Memorializing tragedy: taking the pathway of the prisoner: "a memorial site exists to document a specific period of history, but it also uses the power of authenticity and location to help its visitors form an emotional connection to that history."

ALMOST 61 YEARS AGO, at 5:28 p.m. on April 29, 1945, the main gate of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau--with the haunting German phrase scripted in wrought iron: Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free)--opened slowly. Cautious American G.I.s entered the grounds that were packed with thousands of gaunt, ragged, and starving forms. One G.I. called out to the prisoners, "Hello boys, here we are!"

Dachau, named after the German city in which it was located, was the Nazi regime's first concentration camp. It was the model for others such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Crimes against prisoners there earned Dachau the name "school of violence." In its 12 years of operation, at least 200,000 prisoners were sent there: 30,000 were recorded dead, and countless others died anonymously of hunger, disease, and abuse. This locale now is the most heavily visited concentration camp memorial site in Europe.

The reasons for visiting any holocaust memorial are varied, and reactions are equally diverse. We discovered after traveling to Dachau that modern holocaust memorials do offer a way to make sense out of what clearly is an insane scenario. The function of modern memorializing is to hold up for praise and public recognition that which is valued in a society, and to indicate malady to avoid in the future. "To give tribute, honor, celebrate, venerate, remember and memorialize is to commemorate," as we note in one of our books.

We further observe that commemorations "focus on what the prevailing culture should or does value." Memorial structures themselves communicate this message literally and symbolically. Our study of the National D-Day Memorial, meanwhile, found that, in commemoration, remarkable events are frozen in time lot those in the future to discern the actions and values of the people embodied in the memorial. This certainly is true in the case of Dachau. but how the prisoners are honored, venerated, and remembered is very different from how the commemoration occurs at other types of memorial or commemorative sites. At Dachau. blame is clear; praise is buffered, and the ends for this site are cathartic. What then is venerated? How does the site convey prevailing cultural values? We find that the answers to these questions are conveyed through the experience of tragedy. Since the time of ancient Greece, the experience of tragedy is said to remove pity and fear from the viewer through purgation and makes way for a cathartic or healing experience. For us, Dachau ultimately was cathartic. We invite you to walk with us now through Dachau as the prisoners did and attempt to understand what the site communicates to visitors and how that message may be interpreted.

We enter the camp on a bitterly cold day in February and find an icy white landscape, gray concrete buildings, and barbed wired still atop the guard towers. Standing inside the gates, we feel tension immediately. I (Paula) am decidedly panicky walking on the enclosed side of the barbed wire fences. Plenty of others visit the memorial that day for different reasons. I do not know any holocaust survivors, but feel strongly that I want to understand their experience through research. A traveling nurse from North Carolina mourns the recent death of an elderly Jewish friend who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz. She feels she could honor his death by visiting a concentration camp to gain respect for his experiences. My colleague (Heidi) remembers from her childhood Jewish neighbors who had been imprisoned in concentration camps and chose not to speak about their experience. She wants to learn what they felt they could not share with her.

Our walk to the exhibit leads across the bleak, snow-covered roll-call area where the prisoners had to report every morning and evening. Standing there is a monument created in 1968 by Nandor Glid, a Yugoslavian sculptor imprisoned in Nazi labor camps during World War H who later fought with partisans from his homeland. The massive bronze sculpture, 48 feet wide and eight feet tall, depicts shattered, skeletal limbs caught in a web of barbed wire. In 1967, when the International Committee of Dachau, the memorial's governing body, commissioned this sculpture as a centerpiece for the venue, committee members mandated that the artwork must embody three themes: celebrate the spirit of resistance to oppression, mourn and commemorate the victims, and express hope for a better future.

We pass beside this evocative piece and enter a former administrative building. This houses the main memorial and educational exhibit, "Path of the Prisoner," which begins with a timeline of the camp's history, factual and unemotional, housed in an empty concrete hall. Harold Marcuse, author of Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2003, points out that the guiding principle of this exhibition is "to recreate as closely as possible the path taken by inmates entering the camp. Traversing that same path is indeed a powerful way to help visitors imagine and identify with the inmates' horrific experiences, and thus be motivated to avoid the behaviors that made the atrocities of the KZ Dachau possible." The ball leads into a series of long, gray rooms. These spaces originally contained areas for processing incoming prisoners. Now they are hung with black and white banners with silk-screened texts and images describing aspects of Dachau. We, like the prisoners, are fearful of what we will encounter.