We had, we confess, little interest in the contemporary Munich.
Since Mark's father had been stationed there for some time after the war ended, we hoped to find the intersection where he had a photo of himself taken.
We did have a note to track down The White Rose.
We were also interested in seeing Dachau.
Mark's father had also been to Dachau, shortly after liberation. He took many photographs there that form some of Mark's visual memory of the Sho'a. Mark wanted to check his memory of the photographs with the reality of the actual camp.
At the Isar River we were surprised to see surfers .. river surfing! The surfers use small boards and wear wet suits to navigate a very narrow but touchy current on a channel of the Isar.
The flow is from right to left in the photo.
Sunday morning we started out for Freising.
Then to Dachau.
It does not surprise me that the people of Dachau would want to have a separate Wikipedia article for their town, distinct from the concentration camp that bears the same name. Yet, the two are so close, and the camp is at the base of the hill on which the old town stands, that it is hard to accept that the residents of the 1930s-1940s did not know what was happening in their back yard.
"Dachau" seems synonymous with "concentration camp" the way the "Auschwitz" is synonymous with "death camp".
It is a place of intense evil, calculated sadism.
I [M] once again experienced that cold, choking that swelled through me at Auschwitz and at Terezin. You might think that I might become inured to it; emotionally calloused.
Can that happen?
Towards the end of the tour we saw a short film that included footage of the survivors.
Debbie mentioned afterwards that she needed to close her eyes, hard to see the brutality.
I have always felt the need to keep my eyes wide open.
If this is what was done to people in full view of the perpetrators and seen by those first witnesses who captured the scene on celluloid, I owe it to those, whose images were captured... to look them in the eye and recognize the humanity that others attempted to deny them.
Mark is not the only son of an American serviceman who is interested in the wartime experiences of his father. On the Web you can find a site devoted to The Third Reich in Ruins by Geoff Walden which:
"presents photos of historical sites associated with Germany’s Third Reich (1933-1945), both as they appeared while in use, and as the remains appear today. These photos give a "then and now" perspective, in many cases, a virtual tour of the sites. I was inspired to write this page by a collection of photos taken by my father, U.S. Army Air Forces Lt. Delbert R. Walden, when he was stationed in Germany in 1945-46."
Given some time, Mark hopes to review his father's old photos and recollections (perhaps, even, the YIVO essay), to make that experience available to a wider public.