Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Mauthausen Concentration Camp



 view of the concentration camp from the front

 "oven"



 memorial inside the center of the camp

 rooms people slept in



 gas chamber






 on the right, you can see the "Stairs of Death" going up the hill


Friday afternoon, Stina and I went with Carmen to Linz for the weekend. We stayed at her home and met her family, who were all so great to us! The ride to Upper Austria is so beautiful. You drive through forests and huge mountains as you pass through the Alps. Friday night, we went for a little walk near Carmen’s house, walking through fields of open grass, cows, chickens, and a public petting zoo with bunnies, donkeys, horses, sheep, and goats. The sheep was hilarious, his fleece coat was so great. I wanted to borrow just a little to make myself a North Face jacket, but didn’t want him to be cold that night. We went to downtown Linz and saw the city at night. It’s the third biggest city in Austria, with Vienna being the first and Graz being the second. The lights with the Danube River going through the middle of the city make it very pretty.

Saturday morning, we went to the Danube to work out. I went for a 10 mile run, and Stina and Carmen did yoga by the river. That afternoon, we went to Mauthausen concentration camp. It was so horrifying, but I am so glad we went to remember the lives of the people there. Over 200,000 people were sent there during the rule of Nazi Germany. We went inside the bunk houses that the people slept in. They would crowd far too many people inside, with 3-4 people sharing a cot to sleep on.

We went inside the gas chambers, and I started to get sick to my stomach. I was standing inside a room that thousands of people were murdered in. In the room next to the gas chamber, there was a hallway type thing down the center, with open spaces on either side. In the open spaces is where the corpses were thrown. Before they were killed, the people would be marked by a special label if they had something valuable about them, such as gold teeth, which would later be taken. The next room over contained the “ovens.” They burned the corpses inside the “ovens.” A chimney type thing came up from the ovens, and I can only imagine the smell of the area nearby as they continually burned human bodies. I was so nauseous while I was inside that I seriously could have been sick. Stepping back outside, it took a few minutes to catch my breath again. I could picture Nazi soldiers walking by.

The camp was built inside a giant rock quarry. The people were used as slave labor in the quarry. They were hardly fed, and overworked. Whenever they were too sick to work, they were killed. There was a giant staircase going up from the bottom of the quarry, known as the Stairs of Death. On those stairs, thousands of people were killed. They were forced to carry huge boulders up the stairs. At the top, the people were pushed down the stairs, and the boulders were rolled down after them, creating an avalanche taking them down.

We also sat at the top of a cliff, overlooking the quarry. The ledge is rocky, and goes straight down. Prisoners who were killed by being pushed off the cliff were known as “parachutists.” I can only imagine looking down from the cliff and seeing dead, mangled bodies at the bottom.

The camp was enclosed with an electric fence with barbed wire, carrying a charge of 300 volts. Many people were killed as they attempted to escape, and many more committed suicide with this electric fence. For anyone who somehow made it out of the fence, soldiers would come after them with guns and hunt them . Needless to say, not many escaped.

The thing that got me most was the surrounding area. There were homes within sight of the concentration camp, and an entire village 1-2 kilometers away. I don’t know if the people knew exactly what was going on in the camp or not, but they had to have had some idea. If they were to report what was going on, however, they would also be imprisoned in the camp. But I cannot imagine living nearby, and being able to go about my ordinary life, when I could smell the stench of burning human bodies when I went outside. For the soldiers who worked the concentration camps, they were forced to treat the people that way. If they did not partake in the destruction of the Jews, they too would be killed. Kill others in order to save your own skin…

Upon leaving, I was so humbled.

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