One of my favorite aspects of this trip is attending sacrament meetings in so many different cities/countries. By the end of this trip I will have had the amazing opportunity to attend church meetings in Rome, Florence, Munich, Paris and London. It still amazes me the consistency of the Gospel across all these cultural and physical divides. It has strengthened my testimony of its truthfulness. Our experience in Munich was more authentic, in my opinion. Because we showed up at the church without warning the leaders there was no translators. I will be honest, I kind of preferred it that way. I feel like translating from the pulpit has potential to completely disrupt the spirit of the meeting. In Italy I felt that our translators did a wonderful job, but I worried about it negatively affecting the Sabbath of the locals. However, they have all been extremely kind and generous to us, for which I am eternally grateful.

When we showed up in the Munich ward, we almost tripled their congregation. You could tell we were quite the unexpected spectacle to behold as all 43 of us tried to slip quietly into the meeting that had already started. The young women who was the youth speaker looked visibly shaken to see that her audience had grown immensely in a matter of moments. When she spoke her voice trembled quite a bit and her knees were clearly shaking. My heart completely went out to her. I can imagine how scary that was! But she made it through and I tried to catch her eye and give her an encouraging smile afterwards, which she acknowledged with a timid smile in return. She seemed very sweet.

This afternoon was spent at Dachau, the first concentration camp of the Holocaust. It was humbling to walk the gravel paths and reflect on a terrible time in human history. I found that the experience was not as hard or haunting as I expected it to be. I have heard that the memorial in D.C. is actually extremely intense because it contains piles and piles of the personal belongings of prisoners. I found Dachau informative and a good foundational experience but it was not the extremely emotionally exhausting one that I had braced myself for. I really was expecting a much tougher and emotionally draining reaction, but the information seemed rather cut and dry. Personally, I found the most emotional moments to be brought about by my own meditation and visualization. I made my experience closer to what I had been expecting.

While on the metro heading towards Dachau, I tried to visualize being in one of the cattle cars heading to an unknown destination. I imagined the heat, the smell of too many bodies pressed together. I could almost hear the sobs of adults crying because they knew (or had an inkling) of what they were heading to and the sobs of children because they didn't know what awaited them. I tried to picture seeing flashes of the countryside through the slats, a countryside that should look beautiful and inviting but instead looks horribly unfamiliar and so far from home. There was a moment where I intensely (and seemingly unintentionally) saw this flash of a vision of myself clutching one tiny bag of personal belongings to my chest because it was the only thing remotely familiar. As I was counting the stops until I needed to get off, I tried to visualize the terror of not knowing how long you would be in the cramped, dark, smelly place: hours, days, weeks? By the time I got to the gates of Dachau, I really felt much more connected to history and had a deeper sympathy for what I was about to learn more about.

I tried to continue my visualization a throughout my wanderings. When I noticed how cold it was, I pictured myself walking the same path between the barracks with little-to-no clothing. As I felt every little piece of gravel push up into the bottom of my foot, I tried to pretend I was barefoot and how much worse those tiny stones would feel actually cutting into my flesh. I could hear the birds singing in the trees and wondered if the prisoners ever heard that sound or if it was constantly blocked out by their own misery. The sky today was overcast and grey...the way I would imagine most days would feel inside the camp, even when it may have been a beautiful spring day. I struggled to imagine being absolutely unable to enjoy the warm sun on my skin and a nice breeze through the lovely trees that surround the camp...and I honestly think that is the moment my heart broke. To imagine myself that numb to nature, something I deeply and truly love, was horrifying. I reflected again on "The Fallen" statue and pictured how the man had finally reached his breaking point, incapable of holding his emptiness inside anymore, that emptiness leaking out to fill every aspect of every day. It makes me shudder with sadness.

One of the most interesting aspects of Dachau for me was how large it felt...but then how small it felt when I thought of the 200,000+ prisoners who had passed through those iron gates (with at least 31,000 of those prisoners being killed inside the camp). It really put things in perspective for me.

But on to happier topics...

This evening I don't have much planned. We have an early departure time in the morning for Paris and I really need to get a good night's rest for once ;) Sleeping on the bus doesn't count in my mind. However, it is still too early to turn in for the night so I do think I will go back and explore the main train/metro station. We walked through it on our way back from Dachau and I thought it looked pretty sweet! I probably won't blog about it though because it will just be a leisurely walk-through to kill time and maybe pick up some dinner (or...just dessert ;) before I call it a night.

Until tomorrow then (well...actually...we will be on a bus for 12 hours tomorrow, so I might not bother writing a post about it, hah!)!