There is never a dull moment here. There is always something to do and time goes by WAY too fast. These past few days have been a blur. It feels like we've been here for weeks already...It's hard to believe we're only on day 4.
Our group work is intense. I don't know about anyone else, but my group is definitely hitting it hard. We already finished our research paper last night around 1am. We had to do our research several times and change a few things but thanks to the GLORIOUS Dr. Wood, all our research was not put to waste. Seriously, I don't know where we would've been without her guidance. We were all pretty overwhelmed yesterday...We started convening around lunchtime where we scrapped the research we'd done the night before in favor of a different route on the UK/South Africa situation, then researched from right after lunch around 2 until the coffee break around 4. Then we spent from then until dinner at 6:30 figuring out what we were going to do. You could sort of see our eyes glazed over by the end of our session because we were just thinking too hard. After dinner we had a session and a TCC group meeting, then we met again to finish up at 1ish. I don't think I got to bed until 2, but I felt so great this morning!
I was really energized by the beauty of everything around us, the learning experience and the weight off my shoulders as far as our first part of the project is going. I knew the feeling probably wouldn't last though, since we did have our trip to Dachau.
Wow. We read about the Holocaust in books, watch documentaries and movies, television shows, you name it. But how many people actually can say that they've visited the site of such horrors? It is incomparable to anything that attempts to intangibly describe it. You have to experience it to even come close to fathoming it. I can say this because Dachau is not what I expected. I don't know what I expected, but I do know that since learning about WWII and the Holocaust in 5th grade...I never would have perceived a concentration camp in this way. It was so eerie...it was so huge--and so empty. I just stood there and tried to imagine how this place built to sustain 6,000 but overcrowded with 5x that many people could have at one time harbored such unspeakable horrors.
It was so beautiful outside today...and everything around the camp...it was so picturesque...There was this somber blanket over the grounds...everyone was quiet, deep in thought. And yet this was the site of the deaths, executions, murders and tortures of thousands of innocent people. The Crematorium seemed like a pysichal oxymoron in the middle of it all. It was full of lush trees, peaceful paths and quaint little buildings--a tranquil and lovely place. Yet here was where thousands of corpses were piled up to be burned and thrown into the ash grave...and where people were shot execution style. It didn't fit.
I didn't know what I expected today, but certainly not this. I suppose I expected to seem like something out of a nightmare, but it wasn't. You could see the barbed wire, the watch towers, the gas chamber and furnaces, but none of these stood out as a blatant sign of evil and misery. You could only feel the last remnants of suffering and melancholy that lingered in the aura of the place.
Overall...I'm glad we visited Dachau today. It was an eye opener. It was good to see all the memorials that were set up, like Dr. Wood mentioned...and fulfilling to pay my respects.
