Twenty miles north

Mecca and St. James’s Way step aside: the pilgrimage of choice (at least for fall semester study abroad students) is Oktoberfest. Every year, thousands of Americans aged 18-22 rush to Munich to partake in the annual festival of beer and pretzels in which the clinking of steins provides a percussive compliment to the brass of traditional German folk music.

Like many of my fellow American students spending the next three months of their college careers in Europe, I dropped everything last weekend to attend Oktoberfest. Saturday in Munich, I got up well before the crack of dawn so that I could secure prime real estate within the confines of Hofbräu Festzelt and party with all the other Americans who had made the trip. We all drank, ate fried food and consumed salted pretzels to our heart’s content as brave souls stood upon tables and endeavored to polish off quarts of beer in one gulp with minimal spillage.

At last, after sixteen consecutive hours on the Oktoberfest grounds, I decided to call it a day and head back to my hotel to rest. The following morning, with hours to kill before my 6 p.m. flight, I Googled “things to do in greater Munich,” and after scrolling through a list of items, all of which blended together into a jumble of accented vowels and way-too-many consecutive consonants, one name was instantly recognizable:

“Dachau.”

I would like to say something about how the word had an eerie ring to it or sent chills down my spine, but, to be honest, I had become so used to conversation about the Holocaust that it had no particular effect. As a result of growing up in a fairly Jewish community, I had become incredibly familiar with the topic of the Holocaust. I learned about it all throughout elementary school, high school and Hebrew school and had even visited Yad Vashem—the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel. Because of my background, the event had achieved a level of normalcy to me.

However, I felt the need to go, so I rallied my friends and we took the train to Dachau. When we arrived, we walked around the site taking in all the artifacts. Much of the camp was destroyed by Nazis wishing to conceal the extent of their party’s ethnic cleansing during World War II’s final years, but the reconstruction of the barracks and bunkers were revealing of the inauspicious conditions that the prisoners in the camp faced. As I walked around the camp, the normalcy began to fade and the exceptionality of the whole event felt more and more real. But the gravity of each and every step I took in Dachau hadn’t hit me yet.

That moment would come when I shuffled my way into the remembrance room of the museum in the camp. Perched upon a desk in the corner of the room was a black-covered book about ten inches thick that held the names, hometowns and death dates of the 31,951 prisoners who died in Dachau. I turned the cover and began to read the most gruesome guest book of all time, with three whole pages—roughly 100 names—dedicated solely to people with the last name “Weiss.”

This one moment put everything into perspective to me. I thought about the first article I wrote for this column, which was about my decision to go to Dublin instead of Istanbul and I couldn’t believe how serious I was about the decision. I described it as “the hardest [decision] I have made in my life,” as if determining whether to spend the next four months of my life mostly traveling and partying—selfish pleasures—held any real consequence. Had I been living in Eastern Europe during the time of the Third Reich, many decisions would have been between life or death.

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