Carmelites to the left of him...

I should have pointed out that a couple of weeks ago I was featured on the website of the British Province of Carmelites. You can read it here, along with a horrible photo of me after I'd received the Brown Scapular.

The story rather ominously concludes with the line,

We hope to follow Roy's progress in the year ahead through news items on this website, particularly his reflection on the Carmelites who lived and died in Dachau.

So I really ought to start talking about Carmelites.

I got to know the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic Order of Friars, Nuns and Lay people, while at University in York. In many ways I am the person I am today thanks to their time, patience and presence, and they continue to challenge the way I live and think with their simple message of silence and contemplative living. They were quite struck by my placement at Dachau, not least because some of their brothers were interred here during the worst periods. Dachau was the central camp for geistlichen, religious prisoners who had opposed the Nazi regime in their respective countries. Among them were two Carmelites, Hilarius Januszewski and Titus Brandsma, who would later be beatified by the Catholic Church. Many of the brothers knew personally of Br. Raphael Tijhuis, who lived at their international college in Rome for over thirty years and who was haunted by his Dachau nightmare for the rest of his life.

The Carmelites are indeed still here. The Discalced Carmelite community of the Karmel Kloster Heilig Blut (of the Holy Blood) was established in 1964/65 and continue to pray for reconciliation through a life of prayer and solitude. I popped in for Non, a prayer of the Hours at 3pm, the other day and had a chat with the sister running the shop, in which you can buy rosaries and books looking at Dachau from a spiritual perspective. She seemed very pleased with the Carmelite connection!

Afterwards, I bought a new set of rosary beads. In the rush to pack I forgot to bring my York ones, which were on the altar at my reception into the Church two and a half years ago. I have been touched by Br Raphael's memoirs, in which he talks often of how he missed his rosary beads and risked a severe beating to pray the rosary while working on the Plantation opposite the camp.

It makes me wonder if I should try praying it more often while I'm here. Perhaps it would be appropriate to exercise that right denied to so many.

Small World

I really need to start talking a bit more about the memorial site. As you have probably guessed by now, my office is in the Protestant Church of Reconciliation, which was consecrated in 1967 by the Revd. Martin Niemöller, the renowned peace activist. He spent the early days of the Nazi regime relatively quietly, and some of his comments are seen to be anti-semitic. However, as time went on he became increasingly antagonistic and was interred in Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration Camps as a 'Prominenter' from 1937 through to liberation in 1945. After the war he helped to initiate the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, prepared by the German Protestant Church (EKD) in October 1945, and worked as a peace activist for the rest of his life.

I say all this because today, his son came in to play the Organ. He is in his late 70s/early 80s and apparently comes regularly to play in the Church his father inaugurated. He's a very nice gentleman as well, rather quiet but very friendly. It turns out that he used to go on holiday to Frinton on Sea, literally ten minutes drive from Walton on the Naze, where my family has spent almost every holiday since the mid 1990s. Small world. Then, in impeccable English, he said "Frinton is considered very posh.". Once again, spot on.

Martin Niemöller is best known for a poem he is credited with writing after the war. The exact wording is debated and has been misappropriated and manipulated by all sorts of political groups, but this is the text most often accepted and the one Niemöller himself preferred:

First they came...

"First they came for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and by then there was no-one left to speak up."

Uh-oh!

I had my first KZ dream last night. This is a phenomenon made known to me by the experiences of previous volunteers, that as one works with the memories of pain and suffering for long enough they begin to pervade the subconsciousness to such an extent that you cannot stop thinking about them. It wasn't a Dachau specific dream; I just had the clear feeling when I woke up that I had been interred somewhere, was in captivity and was slowly being starved/beaten to death.

Pleasant, eh!. I know it's a perfectly normal part of the process of working with the KZ but it's still a little disconcerting to know that there will be psychological effects.

In lighter news, I've finally signed up to a language course in Munich Volkshochschule, the community college. I'm seriously considering a dance course, just for the thrill of trying something different, and it's a decision between 'contemporary dance' and Ballet for beginners. Something tells me my physique isn't really up to Ballet, but I will definitely give the contemporary dance class a go. There's even a weekend workshop in a couple of months time that teaches you the Michael Jackson Thriller dance. I. Am. So. There!.

More on OKTOBERFEST

It is everywhere at the moment. There is live coverage of 'Wiesn' every day from about 2pm on Munich TV, and the number of visitors to the KZ Gedenkstaette has increased in the last week. I'm sitting in the office during Praesenzdienst and there are so many more people coming into the Church this week than last.

I said on Thursday that this year there is an historic 'Wiesn' as well as the normal one. Most people have only started wearing 'Tract' (traditional dress) to Wiesn in the last twenty years or so, encouraged by young people investing in what are apparently very comfortable walking trousers. They are very expensive- even a basic pair in C&A can easily set you back €100- so before people try it on; no, I am not going to buy Lederhosen.

One of the highlights for me was a chance to watch some traditional Volkstanzen, Bavarian dances. Accompanied by alpine yodels and plenty of brass instrumentation, the men slap their thighs and their shoes while the women twirl around. OK, that's a very basic description that insults the hard work put into these dances, but it looks amazing.

