Ten years ago we went to Germany. We went with our friends Margaret and Dave and Margaret knew a Dachau survivor. She really wanted to see the historic site so we booked a tour. The Dachau Concentration Camp is not a tour you should want to do, but a tour everyone should do. It was the most disturbing site I've ever seen. The history, buildings that are left and stories were horrifying.
I saw this article and I thought it was worth sharing. If you go to Munich, it's a short train ride and excursion you will never forget!
They Crawled to the Gate – Dachau, Germany, 1945
When American troops reached Dachau on April 29, 1945, the first thing they saw was not movement, but a trembling stillness—figures so thin they blended with the mud, so weak they could no longer command their own bodies. As the gates finally swung open, liberation did not erupt in shouts or cheers. Instead, men and women began to crawl forward, dragging themselves across the ground with what little strength starvation had not yet stolen. Some pushed with their elbows, others inched on their stomachs, and a few reached out with trembling fingers toward the sunlight as if touching freedom itself.
Many soldiers later said they had prepared themselves for death, but nothing prepared them for the sight of the living. One GI fell to his knees as the prisoners crossed the threshold—not walking, but pulling themselves through it, determined to leave hell behind even if their legs could not carry them. “They saluted us… with their eyes,” he recalled. “No gesture. No words. Just tears and bones and silence.” In that silent exchange, the soldiers understood the enormity of what those broken bodies had endured, and what it meant for them to crawl into a world that had finally come back for them.
For the survivors, that crawl was not humiliation—it was triumph. Their bodies had been ruined, but their will had not. Each inch they moved was a refusal to die within the walls that were built to erase them. Even today, historians say those first moments at Dachau were among the most haunting in the liberation of the camps: a procession of the nearly dead reclaiming life one desperate, determined movement at a time.
