Dachau

  I am Logan O'Connell and I am 18 years old from Colorado   

  A vacation to the forest filled European country of Germany sounds to most Americans to be a dream trip that most can only imagine. While the country is known for its beir gartens, breweries, beautiful views and massive octoberfest celebrations one cannot over look the morbid and sickening history the country houses known as the Holocaust to most. Today the Eaton High school EF tours travel group took a break from the dream to reflect on the sanctity of life with a somber walk through the Dachau Concentration camp. For the few readers who don't shiver at the name of this place Dachau was an internment, torture and execution camp constructed and run by the German Nazi party to eliminate potential political enemies and those that the party saw to be insufficient and unneeded in society. To visit a site where so much blood shed and torture/ degradation of human life took place is a moving experience that even those who have no connection to the atrocities feel pain for those mistreated. The site is an eerie walled in complex, surrounded by the walls and and guard towers from which German SS troops undoubtedly shot and murdered innocent inmates. One can still see the the foundations of the barracks in which thousands of souls were packed into cots to await their own deaths. The museum in the largest complex at the gate holds memorabilia that provides all the information one could desire on Nazi history and the life lost in the camp. Some of the group traveled to the back of the camp where the gas chamber and crematorium where located in order to hide them from the other inmates. Dachau is a place of pain but as the survivors stated we have to remember this atrocity to prevent it from happening again.