Mauthausen

August 25^th, 2009

They laugh in the back of the bus and I wonder how I could laugh with a pit the size of an orange in my chest. I’ve just reached the city of Mauthausen, with its beautiful fields, homes and scenery. It is hard to imagine that a little more than 50 years ago this complex was being used to work and murder countless ethnic groups, political “threats” and the “sexually perverse”.

The actually complex of Mauthausen looks a lot like a castle, which is strange. There is only one gate that leads into the detention camp, and I think of people pulling down the Nazi insignia from the top of its perch. From previous knowledge I know that every piece of rock that I am looking at on the structure and on the path has been laid down by a prisoner of the Nazi regime. It feels strange to walk around the complex when nothing looks like the pictures or video that I watched on its liberation. It’s eerie to know that you are walking around in a place that housed so much death.

The tour guide of our group was awesome because he was both knowledgeable and insightful yet quiet when he had to be. Sometimes silence speaks volumes. He showed us the “Wailing Wall” where the SS would line up new prisoners to the camp. Along this wall people would be shot, attacked by dogs, belittled and told, “This is the way in, and that’s the way out (pointing at the incinerator).” If it was cold out than the SS officers might take water and throw it on the prisoners, leaving them outside to turn literally turn into ice cubes and freeze to death.

From this wall the prisoners were led to the shower, where they had their body hair shaved off with rusty blades. They would then stand together, six to a showerhead. People were mass murdered in this shower by various means.

From here we were taken to one of the last remaining barracks, where sometimes up to 2000 inmates were held. It was meant to accommodate 300. The bunks would hold six people; three per bed. 

The crematorium of Mauthausen as an extremely solemn place, with pictures and place cards remembering those who had died. A couple was wondering around and taking pictures in front of the oven, which I thought was incredibly inappropriate. How do you smile in front of something so horrible? The kids were also running around the memorial and trying to hit each other, which was distracting. You are basically standing in a graveyard, there needs to be a certain level of respect. I wonder if this behavior is what Kluger was talking about in her book…

The gas chamber is, of course, quite eerie as well. It is set to look like a real shower so that the prisoners would not riot. These prisoners were conditioned not to riot, although I am sure that it happened. Apparently people have been stealing showerheads and scratching Nazi insignia into walls. In Austria if you are found to be stealing from a concentration camp or distributing Nazi insignia you could get ten years in prison. Below you can see that the shower heads have been stolen and the man on plaque has been taken off. You can't see it well, but a swastika has been etched in his place.

The barbed wire fence that surrounded the camp had a charge of 380 V. People would commit suicide by running into the fence (like Kluger’s mother suggested) or die through escape attempts. Prisoners were also pushed into the wire by SS agents for no particular reason other than the fact that they were there.

The Stairs of Death are particularly chilling because they were used by the SS agents to play “games”. Prisoners that were wasted away to nothing were forced to carry large granite rocks up the stairs, and many times they were over 100 pounds. SS agents would push people down the stairs, which in turn would cause a horrific domino effect. Hundreds of prisoners would be on the stairs at a given time. They also had a game where they would have prisoners race up the stairs and line them up on “Parachute Jump”. The person who won would have to choose whether to push the person off in front oh him/her or be killed.

I think coming to at least one concentration camp is important because it gives you a sense of what went on in the last century. It is, however, only a sense. Nothing will or ever should compare to the way that the prisoners were treated in the camps again. The reason the camps are important is that they remind us of the atrocities that we as humans can create. Our guide said that he has continued to give tours because it is an important part of his nations history but also because he wants to warn people of what can happen under a Totalitarian regime. There are warning signs that all people need to be aware of so that the horrors of the Nazis and the SS do not happen again.