The Day I Didn’t Go to Dachau

Certain memories of this day are still clear to me. I remember the subway stairs in Munich where my first husband and my two children left me to head for Dachau. This stairway in my mind is wider than subways are in truth. At least double in width. And black. A gaping hole with no other people in the scene but my family disappearing into the dark. My son Russ says this is a false memory. He didn’t go to Dachau that day either he says. One thing I am sure of. He was 16 that morning in July. When I asked him recently where he went instead, he has no memories of Munich or Dachau. He wasn’t with me, I’m sure of that much.

My daughter Laurel had an obsession with the Holocaust. The only request she had about things to see on our trip in 1988 to Germany, both East and West, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria was to see a camp. Her chance came in Munich.

While we were in Budapest I had hurt my leg, torn ligaments in my ankle. I was in an old-fashioned plaster cast that covered my toe and went all the way up to my knee. Although I had found a cane to move around a little, the stairs in the subway were way beyond what I could do. So, everyone else went off to their day and I found a café near the subway. I remember drinking Weissbier, or white beer, or wheat beer, and white sausages called Weißwurst or Weisswurst or white sausage. I was alone and spent the day thinking of many things.

I imagine Dachau was on my mind. I had already seen the film Nuit et brouillard. It was easy enough to substitute the images of Auschwitz for Dachau. Mostly I picture grass and barbed wire and buildings off in the distance. There is always an unused train track in the picture.

All these images come back to me as I read Ruth Kluger’s survivor memoir, Still Alive. Why is there a need to maintain the camps she asks. Maybe I agree with her suspicion that Auschwitz is simply a “lucrative venture for nearby Cracow” (68). Could that be? Today, as I’m thinking about Holocaust memorials, I am immersed in Paul Celan’s uncanny and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I think about their use of voids and silence. I think about Ruth Kluger’s calling forth of ghosts. “To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living” (69).

That’s how it is for me with Dachau with my own timescape. I remember the great open maw of the subway. The quietness of my day. My immobility. My family disappearing. How the wind must be blowing across the ruin of the camp. The horrors I do not see but that are with me still all these years later. How alone I am. The way the juices of hot Weißwurst burst in my mouth. How Weißbier cools my throat. That I am alone, but steady enough. That my family, the four of us, will never again find ourselves together after that day. Not really.