[Okta20]

This is going to be long. I hope some people will read what I have to say on that matter anyway. I'm sorry for all the drama. I can't talk about this without drama.

I'm German. This darkest part of the history of our country still haunts our minds. It's not like we think about it constantly. Most people don't think about it much in their everyday lives. But it is in fact everywhere. If you lead a serious, honest conversation with friends or family it my come up. When you talk to people from abroad. It's in the news, in movies, literature and magazines. Just now a tv moderator got sacked because she said in her book that she admired Hitlers family care system.

The collective memory still catches up with us everywhere we go, and when it hits, some of us (quite a lot, in fact) get this special feeling in our chests. It's not sadness, exactly - more like a kind of weariness with the world. Weltschmerz is the proper expression. Only German people could invent such a word.

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I want to tell you about the time I visited the concentration camp Dachau some years ago.
Every 10th grade goes there, usually in winter (for the effect).
It was very cold that day, the sky was cloudy. They showed us the place were the prisoners slept, told us what the guards did to them, how and where they were punished and how and where they were killed. I don't need to tell you that it was horrible.

Dachau was the first concentration camp the Nazis built. It was not like Auschwitz. People weren't brought there to be killed, but to work in factories in the vicinity. Nevertheless many people died there.

What I thought to be really interesting is that not too many Jews were in Dachau, but many Social Democrats, Communists, Gay people or Sinthi and Roma.

They had one of those "showers" in Dachau. We went in there. Though our guides told us the chamber had never been used, our stomachs clenched in there. I think I saw some of my friends crying. I just wanted out of there.

We saw the place where they burned the corpses. We felt the cold air of German Winter. We saw the rooms without windows, so small you could not even turn.

In the end they showed us a movie with pictures from Dachau at the time the Americans came. There were piles of corpses of starved or murdered prisoners.

We were silent in the bus on our way home.
I had nightmares for days after that trip.

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A few things I've left to say.

1) Never tell a German a joke about Hitler or Nazis. Never call a German a Nazi. Don't wave like *that*.

2) Watch Schindler's List. It's a good movie. Though commercial, very impressing.

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If anybody stayed with me, thank you for reading.

Lisa