Mathausen

Tuesday, August 24

Today we visited Mauthausen, which functioned as the main concentration camp for Austria.  The location of the camp was chosen because of its proximately to granite quarries.  Mauthausen was set up as a work camp in 1938 but as all concentration camps it was filled with death.  The prisoners were worked to death in the quarry.  They were forced to carry the large pieces of cut stone on their backs up the hundreds of steep and uneven steps.  SS soldiers lined the stairway beating and whipping them as they made their way up.  If the prisoners were not strong enough to make it up the stairs, they were pushed off the side to their death.  The quarry still exists  and the gapping hole where they prisoners took out the rock is a testament to their sacrifice and victimization.  At the end of the day we visited the quarry and walked the same steps down into the gaping hole in the mountain.  While we were still inside the camp, we were taken inside the actual gas chamber the Nazis used to kill the prisoners.  Words fail to describe the emotions that one experiences.  

We learned that the ashes from the bodies were strewn on the ground to help amend the muddy roads.  Everywhere we walked was sacred ground.  The camp is like one extensive graveyard or battlefield, only so much worse because these were not two armies meeting but a prison camp filled instead with perpetrators and victims. 

I was really offended by the way many of the visitors behaved inside the camp.  There were many families with young children and it appeared to me they were treating the camp as a park instead of a sacred location.  While I won’t judge them because everyone deals with tragedy differently, it was definitely not they way I would allow children to behave in this space.  

It is difficult to think that an entire generation of people could have participated and stood by while these atrocities were committed.  Its difficult to visit a place where such atrocities took place.  

Of the 200,000 people that were deported to the camp, over 100,000 of them died.  The population of the camp consisted mainly of Jews and POWs including many Americans.  Outside of the camp walls, the grounds were filled with monuments from each country that lost citizens in the camp.  

The only bright spot of the day were the simple marble plaques dedicated to the American forces who liberated the camp in May of 1945.  There were three of them, each dedicated to a different division of the army that participated in Mauthahusen’s liberation.