Clamorous Peace
      How does one hear the toils and celebrations of years past? In silence. Complete. Total. Beautiful. Wretched. Celebrated. Mourned. Silence. Graceful. Clumsy. Comforted. Strained. Silence. Beating. Chiming. Forceful. Gentle. Silence.
      Personally, it beats like percussion in my ears. The laughter and joy of those gone by rings like the tinkling of a sweet bell. But, it’s the dark thoughts of torturous death and sadism that sound like a bow being violently sawed against a violin-much like cold fingers brushed down a spine. The difference is laughable. Sadly, when my tour group docked in Munich, we were in store for the latter.
      Of all the days to be hot, dry, and arid, this day was perfect for it. It set a dismal mood appropriate for the eventual onslaught. Everyone gathered on the sidewalks and marched through a lush forest towards the camp, like so many before us had. Imagine their condition compared to ours! Clothes would be ragged, their scrawny bodies calling out for sustenance. This, perhaps was a call never to be answered.
      As the multitudes flocked, the day was silent. The only sound as the massive iron filigree gates yawned before us was the irregular crunch of footsteps of those entering and exiting. Out of the hundreds (or perhaps even more) of people, there was absolute silence.
  In this massive, echoing space encompassing the entire grounds, I could hear whispers of the past come into the focus. Right next to me, the crunching became more uniform as I could hear the prisoners marching to their death. In front of me, loyal servants to the Third Reich stood at attention, making sure those who entered never left alive. I followed the onslaught of Jews inside the gates of Dachau, where my life would be forever changed.
      The focus again shifted around me as I surveyed the horrors before me. Soldiers’ ghostly profiles came into view as they stately marched to and fro with bedraggled men, women, and children dragging their feet to keep up and not trip over those who fell. The rifles awkwardly bounced at the soldier’s sides as they lead in silence or light banter with one another. The raspy breaths and clinking of the Jew’s shackled feet slunk around behind the Nazis.
      There were the foundations of the barracks in front of me stretching far to my left, where the Jews used to wheeze, cough, and moan their way to sleep each night. The foundations were roughly ten feet wide-by-thirty feet long beams of wood lined into ghostly rectangles, evenly spaced about twenty feet apart. They didn’t speak much, but when they did, there were whispers of fearful Jews, questioning if their sun was ever going to rise again.
      When I laid my focus upon the soldier’s quarters, I was drawn in by their odd sense of camaraderie. Of course the inside currently was a Holocaust museum, profiling each year and circumstances leading up to WW2 and Dachau’s long run of mass-extermination, but under the present facades and displays, there were lounging men, not much older than I, who after grim day’s work, were blowing off steam; some did so by playing cards, others by smoking cigars, drinking, shooting pool, laying on their cots, and getting in lively debates with one another. It might as well have been a barrack at a military training school, for as light some of the talk was. Despite the sweet tone of fleeting companionship, I could see flickers and flashes of dread in some of their eyes. They must have, despite their appearance, not been thrilled with their “undying service to the Third Reich.”
      Once outside the building, I rushed to the other side of the grounds with the rest of my group, so as not to miss the choir. I passed the barracks on my right, and to the left were the young men perched in their towers, rifles ready to gun down any Jew who so much as looked at the fence. Their almost pious sense of duty was overwhelming! Between the watchtowers and me was a long-running ditch, filling steadily with the murky, red run-off flowing freely from the many a stray-eyed Jew whose glances were met with gunfire. So much pain! I had to keep moving!
      Stretching in front of me was at least a good quarter-mile of rock road, and I had no time. My feet were unsteady to find purchase on the gravel, but I persisted with the stone church looming ever closer. My determined reverie was shattered as I noticed the shadows were chasing me. Horrified, I moved faster, and my skin started to lightly flicker. I almost paused and to further examine, but over the yelling Nazis, many a pop pop pop resounded behind me. Waiting for the sudden impact, I finally slowed to stop in dreadful hesitation and jumped out of my skin-literally! I must not have noticed our paralleled movements, but a little boy of around twelve years of age kept running my same path and stumbled down to hit the ground in front of me. I stifled a scream as I rushed over to his crumpled form.
      He was about half a foot shorter than I was, with a head of unruly black hair. His stained and scarred olive complexion and protruding nose gave away his heritage as if someone stamped all over his face Der Juden! Der Juden! When my eyes rested on his small hands clutched at his sides, I noticed a small chunk of bread balled in each fist. My gaze crept up to his eyes, of which the gaze was fading into glass, giving away that just enough bullets had done their damage. D--- it! They really did kill him! For what? For some stale bread? Trying my best not to choke up at the suddenly silenced life, I moved forward to shut his ocher eyes, but was surrounded by a throng of Nazis. In the horde, I lost him as they shouted to delegate a peon to drag him off to the furnace.
      As the soldiers filed into their opposite directions, I looked around in the present to see if anyone had just witnessed this, but no one met my eyes; they just moved forward. I continued on to the stone church, almost there! I kept my sight fixed on that church, determined to make it without another incident.
      As I neared it, the great stone chapel came into clear view. It was a great, high-ceilinged grey cylinder that spiraled into the ground. It must have been built post-war as a commemoration and place to observe silence. Why else would there be a Methodist chapel on such Hellish ground?
      I ran inside at the last moment when the choir began to somberly croon the beginning lines of Prayer of the Children1. I stood in silence as the choir pleaded with the stifling crowd to hear the children’s prayer for astounding things: the sun to shine again, a better tomorrow, life, and above all, hope. The tears broke free from my eyes and fell down my face as the choir’s words hit home. So many children roamed this camp and only to have their lights so violently extinguished, just as that of the young boy’s death I had recently witnessed. I stood in awe as the choir reached its crescendo:
Can you hear the voice of the children softly pleading for silence in their shattered world?
Angry guns preach a gospel full of hate,
blood of the innocent on their hands.
Crying, "Jesus, help me
to feel the sun again upon my face?
For when darkness clears, I know you're near,
bringing peace again" (Bestor).
    
        I leaned into the wall behind me as the world began to shake. The song was so irrevocably true it reverberated within the stone building. I felt its melody float around me as the choir all around me gave it all they had. I thought it would be painful to hear such truth in such a place of deceit and tortuous trickery as Dachau, but it was like comfortable silence, acknowledged by everyone.
      The peace and hope spoken of in the song-did the Jews ever feel it? Despite everything, did they find it? I flashed back to the Prayer, and finally understood. They never outright told me, but I felt the undercurrent of Jewish heartbeats magnifying their beliefs and electrifying the atmosphere, even after all of these years.
       Yes.
      
     
   
     
      
      

1 Bestor, Kurt. Prayer of the Children. 1994. Los Angeles: Alfred Music, 1996