You're Journeying through another dimension...

Upon reading book 2 of Maus, I am reminded of a particular episode of The Twilight Zone: Episode 74, Deaths-Head Revisited. Here's the opening by Rod Serling (they just don't have writers like this anymore, bear in mind it was 1961 when this was written):

"Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies 8 miles west of Munich, a picturesque, delightful little spot one time known for its scenery but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery, and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon percieve, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp--for once, some 17 years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S.. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the earth without a heart. And now former S.S. Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is waiting for him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Thilight Zone."

As stated in that opening, a former Nazi captain, Lutze, visits the remains of Dachau; but when he gets there, he is haunted by every last soul that was tortured and or killed and Lutze's punishment is to suffer the same horrors the slaughtered have, not physically, just feel their pain in his head. This causes Lutze to go insane and the doctor taking Lutze away to a mental hospital asks: "Dachau...Why does it still stand?"

Cue the closing narration:

"There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus, the Belsens,the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes--all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's earth."