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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