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Published: August 26th 2008
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Friday, 8/22
We woke up early on Friday morning to meet the bus at 8am. I planned on sleeping the entire bus ride (2.5 hours) to the concentration camp, so I brought my neck pillow and earplugs. We jumped on the bus and I promptly curled into a little ball and fell asleep. I woke up right as we arrived at the camp. Everyone was a lot quieter than normal as we walked to the visitor center. Some of us wandered over to the cafe to grab some food before our tour- scheduled for noon. Mauthausen was the main concentration camp in Austria, and overlooked 49 satellite camps. Unlike an extermination camp such as Auschwitz, Mauthausen's goal was to exploit the inmates' working capacity until they expired. There was a granite quarry on location, and many of the inmates literally worked themselves to death. As a group we walked over to the 'stairs of death' which the inmates used for access to the quarry. They have smoothed them out for tourists, but the original staircase was uneven and very steep. My professor shared with us stories of the SS guards kicking the inmates down the stairs for amusement. The quarry had a grassy base and a small lake, which many prisoners drowned themselves in during their internment. Walking back up the stairs left everyone winded, and we were all horrified to imagine having to climb the stairs at a running pace, holding a 50kg block of granite, while malnourished and terrorized by the SS. We had some time then to look at the various memorials scattered around the camp. Some are for children, others are for victims from a specific country. I only took one picture, and it was of the memorial I had recognized from my history class. While taking photographs was allowed, my experience in that class made me hesitant to get too photo-happy. At noon we met our tour guide at the gate, and he walked us over to the shade to start the tour. He explained a bit about the concentration camp system in Austria, and who was interned at this particular location. More Eastern Europeans made up the numbers at Mauthausen than I had expected. We began the tour with a trip to the laundry room, where the prisoners had their heads shaved and they were showered. The hair from the prisoners was sold to ship manufacturers to use as insulation. The showers were a means of eliminating the weak, as the prisoners were alternatively doused in very hot and very cold water; the ones who could not handle it were killed immediately. We learned that the Nazis were terrified of diseases spreading across the camp (which was home to many Nazis as well) and took several measures to try and maintain hygiene. We then visited a bunker which served as a home to about 300 inmates at once. The room was probably smaller than a tennis court, with about 8 small wooden bunk beds. The inmates were not allowed to leave the room after sundown, and responsible for cleaning it up in the morning. The Nazis encouraged the prisoners to wash themselves and their clothing, but this was virtually impossible with 600 people sharing a few toilets and fewer sinks. We went into a different building to see the camp's gas chamber. Similar to other concentration camps, Mauthausen used Zyklon B (which was invented as a bug repellent) to gas their inmates. We proceeded through a corridor to the crematorium, with two small ovens used for burning the dead bodies. They weren't the enormous ovens with the towering chimneys you see pictures of at Auschwitz, but I froze for a minute looking into them anyway. Beyond that was a display of pictures of the victims and letters from their loved ones. We got some time to browse through this display, and were instructed to meet back at 2pm for a movie. When the time came, we filed into a small auditorium with concrete benches in a stadium-seating fashion. I got out my neck pillow so I could be more comfortable, and may have drifted into a little snooze. I caught the end of the movie, when an American soldier who liberated the prisoners from Mauthausen cried on screen as he tried to recount what the prisoners looked like. We headed back to the bus in relative silence. The whole time I was there I did not cry, nor did I see a classmate cry. I had expected the day to be very emotional, but it was almost so emotional that no one knew what to do but act like robots. Despite having studied the Holocaust, its still very hard for me to wrap my brain around how it all happened. We had a quiet bus ride to some town between Mauthausen and Vienna. The idea was for us to decompress, explore the town, and get something to eat. It was about 4pm, and in Europe the kitchens are closed at that point of the day. I guess they're open for lunch and later for dinner, but assume that people aren't going to provide much business during the afternoon. Some of us complained about no restaurants being open despite eating being the purpose of our visit, and others replied with a comment to the effect of "How can you complain after what you've just seen?". My opinion is somewhere in the middle of believing it isn't tasteful to bitch and moan about waiting two hours to eat given the circumstances, but its hard for many of us to really get a solid understanding of how to incorporate the misfortunes of concentration camp victims into our daily perspective. We arrived home after 7, and many of us dissolved into our plans for the evening and the upcoming 3-day weekend.
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