My Experience at Dachau

​I had arrived in Germany three months earlier, in July, 1958, a mere 13 years after the end of World War II. I was an 18-year-old Yale undergraduate spending my junior year as an exchange student at Heidelberg University. On this cold, dark October day, my fellow exchange student, Douglas, and I had taken the local train from Munich to the artists’ colony of Dachau. Of course, that’s not how the rest of the world thought of that town. Instead, it was known as the site of an infamous Nazi concentration camp. It was in fact the first. It was also our goal that day.

Our first challenge, however, was to find the place. Neither of us felt comfortable going up to a local and asking them in our German, “Excuse me, Mein Herr, but where is your concentration camp?” So we just walked around hoping we would somehow find it. We did! First, we stumbled on a U.S. military installation. Relieved, we put our question to the M.P. on duty. “Oh,” he replied. “It’s right here on post, sir!” We followed his directions and soon found the gate with the superscription, “Arbeit macht frei!” (“Work makes one free!”) We entered. Soon, with a chill, I realized that Douglas and I were the only visitors. It was not yet the museum it would become in later years, filled with marked exhibits, foreign tourists, and groups of German school children required to experience the horrors perpetrated by prior generations of their countrymen.
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Douglas and I soon went our separate ways. I, a third-generation Jewish American, found myself alone in the Shower Room, AKA the gas chamber. From there I went into the incineration chamber, where an oversized pizza-style oven was left standing, with floor markings indicating where others had stood. There was no explanatory signage. In a kind of altered state, I spontaneously dipped my right index finger into the open oven, withdrew it, and printed a capital J on the back of my left hand. Although I usually share everything I experience with my companion(s), I somehow said nothing about this little writing session to my friend.

Fast forward to our train trip the next day from Munich back to Heidelberg, where our first semester was about to begin. Douglas and I were sitting alone in a six-passenger compartment. At Ulm, Albert Einstein’s hometown, two middle-aged German men joined us. With their Bavarian accents and long, belted leather coats, they looked and sounded like my idea of Gestapo agents. They asked us where we were from, what we were doing off-season in Germany, and what our names were. Douglas in his American-accented German explained our situation and gave his full name, including his Ur-German last name, on which they commented. “And you?” They turned to me. “Feldman,” I replied. “Ach, this is also a German name!” It was in fact one shared by Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in Deutschland and Austria. It meant “farmer,” literally “man of the field.” Up till then I had not revealed to anyone in Germany that I was Jewish. I was afraid. But I responded in German, “The name may be German, but like my ancestors, I am Jewish.” The two men started talking at once, saying they had nothing to do with the Holocaust. But I was more interested in what had given my mouth permission to say what it had just said. Then I remembered my dust-and-rust capital J. Since that train exchange, I have never again hidden my Jewishness, not in Germany, not in Muslim countries. This was my gift from the Dachau martyrs. This, indeed, was the final solution of my Jewish problem!

In this Dachau photo, there are three incinerators left standing.