Ignite My Soul

Chapter 4.2 - Day 5: Valley of Death

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"The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable." - Andrea Dworkin.

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After breakfast, we depart from the Rhine Valley because Munich awaits. I mean, helloo. We drive through Germany, checking the scenery and identifying all the company logos we know. We are chuffed to see the BMW plant and the Munich football stadium. The only thing I care about when it comes to football is who's good-looking and has the best legs. To this day, I watch that Nay' le Walk video with Neymar Jr just to drool. He is young, I know, but shuuuuu.

The next stop is the Dachau Concentration Camp. As the bus drops us off, you are met by a beautiful building which feels like a library. The architecture has a modern feel, surrounded by steel and glass. This lures you in, and you want to see more.

Bella announces that this is a guide free tour. She hands us the camp map and gives us the meet up time after the tour is done. The group has the freedom to start wherever they choose.

We take a walk into the actual campsite through the high black steel gate surrounded by equally high white walls. We decide to start in the garden while we still have sunlight for photos, of course. The greenery is inviting. It feels like you are walking into a fairy tale. Walking through the arched, leafy entrance and tall trees truly feels like a LIVE Little Red Riding Hood experience, and that is exactly what it is, but it is more like Little Red Riding Hood meets Hansel and Gretel in this forest.

The walk through the forest is enticing and incredible until you read the metal plates explaining each area. There is one spot filled with purple and pink flowers, and the plate reads – Ashes buried here. This means that after they burned the people, this is the spot where they buried/scattered the ashes. As painful as it is to us humans, from the ashes, nature has fulfilled balance and produced a garden so beautiful you would swear you are in Eden.

We keep walking, shocked to the core, yet we are not prepared for the next garden, which states that it is a burial site for many unnamed prisoners. With each atrocity we come across, there is less conversation and more shocked expressions.

We pass the burial sites to come across the Pistol range where the prisoners were executed. I have to say that if you are not in tune, you actually miss the layer of death lingering in the forest. There is so much heaviness, and it's easy to dismiss it as exhaustion, but at some point, you feel their pain and imagine their screams.

We moved from the enticing and deceptively breathtaking forest to the barracks, which host 5 dormitories each. We walk into the dormitory, and I am hurt to find that not only were the prisoners forced to sleep together in bunk beds, but they had to shit next to each other and wash in the open. No stalls. In the oppressors' view, they needed a common sleeping, bathing and toilet environment to avoid suicide and escape attempts.

It breaks my heart to acknowledge the genius that was Hitler. The Dachau camp lasted from 1933 to 1945. He prides himself on learning discrimination from the hierarchy and protocols of African kingship. Is he wrong? That is extremely debatable and not the topic for today. Yet what I cannot discredit is how he reinvented the wheel to rule in Germany and, in turn, inspired Hendrik Verwoed to establish the apartheid system.

So before you go Rottweiler on me, I want you to take a moment to appreciate and understand the foundation of what has left us Africans so crippled. The emancipation that even Bob Marley refers to in his song.

Dachau, amongst many concentration camps, was developed on the premise of holding political prisoners who were held captive for treason, then added discrimination when it included homosexuals and all beings not fitting in society. The very same principles that we have been fed as the history of Shaka vary from the knowledge that twins and disabled children were seen as a curse and one of the twins would be killed. The Zulu nations also killed the male heirs who threatened their reign—Kodwa angikho daar. (We are not there.)

With our sore hearts and emotions, we move to the hall, which is a museum with the history of the concentration camps. As you enter, you get a view of how enormous this site is. Never mind that you have walked the grounds and seen the gruesome living conditions where deep ditches and razor-wire fencing surround the dormitories and work areas.

Bear in mind that the prisoners were led into the beautiful gardens to either be executed by guns or that the prisoners were led and left in gas chambers with vents all around. The main aim of the vents was to bring forth death and to take away the stench of death as the bodies dropped. The bodies get carried to the burner to be cremated. All the ashes are gathered and spread across the gardens we came across earlier.

The military had two options for killing using ammunition. Either shoot the bodies in the 'comfort' of a room or in what they dubbed as the Pistol range. Either space, prisoners were slaughtered by bullets and taken to burial sites. When the body count started increasing, they were burnt, and their ashes were scattered in one spot.

Some prisoners died because of suffocating in the environment and living conditions. Most, though, died because they caught illnesses or plagues, as referred to at that time of living. Some of the doctors were mandated to kill the sick prisoners as they were a liability. One of the shocking facts from the exhibition and campsite history was that outsiders think Jews were the main classification impacted. However, in this campsite, you learn that the Polish were the highest impacted statistically.

By the end of the tour, we are hardly speaking to each other for different reasons, yet what we have in common is the pain of ill-treatment to humanity. We ride back in our shuttle, and we are all going through different emotions.

After Dachau, we drive to our accommodation in Munich for the night.

We later step out to have dinner. We are sitting at a long full table with 3 pairs of groups we connected with. 5 different tour groups occupy the linked tables. We enjoy dinner and sample some of the finest German beers on offer.

After the scrumptious dinner and entertainment, we head back to the hotel to rest before it is time to leave Germany.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

Friday, we invade Italy—the LOVE country.

Happy Valentine's Day.

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