Dachau, 2023

It's a sunny spring morning. Our train has departed with Germanic punctuality from Munich Central Station. As soon as we leave the city behind, we are moved by the beauty of the landscape: intensely yellow rapeseed fields, large groves of deep green, and small villages of white houses with slate roofs, orderly and elegant. I notice that at the stations we pass, there are dozens of bicycles parked and not a single piece of paper on the ground. Among the passengers, some read, some listen to music with headphones, and some, like me, gaze idly out the window. No one shouts, no mobile phones are heard, and those who speak practically whisper. I envy these civilized Germans who ride bicycles and don't raise their voices.

Then, the public address system announces that we are about to arrive in Dachau, and a shiver runs down my spine. As soon as we get off the train, there's a sign announcing the latest edition of Dachau's traditional Christkindlmarkt. At Christmas, the center of this city of forty thousand inhabitants, located twenty kilometers from Munich, apparently fills with colorful lights, carols, bucolic craft stalls, and thousands of people drinking glühwein to warm up. It seems sinister to me; I can't help it. From the bus that takes us to the former concentration camp, I observe some everyday scenes of this sadly famous Bavarian city. An elderly lady leaving a shop with a bag full of groceries and a bouquet of tulips, a young girl pushing a baby in a stroller, two teenagers looking at something on their phone and bursting into laughter, and a bricklayer renovating a small house surrounded by a garden. Their normality disturbs me. Why? What was I expecting?

In the same way as Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, or Mauthausen, for me, the name Dachau has always been synonymous with horror. The concentration and extermination camps, the crematoria, the most abject crimes, the tortures and humiliations, the most terrible and inhuman experiments, the wire fences, the barracks, the striped uniforms, the inverted pink triangle, the yellow Star of David, millions of men and women exploited to death, children gassed or killed by a rifle butt, people and more people stripped even of their names and reduced to skin and bone, mountains of corpses...

In the spring of 1933, exactly ninety years ago, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau. During the twelve years it was in operation, 200,000 men were imprisoned in its facilities: some for being political adversaries, others for being homosexuals, Roma, or, of course, Jews. In a few days, after Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass (November 9, 1938), nearly 10,000 arrived.

The former Dachau concentration camp is today a memorial that reminds us of one of the most terrible pages in 20th-century European history. We owe this to its surviving prisoners who, after liberation, fought to ensure that their enormous suffering would not be forgotten. Walking in silence through the old detention and torture chambers, through the courtyard where prisoners were forced to form for hours, or through the crematorium where so many were eliminated only makes sense if it vaccinates us against everything that Nazism embodied. "Der Toten zur Ehr, den Lebenden zur Mahnung" ("To honor the dead, to warn the living"), as can be read on the pedestal of the statue to the unknown prisoner).

The former Dachau concentration camp is today a memorial that reminds us of one of the most terrible pages in 20th-century European history

Of course, citizens are not responsible for the mistakes of the generations that preceded them, but they do have the civic duty to preserve and respect their spaces of memory, however painful this may be. And this applies to Dachau, but also to Barcelona.