Through the Moors, Through Dachau by Michaela Maria Müller

I’m back at home. The bread is thawing beside the stove. I pick up the loaf and press it against the blade of the bread slicer. The machine groans, then packs up completely. No chance of cutting a slice off the half-thawed lump of bread. I put the loaf back by the stove. Soon, the house is going to be pulled down. I walk up to the attic.

The smell is of freshly washed laundry. It hangs from lengths of twine and plastic washing line that have been tied together and strung across the room. It’s boil wash, a load of udder rags. Worn-out towels, cut into rectangles, hanging side by side from the washing line. They are used to wipe the cows’ udders when milking in the morning and in the evening.

Wasps have made their nests under the eaves, sinister grey ovals which they have used their secretions to stick to the beams and the bricks. But the wasps have fallen silent, their nests lie abandoned.

In a drawer, I find a broken pocket-watch, a handful of carnival medals, coins forgotten in coat pockets. The attic has always been full things for which everyday life holds no place.

I pass a hand over the dark wood of the cabinet. Its doors are made of etched glass, and the ends of its side panels turned to form slender columns. It used to belong to a man who had to flee the Nazis, says my grandmother. If her information is correct, it must have been standing here for nearly 80 years.

In the town archives, I find a list of Dachau’s Jewish inhabitants. Thirteen names are recorded on the page. The first is that of Samson Gutmann, a livestock dealer. He moves first to Munich, then to Dachau. Rents a house in our neighbourhood, in Freisinger Strasse. The livestock dealer from Dachau and my great-grandfather Michael Müller, a farmer from the next village—did they know each other?

When all the children were born, the great-grandparents called for a photographer. It was not long since the last rain. The peaty soil outside the front door was sodden. When the family assembled for the photograph, the soles of their shoes left traces in the earth. The adults sat, the six children stood. Three girls and three boys: Michael, Maria, Josef, Johann, Anna, and Lene. 

The great-grandfather was wearing a three-piece suit and a freshly starched white shirt. Hair combed severely to one side, the dark moustache waxed. He gazed into the camera, concentrated, his hands clenched into fists above his thighs. My great-grandmother Maria was dressed in a long black frock and wore a watch on a chain around her neck. A small flourish of white frills was visible on each wrist.

They lived by the moor. Its surface was overgrown with low shrubs. The wind gently ruffled the leaves of a rare variety of birch, Betula humilis, its seeds washed up here in the last ice age. Its dead wood, along with the twigs and needles of the firs, gradually decomposed to peat. Year by year, century by century, and millimetre by millimetre the ground levelled out, adding a metre in a thousand years.

The moor began at their front door. Anyone coming into the house after the rain brought it inside on the soles of their boots. 

The men who worked in the moors were tired when they returned from the day’s labours. Cutting peat, they heaved the shiny black bricks full of water out of trenches that led downwards step by step. The deeper, the lower they cut, the denser the peat became. They lifted the wet bricks out of the trenches, inspected and divided them, loaded them onto carts and stacked them to dry in the shacks. 

My great-grandmother had packed bread, beer, salted white radish, and cold potatoes for them. The shacks before which they took their repast were knocked together from planks of spruce and open on one side, the better to capture light and warmth and help the peat dry faster.

During these lunch breaks, the older peat cutters taught the younger ones the names of the birds of the moors. Lapwing, barn owl, curlew, snipe. In the late afternoon, they pushed their peat carts homewards. 

Once they were ready for burning, my great-grandfather sold the peat bricks to a brewery in Munich, which used them to heat its copper kettles. Back at home, they were used to fire the oven, too. When, of an evening, he watched the peat burning up in the oven, it occurred to him that he was burning the earth that was meant to work for him and his family.

Sometimes the tiredness would linger in the peat cutters’ limbs till the next morning and not leave then. The malaria bug had inoculated them with it.

The Anopheles mosquito and its brood had reached the ports of the German Empire in overseas cargoes. Thousands of dock workers in the newly-built port of Wilhelmshaven were the first to fall ill. The physician Carl Wenzel reports 4119 cases among women and children from the Jade Bight alone. The miners of Gelsenkirchen were struck down a little later. The last were the peat-cutting peasant families in the kingdom of Bavaria. 

