Dachau Or My Feelings After the 2016 Election

Work Sets You Free.
The gate to the Nazi concentration camp, Dachau in southern Germany.

In 2002, I was an exchange-student at Ohm Gymnasium in Erlangen, Germany. We went on a field trip to Dachau, a concentration camp. On the bus on the way there, they assured me not that many Jews were sent to their deaths at this particular camp. 

This was mostly a concentration camp for gays and socialists. 

I think they told me this to help me feel more comfortable.

I walked around with some of my friends from class and as we were leaving one of the German kids, I think his name was Manny, handed me a piece of chocolate.

I was ugly-crying and could barely speak, but I felt like that piece of chocolate meant something. It felt important.

We got back in the bus and started driving back. As we drove up the hill, I looked out the window and noted the charming German houses with their cute little flower-boxes built in the eighteen-hundreds and earlier. 

Then, I looked out the window. 

From the bus I could see over the walls and into the camp. From the road, I could see the barracks that they had a rebuilt as a museum. In my imagination, I superimposed the pictures of grotesque human suffering perpetrated in that concentration camp some sixty years ago onto the quaint, well-manicured museum grounds there today.

It was those flowers. The flowers in the front yards and the cute little picturesque flower-boxes that struck me. 

From those windows, while tending those flowers, the people who lived in those houses could see into the camp.

They could always see. 

I thought how? How could people wake up every morning and see that out their bedroom window? 

I realize now in 2016, that I really don't want to find out.