ENTRANCE TO DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP

I started my visit to Dachau Concentration Camp by walking there from Dachau railway station. This walk takes some time, but for me it seemed like the only proper way to start the visit. By trying to follow the same path which so many prisoners have been walking before entering the Dachau Concentration Camp and by trying to imagine what has been going in their mind during that walk. And by trying to think how locals, people living in Dachau, have thought and are thinking today about the camp. They must have been aware of the horrible things happening behind the gates of the camp. How did that feel like? To know that just few hundred meters from your home, people are punished just because they are not like you? People who have not done anything wrong, they are just punished from being born and being different? How many of them have disapproved those actions in their minds? But by shutting their eyes and continuing their life normally they have still silently approved those actions?

Entrance to camp itself is via gate where reads the Nazi motto Arbeit Macht Frei. In early years of Dachau Concentration Camp the things were different. Unlike in later established concentration camps, entering to camp through these gates didn’t mean that you are never exiting the camp. In early years this was really a prison - prisoners were exiting the camp when it was seen that they have paid their penalty. But things changed also here when the WWII started and less and less prisoners were exiting the camp. Or if they were, they were doing it only because they were transferred to work into one of the many subcamps of Dachau. 

Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes You Free. This text was stolen from the gate of Dachau in November 2014