Dachau

There are some things we need to remember, and there are some things we need to forget.

There are some things we need to forgive, and there are many things for which we need to be forgiven.

Art Katz in his testimony-book Ben Israel writes of his visit to the concentration camp at Dachau:

I was totally unprepared for what greeted me at this museum of death ... the gas rooms with the jets still in the ceiling. Here my brother-Jews had been herded like cattle into cars. Women and children. Stripped naked. Old men and young boys. Why was the ear of God silent to the shrieks and prayer of these helpless, innocent ones who were slaughtered like cattle? My stomach turned sick and my eyes blurred with tears ... Outside were the conveyor belts where the bodies were dispatched to the giant ovens ... the mutilated bodies were slowly and systematically fed into the flames. The huge smokestacks never ceased their ugly belching - twenty-four hours a day as the ovens were stoked with the House of Israel.

And later, on the train that took him on his way ...

In an instant the truth dawned: Katz, except for the accident of birth, the caprice of time and place, you might have been born a German Aryan. It could have been you stoking bodies into the ovens. He shuddered and looked long into the blue eyes of the German man opposite. "I have been to Dachau," he said quietly.

A photograph of Dachau, which was posted with this article, has been removed. My apologies; I did not realize that the photograph was under copyright.