AND THE MUSIC DIED

All the adulthood, all the cynicism, all the professed sanity, all the control over emotions crumble. It takes one accordion enclosed in a glass case to do that. It reaches out and, dub it dramatic drivel or whatever, clutches your heart. An accordion is just another musical instrument right? Not this one. It belonged to Isia Rosmarin, a 14-year old, who went one day from being just another teenager to an inmate of the first Nazi and the most notorious Dachau Concentration Camp established on March 10, 1933. He was one of the lucky few who was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. Just how many victims perished is unlikely to be known ever.

A 20 minutes or so train ride and another short bus trip, the Camp, 16 kilometres from Munich, has been preserved as a memorial. The unspeakable horror that transpired there screams silently. It is impossible to even imagine what Satanic minds could inflict such gruesome torture on fellow beings. At one time it might have been a matter of pride for the Nazis that the Dachau Concentration Camp became the prototype and training centre for all SS organised camps.

The entrance has a gate with 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (work makes you free) at the top. Free? There is a stark difference beyond what lies within and the immediate space outside. A driveway divides the cold walls of the Camp and the tree lined mowed grass stretch on the right. The guide Matt, points out the white structure at the end, that's where the SS officers stayed. The scenic beauty acquires demonic dimensions. To the left is another grassy stretch, tree lined on one side only, and at the end of the wall a watch tower is visible.

  

 

How does one describe a tour that chills one to the core and leaves your senses etherized? Matt herds the group around; the solemn commentary continues. The Camp was set up barely five weeks after Hitler declared himself Chancellor. First came the political prisoners - the Social Democrats, the Communists. Soon, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests were incarcerated. Then November 1938 onward, the Jews were marched to the Camp.

What went in the camp defies description. It became a laboratory were the inmates were guinea pigs for unimaginable Nazi experiments. What happens when humans are subjected to sudden increase and decrease in atmospheric pressures? Immerse a prisoner  in icy water. Effects of drinking seawater; effects of going on without food or water; infecting prisoners with malaria and treating them with unknown drugs; tuberculosis medical experiments; making incisions on limbs and infecting them with glass slivers, bacteria, dirt- no horrendous experiment was spared.   

Inhuman conditions, overcrowding, revolting medical experiments, unending physical and mental torture, it goes without saying, equals increasing number of near-dying inmates and high mortality rate. With cold-blooded precision a crematorium was built in 1940. Within a year it was working beyond its capacity. Two years later another crematorium with four chambers were built. It didn't matter what brutalities were inflicted on the inmates because the Hitler's edict made it clear that Dachau and other concentration camps that followed were beyond the purview of German law as applied to German citizens. Many must have prayed for death. 

 

 

      

 

Then there were the fumigation cubicles. The naked prisoners were marched into it...

  

 

Stripped of every iota of dignity and brutalised every which way, it speaks of human resilience that were and are survivors. Decades later, the horror of it all still chills one to the bones. The cells and rooms are empty; then it was hell on earth.

 

 

   

 

 

Among those who never stepped out the gate of the Camp was an Indian princess Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan.

Till today just how many entered the gate and how many perished is not known. On record over 20,000 were listed; scores and scores more were never registered. And you wonder if there is really any justice at all.