Mauthausen
August 25: Friday
Today was the day we visited Mauthausen concentration camp, in northern Austria. It was one of the last camps to be liberated. It also wasn't just one camp, but around six or seven.
There are several things that struck me.
First: the town itself in such a short walk away. The camp, with its stern walls and fences, is perfectly within sight. A five-minute walk into the woods will lead to you stumbling across the stone quarry where thousands of prisoners worked and died.
Second is the the cabin where the prisoners stayed. Now, this has probably been said a lot: learning about something in school is not the same as seeing it in real life. When you're standing in the cabin in the Autumn heat, and being told that two hundred prisoner would be forced, somehow, to fit and sleep in here, at a time, you practically get nauseous.
Third is that, contrary to what I learned, Mauthausen gassed its prisoners. In the college classes I've taken, I've been taught that the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were only far in the east, while the camps in the German Reich itself were "only" concentration camps. But no - they practiced gassing prisoners here.
Fourth is that the area around Mauthausen really is beautiful. And I'm sure it was beautiful before the camp was build here. It almost makes we wish that evil things could only happen in evil-looking places, and only good could happen in good-looking places; wouldn't that make things easier?
Fifth is that the town of Mauthausen began to normalize the existence of the camp over the years. This was the fact that most morbidly fascinated me. The SS members that beat and tortured prisoners within the walls would play semi-professional soccer matches for the entertainment of the locals outside the walls. And when I say outside, I mean right outside - a few hundred feet away. It seems almost intentionally absurd.
The camp tour was split roughly into two parts: the preserved parts of the camp itself, and the exhibition of the items and collections of the history of the Holocaust. Both were enlightening. After visiting the Adolf Frankl exhibit and learning the story of him and his son, I felt better prepared for this trip. But it's still emotionally exhausting. I think everyone's more mature for having seen the camp.
