Tuesday morning my friend and I caught a morning train to Dachau to start off our German day tripping. We both decided that after seeing what Munich has to offer and learning a little more about its history, stepping foot into the first Nazi concentration camp and see first-hand these things we had only briefly glazed over in our high school world history courses would be an experience that we both wanted to have.

It was very weird when we first arrived after a short 30 minute train ride because there was a small town with convenience stores and suburban landscape. I realized that the infamous name is attached to a very limited sector of life in Dachau, and that we associate it so strongly with Nazi terrorization that we fail to recognize its modern function as a city where people's lives are rooted. It was a very normal scene until I noticed that the buses coming through the terminal had outlines of important landmarks and one of them was Nandor Glid's International Monument sculpture and one of the lines stopped at "Dachau Concentration Camp," the first concentration camp that provided the model for all others to come. We took this bus through a maze of houses and parks until the bus halted near a row of bare trees and a concrete plaque that declared the entrance to the memorial site. We traded our school IDs in for audio guides and began listening to an introduction to the camp's history and surrounding area as we made our way down a dirt path and were met with by a small building looking out at the S.S. training camp and I first laid eyes on the barred gate branded with the words "Arbeit Macht Frei;" Work makes you free.

The gate was smaller than I thought it would be, though I went into this day not completely knowing what to expect, and the thoughts about how many thousand of people were paraded through here knowing that they were probably walking into the gates of their death was surreal. Crossing into the border of the camp, an expansive roll call area laid out in front of us with the museum and bunkers to the right and prisoner barracks to the left. We began at the very far end of the bunkers, where the panels and audio guide described its function as a prison within the camp. The hallways were dark and dingy, lined with wooden doors that had small cutouts in them from which to peek into the concrete cells. Some of the main rooms were open to visitors including the interrogation room, as well as doors removed to expose what a room looked like and descriptions of how some were divided into standing cells that barely fit one person where they would be subject to standing for hours or even days on end as a form of torture, and informational plaques described how prisoners were left in darkness for years only being fed every few days and becoming victims to horrible violence. Some of the cells had windows, others did not, but all had peeling paint on the walls. Some of the windows overlooked the outdoor area where concrete poles stood erect, metal hooks and chains dangling from the top. This is where people were hung by their wrists as a form of torture. I walked through the entire length of the bunker and wondered what it must have been like to be trapped in one of these concrete boxes; at the same time, I could imagine what sort of power and authority the Nazi guards must have felt, freely passing through these hallways as prisoners were being dehumanized in cells unfit for any living creature.

I then walked into the museum which took me through a history of the rise of Nazi power in Germany, how the concentration camps were established, the process of entering and what the prisoners were subjected to (giving up everything: clothes, possessions, human dignity; being forced to proceed naked into showers to wash away all traces of humanity; heads shaven; being handed a linen set of clothing and badged to mark their faith and nationality; etc.), facets of daily life, torture, medical experiments, oppression by race and ethnicity, death, and liberation. Accompanied by audio narrations of first-hand accounts of life in Dachau, the information panels hanging in all of the rooms now converted into museum space (including the bath room, kitchen, and entrance office) brought to light more concrete visualizations of what really happened during the twelve years of the camp's functioning existence. One of the most interesting rooms was the first large room inside of the entrance where metal tables were lined up in the center and one of the walls was painted with the large words "No Smoking" in German. This is where prisoners who had just entered through the gates arrived in order to be documented and stripped of all of their belongings. There are four tables with documents facing one way, displaying the private possessions prisoners brought with them such as passports, photographs, letters, and the like. The following four tables had documents facing the other way to show what the Nazis who sat on that side of the table took care of including notebooks with people's names, religious faith, ancestry, etc. There was also a large wooden table with its drawers open, stuffed with rows and rows of colored cards that had prisoners' basic information on them as a sort of log of all of the people who had entered the camp. The number of papers was incredible.

After spending over an hour and a half in the museum and watching a short film about life in the camps and how conditions progressively worsened as the area meant to house 6,000 actually held 30,000+ captive at once, we emerged back at the roll call area in front of the International Monument and memorial of ashes with the words "Never Again" written in five different languages. Glid's sculpture is haunting, as the dark metal resembles corpses and skeletons entwined in chaos, as well as mangled barbed wire like the reinforcements visible around the entire enclosed area of the camp. I made my way across into the first barrack where the inside was set up to resemble exactly what it used to look like. There were wooden bunks (more like pallets) stacked up to the ceiling, a bathroom with 12 open toilets side by side, a locker room where the floors had to be scrubbed to perfection every morning by prisoners as part of their daily duties, and more bedrooms to the other side. I overheard a tour guide explaining that the beds were meant for two-to-a-bunk, which turned into three and four with overcrowding, and eventually there were so many people that only the sick could lay (or sit) in bed, others had to stand, and in many cases people laid on top of each other pyramid style in each bunk, layers of humans on top of each other for lack of space, and many died of suffocation. The photographs throughout showed the immense overcrowding and lack of sanitation in these barracks, and the inability to escape from horrific sights as the dead laid among the living everywhere.

