BLACKFIVE: Kim and Connie du Toit at Dachau

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Kim and Connie du Toit at Dachau

Posted By Blackfive

If you haven't read Kim's piece on the visit to Dachau, you should read it now.

I have been there a few times. I lived about an hour and a half away from Munich and usually took visiting friends and relatives to the site.

As a soldier, I had been through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. Extensively trained to keep going, never quit, be rock steady and survive.

When you walk into Dachau, you immediately know that there was no way anyone was escaping from that hell. It was too open. There was too much concrete, too many towers, too many fences. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was the biggest slap in the face that I ever had when I first saw it. The realization that if I were a prisoner, as much as an American bad-ass as I thought I was, that I would certainly die there.

And that's what Dachau does to you. It sucks out all evidence of hope that ever existed in you.

But the one thing that I will always remember was a photo of some Polish prisoners. There were about 5 or 6 Polish boys in a triangle formation. They looked to be about 16 years old.

They were facing a firing squard.

Emaciated. Tired. Dirty. Skin and bones with the rags of prisoner uniforms draping their bodies. They looked doomed.

Except for one boy. His head held high, he stood in the front and looked his executioners right in the eye. There was no mistaking what his eyes were telling the Nazis.

I don't know how anyone could have had that kind of courage in that hellish place. I was both amazed and heart-broken. Sad beyond anything I had felt in years. When I saw that picture, tears streamed down my face. Some stranger put their hand on my shoulder but said nothing for words would not matter.

Imagine what kind of man that boy might have become if not for the Nazis.