Travel Left its Tattoo On My Soul
Anthony Bourdain said it best. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life and travel leaves marks on you.”
Yesterday, that mark tattooed itself on my soul.
After 42 years, I finally checked something off my bucket list. Dachau. I’ve always loved history. Call me a history nerd. I own it. I even have a degree in it. My focus was from 1923 to 1973. From the rise of the Nazi party to the fall of Saigon. I never really knew why I felt this pull toward that part of history. Maybe it was because it was such a dark time for humanity. Maybe because I was raised Jewish. Maybe both.
But I do know this. At the age of 12, two brothers came home from Catholic school and told me I killed Jesus Christ. Around the same age, a neighbor looked at me and my friend and said “Hitler should have gotten all of you.” When I was 17, a classmate in Jerusalem got punched in the face by a Norwegian tourist who said “Hitler should have killed you.”
At 19, my father and I got into it with someone on the intercoastal waterway. The person looked at us and said “you people.” A friend told me a story about getting into an elevator in Poland during a Birthright trip. Someone looked at her and said “I thought we got all of them.”
All of this made me feel like I had to understand it. Why it happened. How it happened. So that it would never happen again.
October 15, 2025. A day I will never forget. The sky was the bluest blue. Not a single cloud. The breeze was cool and clean. I walked the path toward the gate. Arbeit Macht Frei. Work will set you free.
I stopped. There was nothing. No birds. No crickets. No sound. Just silence. A crow sat on the train platform like it was standing guard over the ghosts. I felt a weight press down on me. But weirdly, I also felt peace.
I walked into the barracks and saw the rooms where prisoners lived. I touched the walls and tried to imagine what they felt. I walked down the rock path, turned left, and saw the crematorium. I walked up and started to take pictures. Then it hit me. I was standing where they gassed people. Where their lives ended…
I can’t explain the feelings that went through me. They were heavy. They were real. They were mine.
But I know this, I am not the same person who walked in through that gate. Dachau changed me.
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