The doctors prescribed quinine. It helped and healed and remained in their medicine cabinets. Since it cured their agues, they made it their cure-all, albeit a pricy one. The crystalline white powder was used as a medicine for other afflictions. It reduced fever and relieved pain. And the maids knew that a large enough dose – ten or twelve grains – would end a pregnancy if taken early on.  

In buying the farm, the family had acquired the right to fish the river. The 1863 map shows the river by the name of Maisach. They called it by a different name: Moasa, its gender female, die Moasa. 

It is thirty-six kilometres long. In its lower reaches, close to the farm, it comes nearly to a halt, describing ribbons and branching through the swamp like so many little veins on the face of the leas. It takes its time before giving up its name and flowing into a larger river, the Amper.

The graylings, barbels, and breams can grow fifteen years old and taste of the countryside: of the fens.

Now the moor has been drained. At the end of the fields, the railway embankment rises. In the daytime, a high-speed train passes every half hour, a local one every quarter, and a commuter train every five minutes. At night, freight trains take over. 

By the roadside, a field of gladioli. Cut your own flowers. 50 metres squared of a meadow just before the sign announces you are entering the town, where the path to the shooting range branches off. The ground close to the beds looks trampled. At the field’s age stands an oil drum, painted yellow.

It has been filled with concrete, out of which juts a square metal rod. A laminated price list is attached to this:

Gladioli 70 cents each

Knives dangle from the honesty box, attached by string to a nail. Their blades point downwards. 

A firm green stem grows out of the earth, unfolding into leaves higher up. The leaves’ veins run in parallel, and the petals are still half rolled up. This one is going to flower in crimson. 

I cut plant upon plant. Soon they are more than I can hold in one hand. I stick the knife in the ground and strip off the leaves to reduce the plants’ diameter. I leave them lying in the furrows, count out a handful of change and a five-euro note, which I have to fold twice, and put them in the box. In an interview with the local paper, the farmer says that sometimes children try to fish out the paper money with sticky tape, that’s why the slit is so narrow. 

I drive on eastwards. The gladioli are lying on the back seat. The road used to end at the mill. Heading into town, the walls of the camp are to the right. The local bus is going the other way. Its destination sign reads “744 Kräutergarten.”

A bus has been going that way since November 1937. It was district commissioner Böhmer who, in late July, had applied to the regional government of Upper Bavaria for a new bus route to be set up.

The district commissioner asks the Dachau cab drivers for an estimate of how often they had driven the route between the station, the camp, and the town over the past six months.

Over two thousand times is the figure he gives in his application. A thousand errands to run. Visiting the cobbler, going for treatment at Doktor Blank’s spa, seeing Herr Meisinger at the health board or Herr Köhler at the bank, appointments with Headmaster Götz or Doktor Franta the vet, purchases at Wülfert’s sausage factory or Herr Siems the tobacconist’s. The line is opened for service before his application has even been granted. 

Henceforth two buses ply the route between the station and the camp: two omnibuses made by Daimler-Benz, straight from the factory, their engines stamped with consecutive serial numbers, registered B-52230 and B-52227, with 32 seats apiece. 

A year later the moor became the Kräutergarten, the herb garden. Inmates had to dig kilometre-long drainage ditches, dig up the earth, pile on fertile soil, parcel out beds, plant shrubs and gladioli bulbs. 

In late summer, they cut the plants and squeezed the juice from the leaves. It was used to produce synthetic vitamin C, ascorbic acid.

The extract was mixed to a paste with thyme, lovage, salt, and beef fat, and sent to the front as the base for a fortifying drink in individually wrapped portions. 

This April, persistent ground frost means that the municipal gardeners are behind in their work. The trees that are to be planted lie side by side on the lawn. Each root ball is wrapped in several layers of sacking, the cloth tied around the trunk. 

I meet an amateur beekeeper who tells me about his hives. This April is so cold, he says, that the bees can’t leave the hive. They eat the honey themselves. He gives a regretful shrug.

