Germany Day 2.

Today I took the 45 minute train ride to Dachau Concentration Camp. Once I got off the train, it was a short walk through the quaint city of Dachau before you got to the camp its self. You had to go through a large gate to get to the ticket office inside. I thought it was for entry, but it turned out to be for the little hand held radio guides. With one of these in hand, I got a detailed history of Dachau. Did you know that they never used the gas chamber there because it was built shortly before the war ended? I went in to the main building where they played a movie on how life was like in the concentration camp. For entry, you had to be thirteen or older, even with an adult. It was pretty tame, or as tame as it could be, for the first part, but then they got really gory, and I realized why you had to be over thirteen. It was really sobering to watch it, but outside it was a little better. They had one of the bunk rooms open, and it seemed okay at first until they told us up to four people slept in a bed the size of a normal twin! The bunks were also four high and were in four rows, end to end. Then I went into the gas chamber its self. Even though nobody was put to death in it, it was still a horrible place. It was a room the size of a classroom, with stone walls and heavy sealed doors, no windows. In the ceiling were a couple of things that looked like shower heads, but they were just decoys. The gas they used rose, so they had vents at the bottom of the walls. This killed the people by taking the out the oxygen in the air and having them suffocating to death. The next room over did actually get used though. It was the crematorium. It is where they took the people who died of disease or malnutrition, and put them into big ovens to burn. They then took the ashes out and dumped them in a pit behind the crematorium. That place is marked today. It was horrible, but it really made me think. Although not as many people died in Dachau as they did in other camps, like Auschwitz, many Jewish people lost their lives. I hope nothing like this will ever happen again. What happened to a man in Dachau. Each of these beds had 3-4 people sleeping in them.