Never Again

We spent about six hours at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial sight today. I feel like I can’t really blog about the experience. I have no words to describe what I feel, except that I don’t think I can possibly feel it as deep as it should be felt. I have no words to describe what I saw and heard and read. The Topography of Terror display in Berlin was only an introduction to what I saw at the Memorial today. I think I will be processing it all for a long time, and one feels almost guilty for simply returning to daily life after witnessing something like that. There are five memorials built there…a memorial symbolizing the path of the prisoners designed by a former inmate, a Catholic memorial for all the (primarily Polish) priests who were imprisoned and died there, a Jewish memorial for the victims of Dachau as well as the entire Holocaust, a Protestant memorial church, a Carmelite convent just behind the grounds of the camp with a memorial chapel, and a Russian Orthodox chapel. There was an English Bible open in the Protestant chapel, and I opened it to Psalm 22, a psalm prophesying what Jesus would suffer, and I was especially struck by Psalm 22:24: “For He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” We took the train ride back to Munich largely in silence.
I think we were both eager for a healing walk in a park, so we took the U-Bahn (part of Munich’s mass transit) to a plaza on the other side of downtown and wandered through the Royal Gardens and into the English Garden, which is larger than Central Park! We had met a very nice man from Munich at the train station in Wittenburg who told us we needed to eat at a Biergarten in the park there, so we made our way to the German beer garden, next to the Chinese pagoda, in the English Garden. :) It was such a contrasting ending to our sober day, to sit at that table and watch the increasingly boisterous groups of men engaging in drinking song contests! The parks were both so beautiful and we felt refreshed after having walked through flowers, fountains and flowing rivers!
I now have 3 blog entries backed up on my Word Processor. We need to find an internet café with wireless! It’s raining pretty hard outside as I type this…glad it held off all day. It was even sunny this morning.