An Energywork Lesson from a Concentration Camp

[A reflection on the two faces of energy.]

“ . . . like orbiting twin stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what’s evident, forever affected by the gravity of what’s concealed.”`
~Sue Grafton

For several years I lived near Dachau, Germany, where one of the largest Nazi concentration camps was located. Even a short tour of the grounds leaves a strong impression. Rows of barracks stretch out in the tidy right-angled enclosure, surrounded by neat, evenly spaced coils of barbed wire atop gray cement walls. Everything is set on a grid in right angles. Men operating under the bizarre trance of the Nazi’s “final solution” apparently developed a neurotic worship of the squarish details of their mission in order to keep alive the frame of mind necessary to run a successful concentration camp. According to some accounts, there was always a prisoner whose duty it was to go from barrack to barrack with a carpenter’s square and a ball of string to snap straight chalk-lines on the floors in order to make sure that each bunk was exactly perpendicular to the walls of the room.

The grounds of the Dachau Concentration Camp are well kept. Clean white gravel pathways crunch under the feet of tens of thousands of tourists who come each year. The museum’s photo exhibition shows masses of wasted humans. Eyes of prisoners, staring into the unblinking camera lens, reach out to you across generations. Other now-famous photos show piles of shoes and eye-glasses. Inside one of the crematoria, there is a memorial plaque with the name of Noor Inayat Khan, sister of the late Sufi leader Pir Vilayat Khan.

There is no spreading chestnut tree with a beer garden waiting outside the camp’s museum. Germans take their serious youngsters through the Dachau Concentration Camp for a lesson in history. A visit to Dachau at the right time can galvanize a young person’s life with attitudes against ever again going through such a national berserk episode. The deep memory of Dachau is intact, scorched into the atmosphere and recorded in the stones underfoot.

Our meditation group visited the convent of Carmelite Sisters who live on the grounds at Dachau. Even after a day of tramping around the sterile, depressing grounds, I found these sisters…