooden beams, which made up the internal structure of the sheds, hung nooses. Some prisoners were hung first, given the opportunity to die of strangulation, before being tossed onto a rack and rolled into the oven for burning.

Thousands were burned alive.

Off to one side, a doorway led into a small, tightly sealed bathhouse that resembled a small community shower in a hometown locker room. There was no water here, only death. Soldiers on top of the building would pull the plug and drop gas pellets into a pipe which quickly filtered into the room from the shower heads. Within minutes, all were dead, ready for the ovens.

A tear came to my eye thinking of the men, women, children, and babies, standing naked; hugging, crying, anticipating; no God, no country; stripped of all identity, who with all of their being, though aware of the terrifying rumors, never fathomed they were being herded into these showers for anything other than to be cleansed with water and clung to the one final human right they had – a shred of hope that water would pour.

Back outside, I inspected a wall riddled with bullet holes and faint shades of blood that had never washed away. I thought of the multitudes of people who knew what fate awaited them inside and chose instead to run for the wall and be shot in the back rather than hanged, gassed, and burned.

I will never forget the words of one liberator, Bill Allison, 14th Armored Division, United States Army; he said, “the first thing I saw was a stack of bodies that appeared to be about, oh, as high as a man could reach, that looked like cordwood stacked up there, and the thing I’ll never forget was that closer inspection found people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four deep inside the stack.”

Some limit had been reached. Nothing I have seen cut me so deeply, sharply. I can find no words to express the whole meaning of the events of Dachau. Instead, I offer this story as a remembrance of the dead and those who survived. No one of us had looked on this until it was too late.

Walking out of the main entrance, I turned for one last look. Standing there, I felt a humble measure of pride in knowing that American service members were the driving force behind the liberation of this camp during the Spring of 1945. The thought of the sheer, uncontrollable surge of emotions the tortured prisoners surely felt when one morning, just before sunrise, the first American tank stood at the gates of Dachau.

We had finally come face to face with the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. We had penetrated at last to the center of the Black Heart.

Contributed by Anonymous