There are probably very few words in this world, which are understood in all languages by all peoples. One of these is "Dachau". In the year 1792 the Bavarian priest Lorenz Westenrieder wrote in his diary, "the market Dachau is, a fresh, merry and laughing place." Two hundred years later the pretty little German village with its sixteenth century castle lives under the heavy weight of history and tainted memories of its recent past still linger like a pungent scent in the afternoon breeze. In nearby Munich, people often talk about a wind called the Fohn, which slips in over the Alps and becomes mischievous as it whispers daft Italian things in sagacious Bavarian ears. Like this wind, time itself moves on and if you were to wander through the village markt, you would find few people now who could recall the Government that once offered prosperity and the rebirth of the German nation in exchange for taking control of their daily lives. Then, as you wandered down along Sudentenland Strasse with its ornate eighteenth century facades and noticed the signs pointing towards the Konzentrationslager, you might feel the restless winds drop as suddenly as they started. For it was here on 20^th March 1933, that the National Socialist German Worker’s Party opened their first camp to forcibly incarcerate people that they considered ‘enemies of the state’. As the years passed, the Party employed the local Geheime Staatapolizei to enforce their policy of Gleichschaltung policy and purged the other political parties of suspected opponents, effectively turning the German nation into a totalitarian state. Although the Jews were only a small percentage of the population, they were used as scapegoats for every difficulty in the new order, until finally the Schutzstaffeln began the formal extermination of the entire race. It is believed that over five million Jewish people were murdered in the gas chambers of these concentration camps, during the period of history, now remembered as the Holocaust. In Dachau, medical experiments were performed on more than three and a half thousand inmates and another twenty-eight and a half thousand were murdered or died of starvation and disease. When American forces liberated the camp in 1945, they found ten thousand dead prisoners and more than thirty two thousand others dying from starvation. After the War ended, the new Government constructed a museum in the former camp with three memorials in memory of the differing Judaeo-Christian religions of the inmates. They also erected another shrine beside the crematorium and the gas chamber, in memory of prisoners from the Russian Orthodox faith. To the side of the crematoriums, they left the small circular path, which led to the ash burial sites, the execution aria and a mass grave of uncremated bodies. I remember being on this path many years ago, when an New York Jewish woman took exception to the fact that a wheelie bin near the crematorium had the words ‘Keine heisse ashen enfullen’ (don’t fill with hot ashes) rather insensitively imprinted on the lid. The memory of the incident remained with me on my further travels, whether it was the thoughtlessness or the indifference, it tainted our common sense of Christian guilt.

Now I was here again, the days like the impatient clouds had also moved on and the magic months were suddenly years. It was late afternoon in mid July and the hovering mists enduring from U2’s Elevation concert in the Olypmiahalle the night before were thankfully beginning to clear. I was thinking about the location of the venue, finding it difficult to believe that the green landscaped hills around the concert hall had been constructed from over twelve million tonnes of ornate Gothic, Baroque and Rococo rubble, which was taken from the streets of Munich after the aerial bombing of the Second World War. The path was peaceful now, it had been raining gently on the graves and I walked quietly in solemn respect for the spirits of the prisoners who had been buried there. For a moment, I contemplated the contrasting ethos of the concert and the camp, how the differing philosophies of Bono and Hitler were now woven into a complex tapestry, paradoxically reflected in a pretentious raised pink herzfoermigen catwalk and the humbleness of a little gravel path. But, it was not only the difference in these structures, the group’s presence on the night had been so vibrant that the world within these walls seemed to have come to a total halt, tormented spirits now at last at rest with their solitude with only the cold winter winds to numb their hidden pain. I walked futher along the path, surrounded with a sense of encompassing peace, until I reached the ‘Grave of the thousands unknown’. Like the mass graves of Dunkirk or Babi Yar, it was indeed a sacred place and while reading the epitaph ‘Vieler tausend unbekannter’, I remembered Bono singing the opening verse of the song ‘40’ to the crowd the night before.

‘I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the mire and clay’

The words of the song were taken from the Old Testament, Psalm 40 and relayed the message about how it might take some time for God to help his people, but in the end he would always comes through in the end for them. But somehow, in this field of corpses that had lain through the darkening light of fifty sunsets, the words seemed to ring hollow. The rain, which had washed away the remnants of these Jewish bodies back through the rivers of history, seemed to have carried their dreams and memories, their religious beliefs, all hand in hand back across the recesses of time. Standing by the concrete headstone, it was felt easier to believe the words of Irenaeus of Lyon, that second century theologist who once preached that God had abandoned the Jewish race and that Christianity had replaced Judaism and that God no longer had a convenant with these people.

A young man then approached the grave. I noticed the Sephardic nose, his olive skin and how his eyes betrayed an inner sadness as they looked deep into mine. It was an encounter that spanned our cultural divide, one borne of different twilights and dawns and I knew from his features that he was probably of Jewish extraction. We started chatted and in the course of conversation, he asked me if I had ever heard of Yevgeni Yevtushenko, a Russian poet who wrote about the ravine in northwest Kiev, where the Nazis had murdered over one hundred thousand people during the Second World War. He opened a book that he was carrying and he read me one of his poems.

It was then I realised that God had not given up on his people, it was the rest of mankind who had. Like a revelation from above, I knew that we were all as every old man and child who lay buried together in that forgotten grave and unless we stood up for the oppressed in life, in truth we were as guilty as their oppressors. As the stranger turned away, I recalled the closing words of Bono’s plaintive song and for a short moment all the tragedy in the world made some sense again.