Dachau

This post coincides with the observance of the annual International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust by the United Nations General Assembly, January 27.

In 1982 Linda and I toured Europe with a rental car and a tent:

We got the tent from best man, best friend, all-around good guy Gary Hobbs. The car's plate started with three letters so we called it that, Een. Ford Fiesta. This was a memorable campsite, as most campgrounds were WAY overcrowded... your neighbors' tent stakes were driven in next to your tent, and yours next to their tent. Cheek by jowl, indeed.

But, that's another blog entry. This is about our visit to the infamous concentration camp.

I knew I had an amazing slide from our tour there, and so I unearthed the slides (no small feat) and then rented a macro lens so I could produce high-quality copies of the slides. The shot above is not one of those... it's just a shot with my phone camera with a bit of editing.

Here's the setup I used to copy slides in high quality:

 

The first two shots inside Dachau sort of give a sense of the size of the grounds. It was built to house 6000 souls, and there are barracks foundations preserved which only begin to convey this scale:

As you can see there is one barracks structure standing, as well as a guardhouse and fencing. The cement fence posts in front of the guardhouse are original.

This view includes tourists to help give one, again, a sense of the size of the camp.

When it was liberated, the camp housed 30,000 prisoners.

In creating a museum of the camp, a fair amount of landscaping was done. This is one of several Menorah atop a Star of David installations, under which is a rectangular stone engraved with "Never Again" in German, English, and Yiddish. The bottom of the statue represents a headstone, to this tourist:

After being moved by this living and permanent installation, our next tourist stop was the crematoria, where thousands of innocent people were disposed of with that wicked German efficiency. 

Truly horrific.

But seeing the ovens, I had an idea for a double exposure. I had a Nikon FM camera loaded with slide film. I shot a closeup of the oven, and somehow I was able to cock the shutter without advancing the film (I don't know, today, how I did that). I then had to guess as to how to frame the second image (the Star of David and Menorah) on top of the oven. Total guesswork there, as well as relative to exposure value. But, as it turned out, total luck:

This picture haunts me to this day, juxtaposing as it does the horror and the hope, and the message:

Never Again.

 

I thought it important to lend another voice to recounting actual history, given the darkness creeping into our current political reality.

There is a pretty good website which reveals much of the history and the horror of Dachau.

Full disclosure, my high school senior play was Diary of Anne Frank, and I was the sound guy for the production. I have a pretty high emotional connection to that work, and to this post.

I reached out to our local synagogue, Shaarey Zedek, to see if there was any interest in this (these) photo (s), and they referred me to the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, MI. I subsequently have sent that facility copies of these slides, and await word on how or whether they might make use of them.

Since these are high-quality digital renderings, they can be significantly enlarged with little loss of quality. We shall see what they say.