Munchen in Munich

In hindsight this might not be the best title for this post, as the focus is really on Dachau. If you're a bit squeamish, it might be best for you to skip this one - or just read the last few paragraphs...

We finally boarded our TUIfly flight from Tel Aviv to Munich. The plane left at something like 1.40am on Wednesday morning, and arrived around 5.30am in Munich (which is an hour behind Israel, so the flight took something like 5 hours or so). I tried to get some sleep on the plane, but you know how it is, trying to sleep sitting up - I'm really not that good at it. Plus I was still quite wired from the quick coffee after the stringent security checks in Tel Aviv.

Suffice to say when we finally arrived in Munich I felt literally like Death Warmed Up. Because we had a 12 hour stopover we had to actually collect our bags, then go put them in some left luggage place before we could head off into town. We decided to have a coffee and pastry for breakfast whilst we made our plans for the day.

I have been to Munich on a couple of occasions, but Agnieszka has never been there, so we decided we would split up - she would go look at all main tourist sites, and I would make my way out to Dachau, the nazi concentration camp. We made plans to meet for lunch and then make our way back to the airport, as our flight was leaving at 5.30pm.

We caught the S-Bahn into Marienplatz and left the station to find a suitable landmark at which to meet - deciding upon the Rathaus. But as we left the safety of the underground, we discovered something - it's raining. And cold. And I'm in 3/4 pants and a t-shirt, with a very light jumper. Fortunately I had my waterproof with me, and Agnieszka her umbrella, but judging from the level of the rain and the coldness of the temperature, I knew that I was in for a bit of a miserable time. It's pretty rough to think that yesterday I was lying on a beach in Tel Aviv in my swimmers, and today wrapped up as much as I can in rainy Munich. Anyway, we said goodbye and went our separate ways.

I caught the S2 train out to Dachau, and from there the local bus to the concentration camp. I arrived there right on opening time - already there were a few tour groups lined up. I have to say that this was not my first visit to a concentration camp, as I have already been to Mauthausen (near Linz, Austria), Auschwitz (Krakow, Poland) and Sachsenhausen (Berlin, Germany), so I knew what to expect - at least I thought I did, but nothing can really prepare you for the assault on your mind, body and soul as you visit a place as evil as this.

The first thing that hits you about the concentration camp is the gate labelled 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('work makes free') which you get at all of the concentration camps. Then the camp opens out onto the expansive roll call ground where the prisoners had report for roll call twice daily, sometimes being made to stand for hours whilst the names were called - dead prisoners had to be brought to the roll call and included in the count. At the roll-call area the prisoners were counted every morning and evening and assigned to their work details. Punishment measures were announced and carried out here publicly to intimidate the prisoners.

The roll-call area was bordered by the maintenance building; to mock the prisoners its roof carried the following inscription: "There is one path to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, diligence, honesty, orderliness, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, sacrifice and love of the fatherland." The prisoners were forced to look at this saying at every roll call.

After looking around the parade ground I made my way to the main museum, which is in a building just off the parade ground. They had very interesting displays about why the war started in the first place, why the Jews were such a problem and how Hitler came to power. Apparently when Dachau (which was the first concentration camp) first opened in 1933, they only had political prisoners, common criminals, 'asocials', gypsies, homosexuals and others who were considered 'enemies of the state'. If a Jew was imprisoned there, it was because he fit into one of those categories, not because he was a Jew. Also, many of these prisoners were 'rehabilitated' and then were released. It was only once the war kicked off that the camp became something much more sinister. The first Jews to be sent there just for being Jewish were those arrested on 9-10 November 1938, Kristallnacht (the 'night of broken glass').

Anyway, I continued my visit through the museum and with each new display I saw the sickening feeling in my stomach got worse, to the point where I actually could not face any more displays and had to go outside. I saw horrific pictures of torture, death, evil, misery... but it was the pictures of the medical experiments that disturbed me the most. Stuck permanently in my mind now are images of prisoners upon whom they had conducted high altitude experiments, there are two photos, one during the experiment, one afterwards - the look of sheer terror and agony on the subject's face is an image that will stay with me forever - but worse still, is the knowledge that the second photo, taken after the experiment, is a picture of a dead man. Then there were experiments for hypothermia, where they would plunge people into tubs of freezing cold water and leave them there for hours, until they died. The images of these experiments literally made me sick.

