Everyone should... (Part I)

Everyone should visit Dachau, the former Nazi extermination camp, now memorial, not far from Munich, Germany.

Everyone.

My visit many years ago accentuated, in bull-horn crescendos, a question and angst that has plagued me since my youth: How did the people around Dachau and the multitude of other concentration and extermination camps, chimneys vomiting human ash, not run up to the gates screaming: “STOP THIS. STOP IT NOW!”

And would have I?

It took a 2- or 3-year-old Ethiopian boy to give me the answer.

And it ain’t pretty.

That boy sat, alone, squatting on the side of the path that took me on my walk from the YMCA in Addis Ababa into the center of the city in my young adulthood. He wore ragged clothes, barely enough to cover his boyhood. Dirt was as much a part of his body as his dark skin. A small tin cup sat in front of him, its mouth clearly wanting to be fed. The boy silently pleaded his case easily and effectively with his appearance and plaintive gaze.

And he was beautiful, as all children are.

The first day, I gave him a coin. The second day, I gave him a coin. The third day, I gave him a coin. The next, and the next, and, perhaps, the next. But, then, it stopped. Not sure what day it was. But it stopped. I walked by, with a mere glance in his direction, then no glance at all. At some point, I just didn’t see. Him.

It was a simple act (or inaction) of self-preservation. I really couldn’t help him. He was everywhere. He was everyone. The poverty, the need, of the 99 percent that was Addis Ababa, was everywhere. You saw it. You heard it. You smelled it. You tasted it. You felt it. To the core.

You turned it off.

You had to. Or it would kill you because of the absolute and stark realization that there was nothing you could really do. No matter how many times you dropped a coin, or a thousand more, it just wouldn’t help. And that’s why you turned away, or turned off completely, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the skin, the tongue, the brain. It felt much like putting a Band-Aid on an amputation. It just wouldn’t help. Nothing would.

And it was killing me. So I turned it off. Just like Herr and Frau Dachau.

If you didn’t turn it off, it would eat at you until you died.

I know the people around Dachau had to know what was going on, but had to convince themselves it was not. The futility of their own inability to stop it beat them down until they simply had to tell themselves it didn’t exist, even as the ash fell on their homes and their fields and dirtied their newly-washed linen and Sunday best hung to dry.

That numbness to horror and futility is something I came to realize during my time in Ethiopia and a thousand other places like it.

I wanted to scream “STOP IT. STOP IT NOW! DO SOMETHING.”

No one, it seems, is listening. Or caring enough to listen.

That little Ethiopian boy, if alive, now a middle-aged man, is with me every day. And, yes, I’m ashamed. To this day, and beyond.

Maybe if everyone on the planet visited Dachua, it would change.

Maybe then everyone would stand up and yell: “STOP IT. STOP IT NOW! DO SOMETHING.”

And, maybe, maybe, someone would finally listen.

I have failed. But I feel as though I am alone, my voice in a vacuum.

Together, as a chorus, perhaps there is hope.

“STOP IT. STOP IT NOW!”

“DO SOMETHING!”

Visit Dachau. Everyone.

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