On July 9, 2010 we all stood before the gates of Dachau Concentration Camp. This was the very first camp that served as a model for all others. None of us had been in a concentration camp before this moment, so as we stood at the gates Dr. Souder, Professor VanWinkle, and Thomas—our tour guide—did their best to prepare us. We all expected to feel intense emotions ranging from shock and amazement to overwhelming confusion. We quickly learned that no one could prepare us to stand on the ground where tens of thousands of innocent people had been unjustly executed not that long ago.
Standing at the gates of Auschwitz we all expected to be hit with emotions potentially more severe then those we faced in Dachau; for Auswitch was the most brutal of all concentration and execution camps. It was here where the most victims of the Holocaust lost their lives. We all expected to see shoes, hair, and gas chambers. What we did not expect was to see such a magnitude of each. We did not expect to walk into a 20 ft corridor and see piles of shoes and hair stacked taller than we stood along the entire length of that corridor. We did not expect to walk through a gas chamber where thousands of people took their last breath each day between 1933 and 1945.
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