I feel like I've reached a place where I don't understand anything anymore.

I went to the Dachau concentration camp. It's the first camp the SS set up to house political prisoners, and even though they didn't use their gas chamber for mass killing, they still treated people atrociously. We had a guide who was really detached and didn't seem to care, so it was hard to process everything on a human level. It's hard to understand how a person survives in that kind of devastatingly sadistic and depraved environment, and how it was that a world allows this kind of existence to happen.

When we first got there, the tour guide asked our group why we wanted to see the camp. No one was willing to answer. Finally, this woman who was part of a mother/daughter combo from Pennsylvania pointed to her daughter and said, "She wanted to see it."

"Anyone else?" the guide asked. We all remained silent. "So you're all here for the same reason?"
Yeah, I thought. Because of that girl.

I wonder why it's so hard to admit you want to see the site of the most gruesome trainwreck in history. It's just important for people to understand and remember.

Most of the buildings are torn down and some of the things have been replaced by replicas. They've taken away enough things so that this place is a memorial, a symbol that will allow survivors to remember and mourn, but not exact and authentic enough to retain the most threatening of its evil power.

The only thing that had really bad feelings was the gas chamber. It has no windows so when you walk in, you're stuck with it, all the energy in the room.

Even the room where they piled the corpses. Empty. You couldn't imagine what they were doing here if you didn't see the photo on the wall.

I couldn't understand. I saw the pictures. And they were unbelievable. But the way the only things that remain are these mostly empty buildings filled with sunlight...they buried a lot of it. I couldn't feel the energies to understand what had happened, how it was that 43,000 people could have died in the place where I was wandering, living a daily existence worse than anything they had ever imagined hell to be like. It was weird to stand in a place of great suffering but still not know how it was this happened, how evil could have exerted its will in such a far-reaching way.

There's something about this country that makes you feel like your mind is in a fog, like it clouds your memory.

The sadistic potential in man is not something to underestimate. Ever.

You have to be careful talking about these things in Germany. They are sensitive about it.

A couple of nights ago I was on the subway late at night in Berlin, and these punks were drunk off their asses and violent. This one guy with piercings and a mohawk kept stalking up and down the aisles, intermittently beating on this guy while this strung out looking girl with short, spiky hair kept screaming, "Nein! Nein!" and trying to grab him as he kept kicking the guy in the face. The guy being beat was bigger but he just sat there with his eyes downcast, body hunched and took it.

Another one of their friends, a bony guy in an army vest with a dirty blond goatee, was walking from one end of the car to the other, thrusting this big, white rat into the faces of girls to make them scream and cower. As he came down the aisle, he did it to the girls sitting next to me, and they screamed, huddling together. I kept calmly small-talking to the guy next to me and projected a feeling of being emotionally bored with the scene. He skipped over us and kept going. If he had messed with me, I was prepared mentally for a fight to the death. But for whatever reason, he didn't see me. Not having full access to my emotions makes interpersonal relationships difficult sometimes, but every once in a while, it helps me be a pretty calm and aware projector in dangerous situations.

So then guy who had been beating the other guy got up and started pacing the car. He was looking for trouble. The drunk Nein girl was screaming at people to stop him. No one made eye contact. He kicks this piece of glass next to the door with a shutteringly realistic violence. An old woman in the back somewhere gasps. He starts screaming at everyone in German, then he kicked the glass again, shattering it. Everyone in that section jumped up and crowded towards the back of the car. In my my head, I directed all my energy into the knowledge that I knew nothing was going to happen. That this was just another cliched moment in a play.

When we got to the next stop, everyone jumped up and got out of the car. The police must have been notified of the trouble because they were in front of our exact car, waiting to get on.

I dropped it out of my mind, just thinking that if I still remembered it when I next blogged, I would mention it.

It wasn't until later that night, walking home from dinner, that it dawned on me that what happened had been a scary situation.