We knew the bus would be there in exactly 8 minutes and 32 seconds. We didn’t crowd around the bus stop as we usually did; we kept some distance from each other. None of us seemed to have any desire to admire the pictures we had shot. We were all unusually silent though we knew that it wouldn’t last; we would all start chattering soon and by dinner time, downing Belgian beers at the beer garden, we would have all but forgotten our mid-afternoon sojourn. So eight minutes were probably all we had. Eight minutes in a small bus stop outside Munich on a lovely spring afternoon when life seemed like crystal; and the line separating good and evil so straight and so clear that I could easily have been a believer.

The first thing I noticed in Dachau was the lack of tourists. Munich was crawling with them but here, a few miles away on the S-bahn, there were hardly any. Not even the ubiquitous school kids on one of their field trips. Maybe it was the wrong time of the year, or maybe people loved to forget Dachau, the way they did back then. Or more likely, everyone just went to Auschwitz. If you anyway decided to visit a concentration camp, might as well go all the way and visit the mother of them all. The few people around us were much older, and they all looked very solemn. A few minutes ago, they would have been on the train admiring the countryside as we had done, talking excitedly about their Europe travel plans. On the bus from the train station to the camp, they would have been a little quieter; voices would have become lower and conversations intermittent. Once they were inside the grounds, all conversation would have stopped. It was like going to a distant uncle’s funeral – the old, unmarried uncle who never kept in touch, who no one had really known until we heard that he passed away. Now we are all here at his funeral, looking appropriately serious, trying to recall his face, his mannerisms, his life from a few photographs and stories. Just that in this case, there’s a barrage of stories and images.

Barbed wire fence with guard towers. An image made famous by hundreds of photos, and movies, book covers and documentaries; one would have to have been asleep the past 60 years to have not seen pictures of barbed wire fences. It is almost always the first in any series of pictures on the Holocaust, and it immediately conjures up other horrific images that you know would follow. Here, finally, in front of me was the real thing, and if it were not for the guard towers, I could have easily mistaken it for the fence around my grandpa’s cashew farm. I felt a constriction in my throat, and I took out my camera and started snapping pictures in rapid succession.

Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp, built in 1933 in the outskirts of Munich, and it remained in operation through 1945. This camp served as a prototype for the later camps. SS personnel who would run the other camps later were trained here at Dachau. Eichmann and Hess were regulars. Pastor Martin Niemöller quoted his famous lines here in Dachau. Over 200,000 prisoners were interned here, and official camp records lists 30,000 deaths. All this we knew from our history books, and we read them again in the museum which used to be the camp headquarters.

In front was the roll call area where rolls were called everyday. If you weren’t there for the call, you were most probably dead. It looked like a public school playground where the morning assembly is held. Behind the roll call area, there were 32 prisoner barracks of which a handful have been carefully reconstructed since the liberation. I went inside the nearest one, there were a couple of people inside and I felt claustrophobic. It was one thing to read in a history book that at the peak of the war, there were hundreds of people living in a 30 sq ft barrack but it is something else altogether to be in this room, the size of my living room, and imagine more than 20 people inside at any time. I shot a couple of pictures of the tiny bunk beds and left. I then walked over to the camp’s old entrance through which the prisoners would have been brought in. “Arbeit Macht Frei” neatly inscribed on the gate. Work shall, indeed, set us free. What more can you say about a “work” camp?

We walked through the camp road to the other end of the barracks on our way to the crematorium and the gas chambers. The crematorium and barrack X (which housed the gas chambers) were separated from the main prisoner camp. Only the prisoners on crematorium duty were allowed in. We crossed a small moat to get to the memorial of the unknown prisoner. An appropriate looking prisoner statue seemed to be in high demand as everyone wanted a picture with him. I walked over to the crematorium building - it had a chimney which would have been puffing around the clock when the camp was in operation. Inside, there were two huge ovens on which the prisoners would have piled up bodies of fellow prisoners. All very efficient for that age, I thought. The girl standing next to me threw up.

On the way back to the main entrance, we passed a few religious memorials. Everyone seemed to be well represented here as they were half a century ago. Not surprisingly, the most impressive of them all turned out to be the secular, International Monument with “Never Again” inscribed in five languages. A coalition of artists worldwide worked together and voted on this design. We stood next to the monument and shot a few pictures. There was something obscene about this particular exercise and we could all feel it, but we took pictures anyway.

“Did you guys just visit the camp?”

I looked at my watch. One minute and 32 seconds for the bus. A young man of not more than twenty had just sat down on the bench beside me.

“Yes, we are waiting for the bus now. You were visiting the camp too?”

“Yes, I started from Russia last year, and I am traveling across the continent. I would work for a month or so at every place that catches my fancy. I worked my way through much of Eastern Europe. I worked in Serbia and Slovakia and Poland.”

“Nice. That’s a lot of travel”

“Yes, it is. So what did you think about the place?”

“How does one even begin to answer that?”

“Hmm… Did you see that Never Again memorial?"

“Of course”

“You think we really meant Never Again?”

“We probably did”

“Then what are we doing sitting here?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Rwanda. Darfur. Bosnia. Serbia. Iraq. Afghanistan. Kashmir. Palestine. Every other place in the world. And here we are feeling good about ourselves because we said never again; we go on and on about how more civilized we are and how much we have come since 60 years ago”

“So you think the monument is a joke?”

“Of course it is. Never Again indeed! We know that nothing has changed and so we need such ostentatious memorials to delude ourselves”

The bus is on time. Right down to the second. Talk of precision.

(Veena travels, or rather she loves to travel. When she is not traveling, you can find her inside Excel cells dreaming of malabar fish curry)

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