The glass of the Kräutergarten greenhouses is broken. Rust has eaten deep into the iron braces. Grass is beginning to grow over the borders of the plant beds. Over the decades, the weather has shifted the concrete parts, which jut out the lawn at peculiar angles. Green moss and yellow lichen have spread over them. 

After the war, the administrative buildings were converted into flats.

Now, yellow paint is peeling off the walls. In places where holes were drilled, the plaster chips off in pieces the size of a hand, the mortar crumbles to the ground in a dry trickle. The letter-boxes are marked with Arab names in Latin script. Someone has stuck a notice reading “Please no advertisement” on their box. In a crack between the street and the building’s foundations, dandelion flourishes alongside herb robert. 

I feel somebody watching me. A woman is looking out of a first-floor window. When our glances meet, she avoids mine and fixes hers on the still-empty beds belonging to the council.

Old apple trees stand in front of the buildings. The municipal gardeners have attached signs to the trunks: 

Cultivar

‘Rhenish Winter Rambo’

Ready to eat: December to March

Flavour: mildly sweet and tart

Chance seedling—ancient variety—c. 1650

Dachau Town Council

Department of Municipal Greenery and the Environment

The residents have placed a white plastic table and a folding wooden bench under one of the chestnut trees. Two wooden chairs are attached to each other by a combination lock, as though it was a promise. 

A man steps out of the door to collect his mail from the box. A woman joins him, they start talking about a phone bill. I ask them if they know something about the buildings’ past. They shake their heads. “No, no idea,” they say.

The woman points towards the playground across the road, which belongs to a new housing development, and says: “But look, that one’s new.”

She thinks I’m asking because the buildings are in such poor repair, though what I mean is their past. I understand that these aspects belong together. 

My grandfather is in a “scheduled occupation,” as they call it. He is thirty-one years old. He does not yet have a family of his own. He is stuck between the threat of being called up for service in the war and his duties tending to the farm.

One day before Christmas, 1940, he takes a bound volume from the drawer in the kitchen table. The leatherette cover is labelled “Accounts of the Mitterndorf-Udlding Commons.” He enters the following:

Maisach de-iced, ½ day, 2 marks

The village works the wood in common. Twenty-two farmers, a blacksmith, a master saddler, a master joiner, and a locksmith, as well as their families. 

Grandfather is the head. Each family has two facing pages to itself, and each job is tallied according to a fixed rate. Thin red lines separate the columns. 

Firewood in the shed and lumber for the new stables are a liability, work done in the woods an asset. Two members don’t go into the woods, their asset page left blank: the owner of the paper factory and the priest.

Six weeks later, at the end of January 1941, supplies of firewood are exhausted. Grandfather, together with the other men who are not at the front, spends three days in the wood. He notes:

Work in the wood, manual and carriage tasks, 3 days, 23 marks

May is when the annual wood auction is held, where firewood and planks of lumber may be won. Afterwards, everybody goes to the tavern together.

The bar tab can still be found in the old accounts book, to which it is attached by a rusty paper-clip:

30 pints lager: 9.—

3 pints white beer: 1.14

Sausages: 4.70

15 B.Pol: —.75

————————

15.59

1.55

—————

17.14

Two years later, grandfather is called up, first to the barracks at Kempten, later to Landsberg-on-Lech for driver training, then to the front as a dispatch driver. When his father dies on Christmas Day, 1944, he receives home leave. He buries his father, marries, and sees his two-month-old son. He will have to hope a long time for a reunion. Only five years later will he return.

I am sitting in the archives and running my index finger over an old map of the town, find the station and, alongside it, Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Why did they choose that one? The street is not particularly long, perhaps 600 metres or so, and begins to the right of the station parade. I trace the street to its end.

Yet then there are the four grid squares that are the site of 12 years of murder and suffering. They are left blank. No barracks are marked, no industrial wasteland, residential areas, fenland, or woods. The railway track by which inmates were transported to the camp ends in the middle of nowhere.

The town map informs me that at the end of the track are to be found the South German Reed Mat Works and a power station, the “Amperwerke.” 

“Why?” I ask the archivist. “Restricted area. Military,” he replies. 

The huge void on the map shows no sign of getting smaller.

