Dachau Concentration Camp

It's hard to put into words what visiting a concentration camp was like. I think it's very important to learn from past mistakes. To enter the memorial, I walked through the same gate the prisoners walked through on their way into the camp. The iron gate said "work will set you free." But many of the innocent people who walked through that gate never got the chance to walk back through the gate into freedom.

I walked around on land where horrible things took place and innocent people died for no reason whatsoever. The memorial was definitely very moving. The stories told on the audio guide by prisoners in that very camp were unsettling. And the documentary we saw at the camp was extremely graphic. It's hard to imagine that humans could do those things to each other. We walked in the crematoriums and saw pictures of the bodies found piled up next to the ovens because there were too many casualties for them to even handle.

Dachau was the first concentration camp that existed. And all the guards were trained at Dachau before they were sent to other camps. Hearing about the medical experiments they used to perform and torture they used to inflict upon the prisoners was disturbing. This is a very sad part of our world's history, but the only thing we can do now is learn from it and make sure nothing like this ever happens again.