There are currently only two barracks standing, and the rest of the spaces are marked by concrete barriers with numbers on them. At the end of the pathway between rows of barracks are the three religious memorials, a convent, and to the left is the crematorium. A small bridge connected the back corner with the crematorium area, straddling the ditch that was created so those trying to escape would find themselves stuck and defenseless as guards were able to quickly shoot them down from watch towers. It feels very wrong to say this, but the area the crematorium is located is eerily picturesque. It is surrounded by trees and wildlife, tucked away in a garden of hedges and tall trees. The first furnace room was not large enough to accommodate for all of the deaths in the later years of the camp's operation so the second brick one was built. There were large rooms we stepped into with panels on the wall revealing that they were rooms made to hold corpses and by the time liberation came around were overflowing with bodies, and several of the brick furnaces. There was also a room disguised as a shower room that was actually meant to spew poison for mass-murder, but that room was never used for that purpose (there was an explanation about how Dachau was a concentration camp, not an extermination camp like Auschwitz). While photographs lined the walls depicting the mounds of corpses that lay right outside of the building, I felt very detached from the atrocities that were committed there and could not wrap my mind around that image, especially with the sky shining bright blue and birds chirping away in the treetops. It is unimaginable that these inhumane acts were committed not in the barbaric ages, but a mere 70 years ago right there where I was standing.

As I walked back across the camp, puzzled by its small size and oddly beautiful surroundings that contained the terror within, I could not believe that this is the place where so many were brutally murdered and exterminated through work in the modern age. It's incredible to think that people kept hold of the desire to survive while enduring such pain and torture, and as I walked back out of the gates that let so many in with the promise of freedom, I wondered what those who had lived through to liberation day felt when they were finally released through this same exit to embrace a future they never pictured would materialize. I must be very careful in my word choice, because I cannot say I am glad I went because it was not a happy occasion, but I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to experience first hand some of what life might have been like in this infamous space that I had only previously encountered in writing and storytelling through film.

We ended up spending way more time in Dachau than originally planned, taking it all in and engrossed by the sheer amount of information, but decided to go ahead to switch gears and continue with the second part of our day trip from Munich to Neuschwanstein Castle. Departing from the main Munich train station we traveled across two hours of flat, green farmland, collections of forests, and staring out at the sunset and cotton candy clouds over the Bavarian Alps until we arrived in the tiny town of Füssen. While we had hoped to see the castle in daylight, the sun had already set and the stars were starting to shine, but regardless we bused up to the mouth of the trail leading up the mountain to the castle and began our trek up. Everything was closed for the off-season, including hotels, and so we were the only ones up there aside from a Singaporean family we met on the bus. On the way we got a nice view of the Hohenschwangau Castle on the opposite hill. A lot of the roads were closed so we ended up only seeing the side of the famous Neuschwanstein which provided the inspiration for the castle in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. It was quite impressive and very beautiful though we only saw a part of the outer wall... But I can say I've touched a real castle and confirm that Prince Ludwig was indeed crazy for building such an ornate castle there in the middle of the wilderness.

After our descent we trained through pitch-black countryside for another two hours and arrived in Munich way later than expected. Unfortunately, beer does not constitute a healthy dinner (though the Germans may say otherwise...) and most restaurants had closed down for the night so my friend and I went on a desperate search for food, which landed us way outside of the city center after two trains in the wrong directions. We ended up scraping ice from the plastic protecting the map display boards in order to determine which was the right bus to take back to the hostel from the middle of nowhere in the 28° winter night (I have never been happier to see the approaching lights of a train ever in my life), and stumbled into the main train station exhausted and relieved. The funny thing is that we coincidentally ran into a group of our friends whose train had been delayed 2 hours on their trip from Prague to Munich in the main lobby and exchanged stories of our traveling woes before my friend and I desperately ran into the only restaurant that was open (Burger King) for a satisfying meal of burgers and fries. It was quite the excursion out of Munich, but the day was filled with many experiences I will never forget from the jarring images in Dachau to the beautiful view from the hill up to Neuschwanstein and the sad traveler's tale of succumbing to eating Burger King on our last night in Germany.