A/N: Typing this from a hotel in Vienna with absolutely atrocious Wifi, and it’s going much slower than usual. Apologies in advance for any typos and/or grammatical errors!

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine visited Auschwitz. I asked him how it was, and he described it with a short phrase: “It was weird.”
Confused at his choice of words in the moment but not wanting to push the issue, I let it go, and our conversation continued onto other matters.

After visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp just outside Munich, Germany, I can fully understand what he meant.

Walking through Dachau felt…weird.

Let me explain.

For people who do not know the history of Dachau, it was the first Nazi concentration camp, constructed in 1933 as a camp for political prisoners. Over the next twelve years, the camp’s prisoners extended to Jews, criminals, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and prisoners of war. Dachau also was the last to be liberated, on April 29, 1945.

Being a history major, I have read extensively on the history of World War II, Nazi Germany, and concentration camps. During my sophomore year at Case, I wrote a historiographic essay (A/N: not a spelling error, this is actually a thing) on the use of medical torture in concentration camps (Easily one of the most interesting yet stomach-turning papers I’ve ever had to do research for).

Reading words, however, can only do so much. History demands to be felt.

Walking into Dachau, it’s mostly barren and quite stark, as a majority of the buildings have been torn down, with the few buildings remaining primarily being exact replicas. There were seven imposing watchtowers on the outskirts of the camp (all replicas – the originals were torn down by the Americans upon liberation). A giant ditch, barbed wire, and a 10,000 volt electrified fence dashed any hopes of escape for the 188,000 inmates that ended up in Dachau. The barrack we walked through was a good ten degrees colder than it was outside, and the rooms were claustrophobically small. We walked through Baracke X – the gas chamber, or “shower room,” as it was meant to be called – but it was never used, and to this day, historians are not sure why.

Dachau was a site of terror and brutality. Prisoners lived in constant fear of being flogged, tortured through tree and/or pole hanging, or being shoved into standing cells for days. Diseases spread like wildfire throughout the camps, especially typhus. There was barely any food or medicine, especially towards the end of the war.

I knew all of this before I visited the camp, but walking through the camp was a completely different experience from what I was expecting. In the moment, it was kind of hard to be standing in these rooms, knowing that I felt completely safe here today, while a little over seventy years ago, these rooms were filled with horror, torture, and death for hundreds of thousands of people.

A lot of people ask me why I study history, often joking that I’m “studying unemployment.” I typically laugh it off, and most of the time I respond by saying that I wanted to study something that I thoroughly enjoyed, but my real reason is so much more complex than that. My real reason can be summarized by a simple quote: one of my favorites, by George Santayana:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(Interestingly enough, this quote is inscribed on a plaque in Auschwitz. I should ask my friend if he saw it. Or, if he reads this, which he hopefully will, he can just tell me for himself).

This quote – and the idea of remembering the past – obviously does not apply just to historians or historians-in-training like myself. It is the job of my generation as a whole to learn from the past, to learn from the mistakes that the generations before us made, and ensure that we do not repeat any prior evils.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I study history.

With love,
Tasha

PS: Look out for a blog post on my trip to Austria later this week!