A concentration camp should appear like a concentration camp if we wish to honor the memory of Holocaust survivors. It should not appear like any other museum.
By Rachel Avraham
From 1933 up until the conclusion of the Second World War, at least 32,000 people were murdered in the Dachau Death Camp. Dachau was one of the first concentration camps established by Nazi Germany and it was the longest-lasting one. Built on the site of a former WWI munitions factory, the death camp was originally intended as a place to imprison Hitler’s political opponents. However, after Kristallnacht, many Jews were imprisoned and murdered there as well.
Last Wednesday, as a Jewish Israeli, I visited the Dachau Death Camp and was surprised to discover that very little remains of what used to be the Dachau Death Camp. Today, the Dachau Death Camp appears more like Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum rather than a death camp. At the visitor center, one can dine on fine German cuisine in the museum cafeteria and visit a gift shop, just like one could at any other museum, as if the place were never a death camp.
For me, this was a grave shock. Although I am only 39 years old and was thus not alive at the time of the Holocaust, I grew up very fond of my Hebrew teacher, Annia Segal, who was born in Poland when it was being divided by the Nazis and the Soviets. Almost all of her family were murdered in the Holocaust, while just her immediate family was able to survive by living in Stalin’s Gulags, first in Siberia and then the Russian Middle East. I also studied math with a Holocaust survivor, Marion Wolfe, who fled Nazi Germany and wrote a memoir titled “The Shrinking Circle.”
Thus, when I visit a place like Dachau I think immediately about them and do not really have the appetite to eat anything at all, and especially not a German feast. Moreover, coming from Israel, I would rather purchase Judaica items from the Jewish Museum in Munich than a death camp. After all, I do not want to tell my kids that mommy bought them a souvenir from the Dachau Death Camp. It just does not sound right in my stomach. However, in our times, I saw people joking and dining in the Dachau Death Camp cafeteria, while buying souvenirs from there, as if it was a normal museum.
While I understand that all museums have to make money somehow, selling Judaica items in Dachau just does not seem right. In my view, they should only sell books about the Holocaust and nothing else, for joyful Judaica items do not belong to a place like Dachau. Furthermore, I found it hilarious that they sold books in Yiddish about the Holocaust, but nothing in Hebrew, even though more Jews speak Hebrew today than Yiddish.
After one exits the visitor center and enters the actual Dachau Concentration Camp, one will be surprised to discover that nothing appears like it did during the reign of Hitler. They planted beautiful trees and flowers to sanitize the place. Aside from that, in the model death camp bunker, nothing is left except for bunk beds, toilettes and a wash area, with explanations. This was not the case in Terezin, which I also visited. In Terezin, the Czechs placed model people, belongings and other stuff, which helped to bring the death camp experience alive for visitors. None of that existed in Dachau. And even in the crematorium, nothing is left but the ovens used to burn the bodies. They did not even leave the showers in place to show people. And of course, the rest of the camp is just a museum with numerous presentations and explanations, like in Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum. Again, it does not look like a death camp and thus it sanitizes the cruelty of what happened to the prisoners of the death camp during the Holocaust.
And if all of that were not problematic enough from an Israeli perspective, the memorial at the Dachau Death Camp refuses to recognize homosexual victims of the Nazis in their memorial and it was not until 2003 that Germany recognized that the homosexual victims of Nazism deserved compensation. This is really horrific, given that we are living in the new millennium, in an era when promoting gay rights is something viewed to be important. And as if that were not bad enough, the Germans built two churches at the sight of the Dachau Death Camp so that people can pray over the souls of the Christian victims of the death camp, but no synagogue so that the Jewish people can do likewise. The excuse given by the tour guide of the museum was that there are not enough Jews in Dachau today to hold a minyan, but given that a synagogue exists in Terezin, where there is also no minyan, I find that to be a poor excuse to have only a memorial for Jewish victims but no synagogue.
I believe that how the Germans built the Dachau Death Camp Memorial Museum is indicative of a larger trend within German society, where people prefer to bury and not think about the Nazi past rather than raise awareness about it. Even Greta, our lovely English speaking tour guide at the Dachau Death Camp Museum, told us that she is afraid to ask her grandparents what they did during World War II because she prefers to remember them as the nice people who gave her candy and toys as a child. She does not want to find out if they have a darker, more sinister side. And she is a tour guide at the Dachau Death Camp for English speakers. It is her job to share Holocaust history with us, yet she does not want to even find out her own family history related to that.
And as time passes, with more and more Holocaust survivors passing away, I fear that the full cruelty that took place during the Holocaust will just be sanitized and minimized, especially if Germans prefer to bury their history, instead of preserving it like the Czechs did in Terezin. I must emphasize that I finished my tour of Dachau feeling sick to my stomach. For me, Dachau should appear more like a death camp and not be just another Holocaust museum if we wish to honor the victims properly.
