Dachau with Daughters

This afternoon turned out to have odd, interesting and bothersome twists. It was cold, but the sun was out so I decided during Sorchia's nap to pick up Olivia and Oona early from school and bike them out of Unterschleissheim, across farm fields and through woods to the Dachau Concentration Camp (Olivia is 5 and Oona is 3 and its high time they learned about genocide). On the way, Sorchia and I were accosted and nearly attacked by a lone swan that has taken up residence in the park we ride through every day. He had in fact been harassing a 12 year old boy as we drove up. (I've got a video to prove all of this).

The ride out went well. I knew half of the route and the other half I'd memorized from scrutinizing Google Earth. But as we entered Dachau and neared the camp, Sorchia, sitting in the bike seat immediately behind me, started crying. Clearly she was getting very cold, even though I'd bundled her up tight. The sun was sinking faster than I'd calculated, so we aborted the camp and opted for a few minutes at a playground.

While we were unloading, a man walking his dog came up and started chatting in German. His face was friendly, gray stubbled and shy of most of the important teeth. He wore a dirty peasant hat and peasant coat. From the little vocabulary I've picked up in the last two months I learned that he and his family were among the ethnic German's expelled from Romania in the years after WWII. I thought this quite interesting because the phenomenon of this expulsion is something I had never heard of before recently reading about it in depth in Tony Judt's excellent Postwar: Europe Since 1945. Ethnic Germans had been emigrating to different parts of eastern Europe for hundreds of years and settling in farming communities and small towns. These people hadn't lived in Germany for generations and were "citizens" of the countries in which they'd settled. It was the breadth and success of this dispersion that had, in part, emboldened Hitler to conquer territory that contained these ethnic Germans. After the war, whether because of their unwitting contribution to Hitler's plans or for revenge, the Allied leaders acceded to the demands of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland and others to allow the expulsion of these, likely largely innocent populations. Many settled in Bavaria, and here I was talking to one of them.

After 10 minutes or so at the playground, long enough for me to negligently fling Oona violently from a spinning appartus, causing her to face-plant into the woodchips, I noticed the sun was now setting and so we had to go!. This was urgent. I had no headlight on the bike, the way back was unlit and one short stretch was on a narrow road with some traffic. Also, the temperature was dropping noticeably. Sorchia balked at loading and she sobbed all the way back, 7.5 miles as I flew as fast as I could while pulling two girls in a trailer. When we got home and inside, I realized that poor Sorchia's feet were underdressed and were ice-blocks, clearly to the point of causing pain. Bad Dad! She and I cuddled in a chair for awhile until she warmed up. I'm hoping that tomorrow the rain holds off so we can try again to make the camp.