Mauthausen

This is going to be a very difficult entry to write. This has certainly been a very difficult day.

Upon arrival at Mauthausen, Professor Stuart told us that after getting off the bus we were to meet up in the middle of "the modern building." I looked at the walls and edifices of the camp and said aloud to myself "Which modern building?" For these are no medieval ruins, they are less than a century old. The building in question was the one that housed the administration of what is now called the memorial.

"Memorial" - the whole camp is described as such on its website, yet there are also many other memorials set up in front of the camp's gates. These individual memorials have been set up by each nation that had members of its citizenry perish at Mauthausen, each with a different artistic way of paying tribute. The word "nation" here also includes the Roma and Sinti people, as they have their own memorial too. Even West Germany and East Germany erected their own memorials here, though I am told that those were both difficult to deisgn.

Our tour guide led us throughout the grounds, both outside and inside the gates, and we all somberly followed. She gave us much information about Mauthausen, like how the prisoners themselves had to cut the rough stone steps for the staircase from the quarry, or how the dormitories that would comfortably fit 20 people were made to hold 200, or how public soccer matches were held on a field just below the camp and the local citizens would come and watch, oblivious to what was happening higher up on the hill.

It seemed logical and yet perverse how the last place the tour guide showed us was the gas chamber below the camp's prison. Even though far more Mauthausen prisoners died doing manual labor, it was much easier to imagine scores of people being slaughtered in this tiny space, and to me it was the most distressing and saddening part of the camp. There's a chance you can live another day carrying a small boulder up the stone steps - but there's no chance of surviving a room that was explicitly designed to kill you in half an hour. You know with certainty that the four white walls around you - apart from the 80 other prisoners crammed in next to you - are the last things you'll ever see.

I will admit to my credit or discredit that I was far too emotionally downtrodden to really pay attention to anything that we saw in the town of Weithoven, a side-stop for dinner on the way back to Vienna. The gothic chapel and Renaissance-era town hall could not distract my mind from the gas chambers. And instead of joining with others on the bus on the way back and singing songs aloud to release spirits (Professor Stuart would later say that this has happened during every class's return from Mauthausen), I sat twisted in my seat, being driven almost mad from the irony of it all. I did not sing.



The German word of the day is "es geht," meaning "it's okay."