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Who do you want to be?
As World War II progressed, concentration camps such as Dachau, which opened in March 1933 and could accommodate 5,000 people, ballooned in size and no one could escape the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. By the end of the war, when the Americans liberated Dachau in 1945, Konnilyn Feig points out the camp held 30,000 prisoners, six times what it could accommodate, and “8,000 unburied corpses.” What did the people next to Dachau think? What did they do when trains pulled into the camp, unloaded, and went out empty? What did they do when the work details left and returned every night?
John A. Williams, in his novel Clifford’s Blues, points out the psychological disconnect it took to perpetrate and live amidst all of the violence. In his January 7, 1943, diary entry, Clifford Pepperidge details how Dieter and Anna Lange, the German SS couple whom he lives with Dachau, respond to the environment of Dachau and also to the encroaching Allied forces. Anna turns a blind eye to what’s occurring: “she didn’t see the bodies piled up beside the morgue or in the ditches near the train sidings or thrown against the four sides of the crematorium. She didn’t know that a prisoner found with a single louse on him went to his death.”
As the wife of an SS officer, she chose to ignore all of it because it did not affect her. However, if others discovered that her husband, Dieter, as gay and…
