Another Take

Another Take on Dachaus, Auschwitz: Why does it still matter? This is not my typical blog post but an expression of an idea I had based on an old Twilight Zone episode. I turned it into a short story, sort of reminiscent of a half hour TZ episode.

Mr. Collins was on a guided tour at Dachau. While touring one of the deserted barracks, Mr. Collins wanted to lie down on one of the bunks in the dilapidated and abandoned barracks and fell asleep. When he awakened he heard loud and nasty instructions to rise for exercises. The voice said it was a balmy 5 degrees below zero. Judging from the sight of the soldiers’ uniforms and the others around him, it was no longer present day. It was 1941 all over again. It was like he was experiencing a Twilight Zone moment.

View of the Dachau concentration camp, after liberation on April 29, 1945. It shows the electrified barbed wire fence, the moat, and a watchtower.

Mr. Collins was dazed at first, having just been suddenly awakened. Once he was able to stand by his bunk, he noticed his clothes had been transformed into the prison attire like everyone else's. He thought he was dreaming at first; no, more like having a nightmare.

Before he could gather his thoughts, the group was ushered through the door and outside into the bitter cold. Once outside standing in the snow and ice, he thought how in the world could anyone survive in conditions like this, especially without any protective clothing. As he thought it, he had already answered his own question; they can't. They really weren't expected to survive.

Several of his "colleagues" did not. They passed out during this so-called exercise routine. Dropped dead.

While standing there, Mr. Collins had lost feeling in his feet and his fingers were turning blue. He didn't know how much more of this torture he could stand.

View of barracks and the ammunition factory in one of the first photos of the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, March or April 1933.

Dachau opened in Germany in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp of the Nazi regime. Prisoners were subjected to horrific conditions, forced labor, and medical experiments. Dachau became the model for all Nazi concentration camps. It was liberated by American forces on April 29, 1945.

At what seemed to be forever, the group was finally lead back into the barracks. No heat and no warm clothing. The prisoners just had to make do. Just then another Nazi official entered the barracks and announced that two of the group did not survive exercises. So, two of the bunks would be available. However, there were three additional prisoners expected any minute so an additional bunk would have to be made ready.

"Mr. Collins," the official stated, peering directly into Collins' eyes, "your bunk will do nicely."

"But where will I sleep?," asked Collins. "Oh, you'll have a permanent resting place," replied the Nazi as he pulled out his Walther P38 pistol. Everything then appeared to be in slow motion.

As he pointed the P38 at Mr. Collins, the trigger seemed to take forever to be pulled back. Just at the instant of the bullet exploding from the barrel, Mr. Collins let out a blood curdling scream.

Then, all fell silent.

"Mr. Collins! Mr. Collins!," a young woman's voice was heard directly over Mr. Collins' face. "Wake up, sir," she said. "You fell asleep during our tour. Please follow us and we'll lead you to the exit and the awaiting tour bus," she explained.

Collins, meanwhile, was shaking even though he realized his nightmare was just that, a nightmare. Before he began to walk out, he looked down and was relieved to see he was wearing his clothes in which he'd started the tour. His nightmare was over.

Little remained of what he had dreamt. Interestingly, however, no one seemed to notice the Walther P38 lying on the mattress where Collins had been. Smoke was still emanating from the barrel.

All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Shoah. It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.
The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing "local" prisons. The first transport of Poles reached KL Auschwitz from Tarnów prison on June 14, 1940. Initially, Auschwitz was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, even when, beginning in 1942, it also became the largest of the extermination centers where the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" (the final solution to the Jewish question - the Nazi plan to murder European Jews) was carried out.

At the end of the Twilight Zone episode, Deathshead Revisited, the doctor exclaims “why do they let it remain standing?”

In Serling’s epilogue narration, he says “There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.”

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