Well. I uploaded pictures from our second day in Bavaria weeks ago. Today I’m finally posting them.
See, we traveled through this tranquil countryside.
To find that the same peaceful land housed this reminder of horror.
I came out of Dachau so glad that a group of survivors made sure people would never forget.
Then when we returned from our trip I sorted through my photos on a Saturday. That same afternoon Tim and I talked to S, a woman from our street, as she sorted pieces of her life into boxes so she could leave her home.
S used to live there with her husband and daughter, and then when she and her husband moved they left her daughter (who has a drug problem) in the home with her daughter’s son, and sometimes the boy’s dad was there, too.
S moved back after her husband left her for a younger woman.
Getting ready to go, she related some other tragedies that took place before we knew her. Relatives and friends were loading boxes to take her to her sister’s where she’s fixed up the garage to live in. “I’ll be fine,” she assured us.
I wandered back home. Folding in on my anxious self, I thought, Dachau is everywhere.
The next week S’s house stood empty. Its new owner likely bought it cheap and will fix it up, she told us, to sell. I noticed sunlight brightening the deepened burgundy on leaves covering S’s front maple. Our maple changed, too, and I remembered evil continues.
Lord have mercy.
The best part of Dachau was the grass. The trees. Growing, housing birds. No, it was the people. Schoolkids on field trips, all required to pass through here at least once. And then they could leave.
We were all free to go.
The sad truth…ugh!
Recently read a quote from Victor Frankl Holocaust survivor, saying there are two ways to go into the gas chambers: free and not free.
We are so unbelievably lucky that we are, as you say, free to leave.
That sounds as though Frankl referred to inner freedom, Fresca. I’d want to go in free in that sense. Then they could ultimately do me no harm.