Reflections from Dachau

This is the second time this month I've visited Dachau, the concentration camp located outside of Munich. For some reason, it wasn't boring. My tour on this occasion could serve as a foil for my first tour. We need look no further than the guides, the first an entertainer (in the most general terms because concentration camps are not entertaining) who learned stories about Dachau specifically and had had only sparse background knowledge of the war as a whole; the latter a PhD in eastern european history capable of speaking four languages with an a thorough understanding of every apsect of the war who presented his facts and arguments with the zealousness of a professor in a History 100 class. The first attempted to recreate the feeling of living under the harshest conditions while striving to make a connection utiilizing anecdotes of various inhabitants to really bring the starkness of the situation to life while the most recent allowed the gravity of the atmosphere and situation to speak for itself, taking an approach of formally educating us as to how this came about and what role it played (not Dachau but the holocaust in general) played in the overall scheme of Hitler's plan. Approaching Dr. Wasser about these differnces, he questioned which I thought was better. At first I hastily replied the former tour taken with my family (although acknowleding the usefulness of the other), but now I really find both to be comparable, Each serves its own purpose, and the best case scenario would be to do as I did, just go twice. Why not, it never gets old.