Mauthausen

Today we made the trip out to Mauthausen in central Austria to take a tour of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. We arrived and met with our tour guide Daniel who sat us down and told us a little about himself as well as his style of tour and his ideology of remembering. After reading Ruth Kluger and understanding her thoughts on visiting concentration camps. She thinks that it is unnecessary to visit them, yet I completely disagree. I could not disagree more (however, since she is a survivor and I am a 21 year Californian college student, we probably aren’t going to feel the same about such a topic). For me, reading is one thing, experiencing and witnessing something in person is completely different. Now I want to make it clear that I am not saying that going to the camp 70+ years later means I’ve experienced the Holocaust, but seeing it in person gave me something that words could not. Right when we got off the bus it was a weird feeling, you know what you are going to see, you know what you are going to hear, but the air was weird, the mood was off, everybody was quiet, I was quiet (and I’m a talker and I didn’t want to talk).

Daniel briefed us on the Mauthausen basics, the camp started on August 8, 1938 with 300 prisoners from Dachau. The population was always growing, yet the sense of normalcy always remained the same, which was something that Daniel wanted to get into our minds. The people in the city helped create the camp, they provided infrastructure for the place and the Nazis employed workers for everything to get the place up and running. He even mentioned to us that IBM gave them a computer, it is just wild to think that there were other factors to the creation of the camps than just the Nazis. They built the camp to look like a castle from the outside, it stood out on top of the hill and the Nazis wanted it to, it showed who was king of the land.

TWO WORLDS: This was another aspect of Daniel’s tour that really hit me hard. You have the people that are running the camp and then the people that are held captive. The people that are running it are effectively living the dream, in that they relax and go swimming, there was a movie theater and a horse track, all the while on the other side of the wall is hell, hundreds of people cramped in rooms, little food, disease everywhere. In the SS quarter, there were 800-1,000 SS officers that lived there, they could not enter the camp, and their only job was to keep the prisoners here. Daniel mentioned that there were 3,000 people that were shot dead by these men outside of the gates of Mauthausen. 85% of the deaths were due to disease, starvation, sickness, everything that comes with poor hygiene and close quarters. 15% were killed via direct methods such as guns or gas chambers. The living quarters were the Nazis most effective murder weapon.

There were different groups that the Nazis would put people into, Political, Criminal, Immigrant, Jehovah’s Witness (any Evangelical movement), Homosexual, and Asocial. This form of grouping was a form of easing the actions of the perpetrator. It is a dehumanizing mechanism, just like the shaving of hair, putting tattoos on arms instead of names, people be naked, they tried to create this atmosphere, they didn’t want to deal with people, just statistics. Daniel told us that the Homosexuals might make it only a few days if they were lucky, whereas others would live for much longer.

Going into the gas chamber: Daniel said you won’t find any answers down there, and I wasn’t looking for one, but it did hit me. I had a feeling unlike any other, I have never felt as emotional for something that was so far away from me. It was weird and I almost cried, I couldn’t imagine, not even one bit, but for me this is part of the reason why I think Mauthausen should exist and why Ruth Kluger is wrong. She wrote a great book, but walking through the camp and hearing Daniel talk was stronger from me, walking down those stairs was stronger. Like I said, I’m not saying I know what it was like 70 years ago, but I am more knowledgable about the situation, the living conditions, the statistics, I know the place exists, and I know how I felt as a 21 year-old college student studying abroad for a month in Vienna. I have a better understanding of the information and the circumstances, but not the minds of the people in the camps or the SS officers, I will never know about those emotional and physical factors. This is why I think Kluger is wrong, when somebody says you are living in a room designed for 50 people yet 300 are actually there, it hits you, but when you walk in with a group of 25 people and see that you fill it up pretty well, you start to think. Mauthausen serves a purpose as a place of remembering and a place of educating.