I meet somebody who knows more. Kurt is waiting for me at the entrance to the former SS training camp. Now, the grounds are a training facility for the Bavarian riot police. The guards, two young police officers, wave us through. It all goes quickly, so quickly that I’m surprised. No ID check, not even eye contact.

“We’re expected,” he says when he registers my surprise. He trained Bavarian riot police for forty years. Maybe he was their instructor. 

Kurt is wearing a backpack and pushing a bicycle. He offers me the use of a bicycle parked alongside the gatehouse. 

The pedal bearings crack as I ride it. On each turn of the pedals, my left leg seems to tread into empty space for half a rotation. I double the force in my left leg to keep up with him.

“What was it like to work here?” I ask.

“I spent a long time trying to find out who used to work in my office. But they destroyed most of the files. I never did find out,” he says. 

We stop at a bridge overgrown with moss. A weatherworn stone tablet bears the inscription “Samoa Bridge.” Whoever gave it that name dreamed of paradise as a colonial empire in the South Pacific.

From his backpack, Kurt takes a blue ring binder and opens it. He shows me our route on an old map. This time, the map is not one with empty grid squares, not this one. They neatly recorded each building. Where we are now standing, the map shows a railway track branching off to the right and ending at three black squares.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Ammo bunker,” he says.

During the First World War, officials in the Bavarian war ministry decided to build a new gunpowder and ammunition factory. 

There already was such a factory in Ebenhausen, sixty kilometres away. The officials had seven sites to choose from. They decided on Dachau, because the town and its environs were located in an area that was rich in water but had a low incidence of thunderstorms. 

Hundreds of workshops, houses, and facilities were rapidly built and populated with workers virtually overnight. The town’s population doubled within a year. The workers lived in hastily erected shacks and were soon followed by their families. The classrooms thronged with school children.

We dismount outside a Portakabin and sit down on a bench. During the week, police cadets live here. There is no-one to be seen on a Sunday afternoon.

We are now quite close to the water tower from the days of the munitions factory, and to the memorial next door, too. A wire fence surrounds the water tower, it’s cordoned off, no entry. The same applies at the next stop. A construction fence blocks access to the “Holländerhalle,” named after the machines used to make guncotton. 

“Controlled deterioration,” remarks Kurt.

The Holländerhalle is a tall, airy building in which the women’s hands would receive acid burns as they worked. Their hands turned yellow. Behind their backs, the townspeople would call the women canaries. 

We take a shortcut across a patch of grass to the entrance of a long, single-story building, covered in grey plaster and roofed with brown tiles. Three cars are parked in front of it. Kurt gets off his bicycle. I stop alongside him. A strong wind has picked up. I try to rub sand from my right eye, it tears up, I want to press on. He stops me, says: “The Dachau trials were held in there.”

We can’t enter, it’s locked.

On my next visit home, fresh gravel has just been spread in the yard. Where the house stood, beds of leeks, beans, parsley have been planted. Hollyhocks and zinnias grow in between. For years it rained through the roof, there was no saving the house. Its substance was too badly damaged, the materials used had been of poor quality. 

At an angle of forty-five degrees to the right of where the house had once stood, builders have excavated a pit. Behind it the pen for the Simmental cattle, which was so modern in the early 1980s that delegations from Japan would come to visit it. They paid to have their pictures taken with us children in coins which they had strung through holes on a cord.

The cabinet from the attic is now in my aunt’s flat. I am unable to trace Samson Gutmann’s descendants. Did he escape and survive? Was his entire family murdered? Why is his name not in the central database of Holocaust victims at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel? There is a story to all of Dachau’s other Jewish citizens. Children who were sent to England, parents who perished in concentration camps in the East. Adults who returned in memory of their childhood ending. 

Michaela Maria Müller was born in Dachau, Germany. She is a novelist and journalist. She studied history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is currently working as a journalist and reporter for Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Die Tageszeitung. Her latest book Auf See. Die Geschichte von Ayan und Samir appeared 2016. She is a fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Writing and a former resident at the Franz-Edelmaier-Residency of the Swiss Society for the European Convention on Human Rights (2019).  https://www.michaelamariamueller.de 

Joe Paul Kroll is a freelance translator and editor based in Wiesbaden, Germany. https://jpkroll.wixsite.com/home