Munich Day 2

Hey everybody! I woke up this morning around 9:15am to be ready for our 10:15am guided tour of Dachau. Today we split up into smaller groups; I traveled with Sarah, Courtney, Brooke, Sam, Laura, Casie, Kelly, and Shannon to visit the concentration camp. We walked on the train station with the rest of the guided tour, caught a train which took us 10 minutes outside the city, and then we caught a bus that took us the last 10-12 minutes to the site of  the first German concentration camp. I knew today would be a difficult day to take in, and it was pretty hard to take it all in and realize just what happened here about 65 years ago. We walked into the camp, through the entrance building, through the Iron Gate, into a giant square filled with gravel. On our right, we saw an enormous U-shaped building where the exhibit was. This building had many uses before, and during the war, the last of which was to house US soldiers after they had liberated the prisoners of Dachau. Our tour guide was a graduate student from Ireland, who was a really nice guy and knew a ton of information on the history of the camp. We definitely wouldn’t have learned as much listening to the audio tour, and I think having him gave us more insight into just what really happened. I learned that Dachau was a “work camp” and that most of the deaths at the camp were caused from being worked to death unlike Auschwitz which was one of six “extermination camps”. It was a somber, sad day the entire day through. We saw pictures of malnourished people, and video of some of the things post liberation. We walked through the barracks, where the prisoners had to sleep and it was awful. The beds were stacked three high, made of wood and depending on the time of the war, 50-200 men were expected to sleep in these fairly small rooms. I think there were 34 different barracks (only 2 models were shown) to house all the men. It was a sad part of the day to say the least. I can’t believe how you can treat another human being like that, even if they are your enemy.

But moving on, after Dachau we headed back (3pm) to downtown Munich (spelled Munchen by the Germans) to grab lunch. I ended up splitting up with the group and grabbed pasta next to the hostel with Laura and Casie while the rest of the group headed down to the main square where we had been the first day. We then joined up with some other people from the group and walked around the town for about an hour. We saw some teenagers’ doing “hardcore” which I thought was funny; they didn’t really do anything impressive from what I saw. 

Tonight some people went on a “Beercrawl” (basically bar-hopping with the hostel) but I decided to stay in. I think I’m going to go downstairs and grab some food and then just relax the rest of the evening; trying to keep my blog up-to-date and whatnot. Tomorrow we head to the Disney Castle and then should get to Strasbourg around 9pm. I’ll update everyone again soon!

Jonathan