I've actually been to Germany. I've seen the physical places of death and demise...not the camps themselves, but the happy still-cheery, still-pretty places where those who did the Devil's work enjoyed breakfast, kissed the children good morning, and made the daily commute out to the factory where death was manufactured in the most ghastly growth industry ever devised.
My brush with the robe of Death: Dachau in Bavaria, and Arweiler in the Rheingebiet.
These stories are not the usual accounting. I go a different way than most. I am, as ever, fascinated with the question of what in the name of all that's holy were the Germans thinking, as they watched monsters do monster's work in their name?
I used to think they were stunned into impotence. Now I think it truly snuck up on them, the death (of the soul) of a thousand cuts. By the time the Holocaust was in full bloom, it was...just the way things were. It was...normal.
Then they woke to the sound of bombs, and the drumbeat of utter physical and moral defeat.
Dachau
During my sojourn in Germany, I spent quite some time in Bavaria training and running in road races. In the summer there was a 10K in the town of Dachau, yes that Dachau, in the suburban band west of Munich, and northwest of Pasing (where you'll have to change trains, I think, else you'll wind up in Germering before you can hop off and change trains for the ride back.)
I can assure you, there is a Dachau, there is a concentration camp, and a steady flow of tourists who make the trip. Happily for most current denizens of Dachau, the camp's on the other side of the train tracks from where most of them live.
I came to Dachau to run, so once I left the train, I had an hour to get to the Sportverein and register. I needed to warm up, so I started running...which is good, on account it was considerably farther to the starting line than I first envisaged.
While plodding along, I was struck by how unusually similar the particular section of Dachau was to an American neighborhood, far more so than I'd seen anywhere else in Germany. Large front lawns, large houses, driveways, lots of big hardwood trees. None of the usual apartment towers that dot even the small towns of Germany. Some smaller cottages, with small walled-in gardens, to the south of the town, toward the ubiquitous fields that fill much of Bavaria. All told it was very beautiful...with things that can be landscaped and purchased.
In all fairness, I never spoke much with anyone from Dachau, save in the context of registering to race and getting some well-deserved water afterwards. And those residents with whom I'd like to have spoken were either dead or highly unlikely to schedule a meeting for other reasons.
What really caught me was the eerie sense that the town looked a lot like this back in the 1940s. I found myself wondering how many of the homes were in use back then, middle managers from the factory across the train tracks, among them a man who would put on a suit, collect up his briefcase, kiss the wife and kids on the cheek, and walk off to earn a hard day's pay, to the adoring waves of his family. Perhaps some of the women worked as secretaries, doing the paperwork of evil, typing the request forms and
registering the production quota for the day, then sending the post via train or military courier to Berlin.
An entire economy, a lucrative one at that, with shops and cafes and schools and the occasional festival and the weekly market, all built around a most peculiar cottage industry -- one dedicating to emptying cottages.
It was pretty, but I was plenty happy to run, then run out of Dachau. Too many ghosts wandering the well-kept lawns, not all of them KZ prisoners. Too many shades kissing their ghost-wives and ghost-kids good morning, then heading off for another day at the death factory, forever and ever and ever.
Arweiler
There is a small brick building, with a 19th century look to it. Simple, plain, The sign marks it as a community center, but the doors are locked, the windows dark, the place has the look of something well-maintained but never used.
On the back corner of the building, nearest the stone tile street passing its flank, is a metal plaque that reads, approximately:
Former Synagogue, preserved in memory of the 730 Jewish residents of Arweiler, taken from their homes from August 1941 to September 1943.
Now, I'm drawing on memory here of something that I've not seen in five years, but the two things that stuck with me all those years was
(a) the lateness of the SS sweeps, in Nazi time.
(b) the protracted duration of the SS sweeps.
I suppose I had imagined the Nazi KZ officials descending on their victims en masse, sweeping through entire cities in a night, loading up the trains, leaving non-Jewish neighbors scratching their heads in fear and wonder (some clapping with delight, perhaps) the next day.
But in Arweiler, a cute little town in the wine country east of the Rhine and south of Cologne, it took the better part of three years to 'cleanse' the community.
At that point I recognized who was doing most of the dirty work: it was the neighbors themselves. For some reason, it was worth conserving the Jewish community up to a certain point...then there was no percentage in it, and the Jewish families started to be turned in, one after another after another, perhaps as they ran out of bargaining chips with their oh-so-contemptuous-of-commerce neighbors.
I just don't know.
What I do know is that it took three years for a small German town to be relieved of the burden of cultural diversity, and that's three years for children to grow up accustomed to playmates disappearing and three years for grownups to try not to talk about people who never existed in the first place and an eternity for everyone who ever come's Arweiler's way to chance across a small plaque on the back of a dead synagogue, and realize with a chill that Satan himself once stood here and laughed.
