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If you stand quietly in the former Dachau concentration camp, near the eight-foot concrete wall with its porcelain spools strung with barbed wire -- no longer electrified but still menacing -- you will hear, in the stillness of a summer day, the whir of vacuum cleaners, clattering dishes, laughing children, and the latest hits by Britney Spears, Shania Twain and the Backstreet Boys. These are the sounds of Karl Riemer Strasse, a residential street of 40 or so houses, four of which have the camp wall running through their backyards. The bedroom windows, decorated in lace and framed in blond wood, look directly into the camp interior. From one balcony, you have an unobstructed view of the camp gate with its wrought-iron inscription, Arbeit macht frei, and, in the distance, the chimney of Barrack X, the Nazis' first comprehensive extermination facility -- changing room, "shower" and crematorium all in one.
When construction began along Karl Riemer Strasse in the late 1980s, it inspired expressions of shock and outrage among Holocaust survivors. Nikolas Lehner, a Jewish survivor from Hungary who had settled in Dachau following his liberation from the camp, wrote a protest letter to a Dachau newspaper. "I am certain that the vast majority of visitors, not to mention the camp survivors themselves, feel the same way I do," Lehner wrote. "No one even thought to ask the survivors how they felt about this matter." Not only was Lehner concerned about the impression it made on visitors to the memorial site, especially regarding German attitudes toward the Holocaust, but also about its impact on the children growing up in these houses. "We know from discussions with visitors that questions are being asked, not only about the population's attitudes then but also today," Lehner wrote. "Some day, questions will also be asked by the young people who spent their childhood in front of this wall, growing up in the shadow of the past." Ten years later, Karl Riemer Strasse is a flourishing suburban community where housewives sun themselves on their terraces, where men stand about on street comers chatting about weed killer and soccer scores, and where children, when they awake each morning, look through a tangle of lace curtains and barbed wire to watch...