A Few Miles from Dachau

A Few Miles from Dachau

I was famished when my train from Brussels pulled into the Munich station, so I went straight to the outdoor food kiosk. I ordered a beer and a steaming Leberkäse sandwich, the German staple of ground pork and beef on a crusty roll. Leberkäse translates as “liver cheese,” even though it doesn’t contain either, which should have been my first clue about this trip.

I had $1,000, an overflowing backpack, and no plans beyond getting to the youth hostel I had circled in Let’s Go: Europe. My goal was to stay abroad as long as the money lasted, which I estimated, based on absolutely nothing, would be two to three months. All I knew for certain was that I was eating the best sandwich of my life. I finished my lunch, grabbed my backpack, and trundled down the snowy street.

Starting my post-college journey in Germany wasn’t a deliberate choice. While my Jewish father grew up there, and his family was expelled by the Nazis, I chose Munich because I found a cheap flight. My connection to Germany, or Judaism for that matter, felt immaterial. At twenty-one, I believed identity was a lifestyle choice. You could lean into it or set it aside. Postponing decisions felt like freedom.

“Why do you want to be an au pair?” the woman at the desk asked me two days after I arrived in Munich, as if either of us believed I actually wanted to be an au pair. I had stumbled into her office by accident, asking for directions after my friends ditched me at the Hofbräuhaus. My German was decent, and after she explained how to get back to the hostel she asked if I wanted to be an English tutor for a 13-year-old boy for a few months while I was in town. Oh, and tidy up a bit in exchange for room and board and a travel allowance. I always say yes to new opportunities, especially if they make no sense, so I filled out her forms and said being an au pair would help me practice my language skills and learn about my father’s home country. Neither mattered to me, but it sounded like something I was supposed to say.

The next morning, I boarded a commuter train to Gröbenzell, a small town north of Munich that turned out to be a short bike ride away from the Dachau concentration camp. That information wouldn’t have meant a thing to me before my time abroad, but it changed the context of my life.

I moved into the basement of the Keller family a few days later. Dietmar was the father, who I drank beer with most nights. Sabine was the mother, who told me privately that she slept in a spare bedroom down the hall from her husband, a subtext I didn’t catch at the time. Manfred was the 13-year-old son who had no interest in English. And Alexandra was the 17-year-old daughter. One would think that would disqualify a 21-year-old male live-in au pair. It did not.

A few months into my stay, I rode the family bicycle to the nearby Dachau concentration camp. I knew about the horrors of the camps from school and the movies, and I figured my parents would want me to see it. I wasn’t particularly interested in my Jewish background. If anything, I was embarrassed by it. Like a lot of kids, I wanted parents who seemed normal and impressive. My non-Jewish friends had cool parents who drank cocktails and belonged to country clubs. My parents had accents and belonged to a synagogue. Judaism was dowdy and uptight and I was neither.

I got lost the first time I tried to visit the camp and ended up at a fun street fair, with musicians, crafts and food. I bought a hot cup of Glühwein and laughed at one of the street fair performers who had a trained mouse run up and down his arms and shoulders. Feeling buzzed from the sweet hot wine and feeling bad for having a good time instead of going to the concentration camp, I asked an older woman next to me in German if she could tell me how to get to Dachau. A bit drunk herself, she put her arm around me and said, “Sweetie, you’re in Dachau right now.”

The music kept playing behind us. Someone was laughing. It all sounded suddenly obscene.

I hadn’t realized that Dachau was the name of a town, not just the name of the concentration camp, and I couldn’t believe I was drinking and laughing in the city that killed so many innocent people. I threw away the rest of my wine and walked to my bike, dizzy and ashamed. What the hell was I doing? My father was a Holocaust survivor for God’s sakes.

I rode to the concentration camp and, seeing no bike racks, chained my bike against the camp’s rusted barbed wire fence. So many prisoners saw this fence as a place to be electrocuted and killed. I saw it as a convenient place to lock up my old bicycle.

I went inside the camp and bought a ticket. It felt strange to pay money to go into a place of such horror, but I did it every week or two after that. I would mostly walk alone on the cement foundations of the old housing barracks. I found the experience of pacing alone in the cold more meaningful than standing in front of the ovens, listening to the tourists gasp. With strangers, I traveled through a museum. Alone, I traveled through time.

The world used to feel very light, and often still does, but walking over the foundations filled me with darkness. It made me wonder what the Kellers knew, and what they had decided not to know, and whether that kind of not-knowing was something you practiced or something you inherited.

And it made me wonder how that knowledge shaped the way people felt about me in my quaint little village of Gröbenzell.

Did they wish I didn’t exist?

Or do they feel absolved because I do?

During my first few months, Gröbenzell had been a light and happy place to drink beer and flirt, but it became something else, a place bordering atrocity, where my Jewishness mattered in ways I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t given my Judaism much thought over the past decade, but now it raised its hand and asked, “What about me?”

Some questions don’t care how old you are. They wait patiently in the background, sometimes just a few miles away, until you’re close enough to hear them.

I didn’t answer the question right away, but that winter in Gröbenzell was the first time I understood that identity isn’t something we always get to choose.

Sometimes it waits for us.

And then it chooses us.