Thoughts about My Trip to Munich on my 50th Birthday

Thoughts from Gramm--

2/20/23 –President’s Day--An important memory I want to share with you.  The Munich International Security Conference has been held in Munich since 1963. I must admit that I never paid much attention to it. But this year with our government at odds and democracy being threatened world wide, I was reminded of a trip J.D. and I took to Munich in November of 1984, the month I turned 50. It was a business trip for Corcom, a company, whose electronics Conti-Younger represented. . That year, November, 1984 was the start of Ronald Reagan’s 2nd term of office……….

Dachau Concentration Camp was located a train ride away, so J.D. and I took the trip to pay respects to the souls whose lives were sacrificed because not enough people cared soon enough for Jews and others, thought unworthy of life. What follows is the story from my Travel Journal of Munich that year……………

And so it is November 14, 1984. We leave today to visit Dachau. It is a bitter cold day. We take the train to Dachau, an ordinary village-- business as usual. Then a bus to the memorial itself. It is a vast, white, sterile site chilling an already frigid day. We walked through the gates guarded by barbed wire some of it rusty enough to have seen more than anyone would want to. We walked what seemed like miles of white pebbled walkways to the only remaining barracks whose contents were merely replicas of the slabs, notched to mark each individual's territory. Some comments were posted in several languages in each barrack.

The next pause was at the memorials: Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic. The Jewish memorial reminded me of a coffin being lowered into the ground. The crematorium, of course, was the worst. Tablets marked the procedural steps to “freedom”. A short walk through the woods gave the continued history with a gravestone at the several places for unknown ashes; to mark an execution area with ditch; a torture area. We stopped at each to pray for the dead AND the living. The museum itself was in German only but fully disclosed as best we could tell . We were  not in time to see the English documentary shown only twice per day. There were several student groups touring. How could they ever understand? I don't think we do either. The Nazis had every list of names checked and cross checked and a method of designation that began with a triangle patch sewn on each uniform then added to by a rectangle and star of David and further designated by color. It read something like this.

The designations I could decipher were: politics, occupation, emigrant, Bible researcher, homosexual crime, company, Jew, pathology.

The sign at the gate of the camp when it was in operation read “Arbeit Macht”—with work comes freedom. The fresh graffiti drawn with modern markers upon the wall adjacent to the cell were the following words “England’s neo-Nazis say, gas all the Jews and Niggers” That was Dachau -- cold and whiter than the winterscape I saw yesterday, painted by Adolf Holzel in 1900, and titled "Dachau".

November 14th

Our last Corcom dinner was tonight and it really destroyed me! Having visited Dachau during the day put us in a weary an wary mood. Then at a dinner with young Germans who work for the company, someone asked me what we did that day. When I said we had visited Dachau, a young man said, “Oh! Did you collect any bones?” I reacted with horror and let him know that he was out of line and ignorant. Later a young German woman came over to apologize for the guy’s stupidity. She was so embarrassed by him.

Let’s get out of here and celebrate my 50 th birthday!!!!!!!

Munich to London to N.Y. to Bermuda……