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.".

• Author: Youra, Paula
• Position: The World Yesterday

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...