Sanitized

One day, we left the palace for a trip.  We went to the Dachau Concentration Camp.  It had not been a death camp as had Aushwitz but a work camp, though tens of thousands died there from overwork, starvation, and neglect.  It would not be a fun day.

But Dachau was not horrible enough.  It is a museum, a monument containing monuments.  It has been "Disneyfied," if you will.  The grass and the trees and the pathways are well-kempt.  There is one row of dorms that is clean and bare.  The tables are handmade, now antiques that look terribly appealing as do the tin plates.  I stood there thinking of the craftsmanship that went into it all.  I thought that the items would sell well at Pottery Barn.  It just wasn't horrible enough.

Visitors should have been lined up single file and made to walk without talking.  There needed to be some humiliation.  I know, I know. . . but the horror is not there.

At the end, we all sat in a nice hall and watched the archival film footage of the camps, but it was not as much as the miles of footage we were shown in school as kids when I was growing up, not nearly as graphic or horrible.

The German people are ashamed, of course, of this period in their cultural history, and they do not want to make it worse but merely to acknowledge it and its horror.

As I sat on the bench watching the films there in the dark, it occurred to me how much this event shaped the generation of baby-boomers who came along after the war.  We were liberators, they told us, and this would never be allowed to happen again.  This was the result of abusive authority, the tyranny of dictators and of regimes that required compliance and uniformity.  The school systems drilled into us the need for individuality and tolerance and rebellion against all forms of enslavement.  Prisoners were dressed in uniforms, their heads shaved, their freedoms taken.

And so we became what they made of us.

Dachau should have been worse.  It was far too sanitized.  There were still fences and barbed wire, but most corporations in the U.S. have that.