My Shoes Against Their Shoes

It took me about a week to be able to write this post because I wasn't too sure how I was going to write it, and I am still not too sure how. Figuring out how I felt walking on to the ground of Dachau was challenging, and it is still hard to put it into words. However, what I do know is that this is an experience unlike any other experience. Everyone will handle his or her experience at a concentration camp differently. Stepping on the gravel walkway that the prisoners stepped on, roaming the buildings that the prisoners worked in and walking through the gate that many prisoners walked through yet, very few had the chance to walk out of is an indescribable feeling that can cause a sea of emotions for many people. 

I am Jewish. I have never been to a concentration camp before, but I have learned about and talked about concentration camps and the Holocaust in history classes, religion classes and with my family members before. However, other than museums I have never been to Germany to see where everything started. It was hard to walk on the grounds of where a lot of my ancestors died on and it was even harder to think that there were even more people who were killed on these grounds for example, Protestants, homosexuals and Jehovah's witnesses. 

However, once you start realizing where you are and what happened on the ground you are standing on, you start realizing that Dachau is one of the many concentration camps established during WWII. That is when it hits you, that there was not just one place where many innocent people were killed, there were many. They were helpless and most of them lost hope.

It begins to get even tougher when you start thinking how many prisoners walked through a concentration camp gate and how many were never able to walk out through those same gates. But you were. You came to see Dachau. You walked through that gate and you had the freedom to walk out of that same gate. That feeling in itself is both terrifying and reassuring. It is terrifying because something so horrible like this happened in history, yet it is reassuring because you know the world would never let anything like this happen again. 

I think an experience like this is not something I will ever, nor anyone will ever, be able to put into words. Yes, you can say it was powerful, sad, emotional and heartbreaking but, it was more than that. However, I do believe that it is something that everyone should take the time to do. 

-Jordyn Jaffe