Before we left on Tuesday Irina and I very quickly popped in to the Paulaner tent, one of the biggest on site. It was fantastic and, although I had only had one beer, I had enough dutch courage to join in with a Schlager-tastic version of 'Sweet Caroline'. Neil Diamond would have been so proud...

Herr; es ist Zeit...

...so goes the opening line to Rainer Maria Rilke's Poem Herbst (Autumn), and he's right- it is about time too! I swear in the last twenty four hours the temperature has dropped by ten degrees centigrade, kicking us into Autumn. It seemed like a fitting way to end what was a rather morbid tour of Dachau yesterday afternoon. I was taking part in a guided walk along the 'Way of Remembrance', between Dachau station and the memorial site. The route roughly corresponds with the route that the train line took in the 1940s, and by the roadside stand info-boards with pictures of trains carrying people like cattle. Today, it is a lovely cycle path along which I ride regularly when heading into work.

It has not been difficult to settle into life in the town of Dachau. I know that it has been here for longer than Munich, that for all but twelve years of its history the town has been thriving on the fertile lands that surround it, and at the turn of the century the town heaved with some of Germany's best known artists. Yet really I forget that the whole town would have known about the concentration camp. The "Fruehlingstrasse" has my favourite kebab vendor in town. During the 1930s was renamed "Adolf-Hitler-Strasse" and a few doors down from my kebab place was a bar that was popular with the SA.

I remember before I left York somebody asked me, "How can people live [in Dachau] after all that happened during the war?". The answer is, quite easily. Titus-Brandsma-Weg is a small street with houses that, from the bedroom windows, have a clear view of the memorial site. These buildings were built well after the war and, quite possibly, after the 1960s and the development of the site as a memorial to the victims. In the 1980s the Commandant's villa along what is now the "Strasse des KZ Opfers" was demolished. On that spot these days is a basketball court for the local residents.

Some would say that ultimately this is a triumph for goodness, that the fact life goes on normally here after such barbarity is a fitting tribute for those whose normality was cruelly stolen from them. As with many things here, I reserve my judgement for when I have lived here a little longer and understand what it is to be a Dachauer.

The obligatory 'OKTOBERFEST!' post

Well it had to happen eventually. On Tuesday, the Rev. Bjoern Mensing and his lovely children took Irina and I to Oktoberfest, basking in unseasonally good weather. As we got off the S Bahn, it was clear that to get there you simply follow the long line of 'Tract'-clad Bavarians off for a great time. Seriously, I felt really quite underdressed!

I had always imagined Oktoberfest, or the Wiesn, to be a few huge Beer tents full of old men with impressive moustaches and a girth to match. Even though I have experienced an Oktoberfest before, it was on a smaller, provincial scale and had fewer people in traditional dress. All I can say is, it is huge. Absolutely huge. Like one of those carnivals that comes to your town's one green area every bank holiday, times twenty.

As it is the 200th anniversary of the first Oktoberfest, which was to celebrate the marriage of King Ludwig I and Theresa of Bavaria, there is a special historic section this year with traditional dances, costumes, fairground rides and even a mock-horse race!

Photos to follow!

Working with the Past

Today, I was taken for a tour of the memorial site for the first time. In the last few days I've had the opportunity to explore the site on my own, but I had hesitated to go in the exhibition or the crematorium until this point. Klaus met us at the Besucherzentrum (visitor centre) where he began to explain the pre war history of the site. A former munitions factory during WWI, when the Nazis came to power Heinrich Himmler (then in charge of policing Munich) saw the potential of the site as a possible concentration camp. On the 22nd March 1933, the camp was opened.

We moved through the Jourhaus, the gate house most well known for the gate saying 'Arbeit macht frei', and then toward the permanent exhibition in the former Wirtschaftsgebäude, or Maitenence Building.

Though there are boards explaining the history of the site, much of the interior has been left as it would have been back when the camp was liberated; paint flakes off the walls and much of the concrete is exposed. This was where the new inmates were brought and 'processed', and I assume that this was an attempt to remind us that this building is as much a part of the site's history as any other.

Pictures of victims before their internment are everywhere. I have seen plenty of them over the years, as we all have. A gentleman in his early forties well dressed and enjoying a summers day. A woman sitting with her young children in the garden, also enjoying the sunshine. Perhaps I have seen too many of them. I am well aware each one is a life turned upside down by events of history, yet they no longer move me in the way I feel they ought to. What did move me was the pictures of medical experiments on prisoners, then the film by the Americans of piles of bodies waiting to be cremated. I still find it hard to connect the black and white images of the 1930s with that footage of the liberation of the camp.

I have now been here just over a week, and it is only now that I realise this is no longer a holiday or a 'school trip'. I suddenly feel the huge responsibility I will eventually have not just as a guide, but as a representative of the ongoing effort to remember the past correctly, no matter how painful that may be. I'm sure there will be many graces, but what affect will it have on me? How will I react to living and working day to day with these memories?