Mauthausen

08/25/09 Mauthausen

Tuesday August 25^th was the day that our class visited the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and I sincerely doubt that every one of us will remember the experience for the rest of our lives. Set up in the rolling hills occupied mostly by farms, the camp is an imposing stone building that seems to jut out from the hillside like a scar upon the landscape. The view of the town and river below would be quite beautiful if it wasn’t for the knowledge of everything that happened in the camp, and in a sense this gave the whole place an extremely sickening feeling. For some reason it is almost easier to imagine a work camp in the depths of Siberia, under horrid conditions and surrounded by a bleak landscape that would reflect the horrors within the camp. But Mauthausen would have been a beautiful picnic spot under different circumstances; the sun was shining, the grass rolled out across the adjacent hills, and a neighboring quarry had a small pond that would seem idyllic for a relaxing afternoon.

Although the setting wouldn’t betray the sort of carnage that took place there, everybody knew the sort of information that we were going to get when we took our tour. The first thing one sees after walking through the outer gate of the camp is the memorial garden, which was a large and beautiful collection of memorials donated by various countries, generally commemorating their national brethren that died at Mauthausen. We didn’t spend any time at the beginning looking around this garden, but rather took a turn through the main gate into the actual prison part of the camp. The wall along the right of the entrance was peppered with plaques that also remembered those that struggled and died for the liberation of the camp, and the one that immediately caught the eye was the tribute to the Americans that liberated the camp, being as it was in English. Looking along the rest of the wall yielded more surprising sights, such as a tribute to the homosexuals that died in the camp, Russians that were persecuted there, and political dissidents that suffered the ultimate punishment as well. It became clear from looking at the wall that this camp was not what I had expected, which was a work camp almost exclusively for deported Jews. Rather Mauthausen was one of the largest camps in the early stages of the war, and housed mostly political prisoners or prisoners of war, a large portion of which were Spanish Partisans that had been deported by Franco. I had very little idea that the alliance between Franco and Hitler had run so deep as to have an agreement for the handling of Franco’s political prisoners, and this immediately gave the camp a different feel than what I had expected.

Looking at the camp through the lens of a political prisoner work camp didn’t really change the horrors of the experience for me, but it changed the overall tone of the tour nonetheless. Our tour guide was a young Austrian that seemed to have a great deal of knowledge about the Camp, which he had been giving tours of for over four years. He informed us at the end of the tour that he chose to join the Austrian Civil Service as opposed to joining the armed forces, a decision that all men of age have to make. His association with Mauthausen did not end when his term of service expired, as he felt he had the responsibility to inform people of what happened there. However he made it very clear that he did not think the importance lies in showing people certain sites where thousands of people were beaten or murdered, but rather to convey an understanding of the events so that we might be able to prevent such things from happening in the future. He was a very bright though appropriately somber young man, and he took care to remind us that the sort of atrocities we were learning about are not limited to the Third Reich, but are in fact still being perpetrated in certain areas of the world today.

The areas of the camp that brought the point home the hardest for me were the areas that saw the most repetition, and therefore the most humanity (or lack thereof). The showers would not be considered to be one of the more horrifying areas of the camp, but the knowledge that every single person that came into the camp was herded through this area in a state of humiliation gave a very palpable sense of reality to the situation. It’s difficult for me to look at a wall full of plaques and truly understand that every prisoner was beaten or humiliated against it, largely because it is full of memorials and outside in the brightness of the surrounding day. Down in the showers, it was much easier to lose oneself in the historical moment so to speak, and to try to identify with those that were there 65 years ago. The small gas chamber had the same effect on me, largely because of the tiny size of the room that it occupied. Our group of about 27 could hardly all stand within it comfortably, and it was difficult to imagine over 100 people being squeezed into the room under the pretense of a shower. But Mauthausen was not a death camp, which for me almost made the gas chambers there even more horrifying than something that one might see at Auschwitz; they were built toward the end purely out of necessity. The camps to the east were in danger of being overrun by the advancing Russian forces, so the surplus of prisoners flowing from the east necessitated the installation of a small gas chamber within the camp that had previously been intended as a work camp. Of course working oneself to death is not exactly more appealing than the fate of those that went to the chambers, but the coldly calculated assessment of what needed to be done to control the influx of prisoners at Mauthausen gave me a feeling of indescribable horror.

Unfortunately for the memory of those that perished in the camp, there was an incident during our tour in which we saw another tourist acting completely inappropriately. He was having his picture taken (while smiling) next to one of the crematoriums, and his kids were loudly chasing each other and being disrespectful in the room in which pictures of lost loved ones peppered the walls. This was especially disturbing, because I had spent about ten minutes looking over the names and faces of those that adorned these walls, paying special attention to the birth and death days of the deceased. My eye was drawn to those that were born in the early 1920s, and died in the early to mid 1940s, as they were about 21 (my age). It was not difficult for me to imagine my own face on that wall, my own face looking back from a faded photograph that could not in any way convey the sort of person that the camp would have turned me into by the time of my death. Those that died in the camp were not the same people that posed for the military photographer all those years ago; they had been denigrated to the worst most wretched beings possible. They had been stripped of their humanity and despite the loving remembrances of those that knew them in a former life, many died as somebody almost wholly different than their true selves.

No matter how horrible the camp itself was, nothing could quite prepare me for the trip down into the quarry. The prisoners at Mauthausen were used for a variety of construction projects in the forty-something satellite camps in the area, but the majority of the labor was devoted to a granite quarry that was adjacent to the main Mauthausen complex. The quarry was accessible only through a steep and treacherous staircase known to the prisoners as the “stairway to death”, which in its current state is a difficult staircase to navigate. But there is no doubt that the staircase that the prisoners were forced to use was much worse, consisting of uneven steps that could be up to half a meter high, jagged rocks, and an incredibly steep incline that would make falling backwards extremely hard to avoid when one was carrying an 80-90 pound piece of granite on their back. But the quarry was not a desolate area that gave off the feeling of impending death; rather it felt as though if you stumbled upon the area on a weekend hike you would decide it a perfect place to camp or have a meal. Had it not been for the tour that we had just had, I likely would have walked down the stairs, looked around at the quarry for a moment, then walked back up.

As it was, we knew exactly the sort of atrocities that were perpetrated at the bottom of that ravine. Both the tour guide and a short movie we watched at the camp had talked about the cliffs overlooking the quarry, and the way that prisoners were unceremoniously and often randomly thrown off by the SS. We knew about the group of Jewish prisoners that were led straight from the train to the edge of the cliffs, and pushed off in a single file line so that the person in front was invariably moved off the edge by the prisoner behind them. We knew that while most died from the fall, those that survived tumbled the rest of the way into the seemingly tranquil pond below to drown helplessly. The idyllic setting was shattered when one considered exactly the number of people that were killed from heat exhaustion on that spot, or the number of people that had floated in that tiny pond; forever staining it with the crimes of the perpetrators. At no time did I feel physically ill during the tour, but while at the bottom of the quarry overlooking that pond I had to take deep breaths to keep my head from delving too deep into what that spot had witnessed.

I was glad that we went to Mauthausen, and I’m thankful that I’ve had the experience of seeing a very small piece of what the Third Reich used to perpetrate the Holocaust upon Europe. I know that I will never be able to truly understand what went on there, and how it really felt to be either a victim or a liberator at the time that these horrendous events were actually occurring. I’m lucky that I’ve been instilled with the proper respect for the seriousness of the memorial, and was able to act accordingly and get everything that I could out of the site. Kurt Vonnegut said it better than I could ever hope to;

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.”

I thought of this quote often during my visit to Mauthausen.