I went outside the museum when I could stand it no longer, and walked around the 2 barracks that are left. These are not original barracks, as the originals were destroyed in 1964 as the cost of maintaining them was too high. They have, however, been reconstructed accurately to look how they would have in the heyday of the camp. In each barrack the sleeping quarters consisted of triple decker bunks. The prisoners had to make their own mattress every day out of straw, and by the latter days of the camp, when the number of prisoners was astronomical, several prisoners would have to share the same bed. In the corner of the room was a small pail for night waste - for several hundred prisoners to share. If you were healthy, you made it to one of the top bunks - this was ideal because if the bucket was full, you didn't have to worry about excrement dripping down onto you from prisoners on the top bunk. Of course, if you were old, weak or sick (or all three) you couldn't get the top bunk, so you got dumped on in the night.

I left the barracks and walked down the poplar lined avenue, past the gravel beds outlining where all the other barracks had been, down to 'Barrack X'. The gas chamber.

According to the displays there, the gas chamber was not used like it was at other camps, as a place of mass extermination. But if you do a bit of research on this, there are conflicting reports - some say it was regularly used like this, some say it was only used a few times. Either way, its a very chilling place to be. You go in first to the undressing room, and from there into the main chamber. The main chamber has gas nozzles in the ceiling, which look like ordinary shower heads. The ceiling is quite low. Next to the gas chamber is a crematorium, where the bodies of the dead were disposed of.

Looking at these rooms made me feel even more numb, even more sick than I did before. Couple this feeling with the cold, and the rain, and the oppressive environment, and I knew I had to get out of there. I quickly went around the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and other memorials and then got the bus back to the S-Bahn.

I was about an hour or so early to meet Agnieszka, but I was cold, wet, and tired - so I decided to call her, see if she was finished and wanted to meet up early. We made arrangements then to meet and I headed back into town. The rain stopped, the sun came out, and life started to return to me after my experiences at Dachau.

We met up and then found a nice little restaurant near the Rathaus where I had traditional Munich white sausages, sauerkraut and mustard to warm me up. I really enjoyed these sausages and it reminded me of a few years ago when I came to Munich for the Christmas markets, with their gingerbread stalls, sugar coated peanuts, chocolate covered fruit (mostly bananas), and the magnificent sausage stalls - yum, yum! Anyway, I enjoyed my lunch, but all too soon it was time to get the S-Bahn back to the airport.

Slight problem at the airport. We couldn't remember where the left luggage office was. At all. So we spent some time wandering around trying to find it. Eventually we did, and then we checked in and went through to departures.

In the duty free shop in departures I found some Munich sausages (tinned) and mustard, and decided to buy that as a souvenir. This would not normally have been a problem, but when we arrived in Berlin and changed planes, they weren't going to let me bring these with me, as we transitted from a domestic flight to an international one - because of the new EU rules regarding carrying liquids on planes. Eventually they allowed it though, on the grounds that the duty free shop in Munich had sealed the bag such that I couldn't open it, so therefore couldn't have put explosives in it.

We flew back to Stansted with no dramas and got the bus back to Victoria. It had taken us about 20 hours to travel back from Tel Aviv, but finally we were back. Got the train at Vic back to Streatham and then walked home.

We'd travelled for 42 days, through some 14 countries, almost as many different currencies, been on planes, trains, automobiles (including cars, minivans and buses), boats... cruised on Lake Bohinj, hiked there too, tried some interesting (and at times, physically volatile) food, met some amazing people (and some whackos too), visited some incredible geographical, historical and even holy sites, swum in the Adriatic Sea, Lake Ohrid, the Black Sea, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, the Mediterranean Sea and even paddled in the River Jordan, and as exciting, adventurous, amazing the whole trip was - I REALLY NEED A HOLIDAY!