Today was our Mauthausen tour. Mauthausen was the largest concentration camp in Austria during the second World War. We had a pretty neat tour guide who took us around the camp. It is really more of a memorial than something you think of as an ex-concentration camp. If they didn’t have Holocaust monument everywhere and you took me to Mauthausen today and asked me to tell you what it was, I’d probably say it was an army barracks or a boy scout retreat or a KOA or something. It is nothing like a concentration camp. As Ruth Klüger mentions in her book, during the Holocaust the concentration camps smelled like death and were filled with violence, emaciated prisoners, blood all over the ground, and things like that. So it is impossible to know what the concentration camps were really like by visiting one. In Mauthausen most of the original buildings are gone, and the remaining ones are greatly changed. For instance our guide led us to a barracks room. She said there would be 50 beds in that little room. Today there are only 6, to make room for the tourists. When the Nazis fled Mauthausen, they took out the pipes and things that they’d used to gas the victims of the gas chamber. The “Stairs of Death,” while still grueling, have been made more manageable for visitors to Mauthausen. Perhaps the most glaring change from the war days are all the monuments and memorials to the victims everywhere. There is one for every country from which Mauthausen victims came, also a lot of other groups, and even a bunch of memorial plaques to individual victims put up by their families. So Mauthausen is great as a memorial site, but does not even come close to giving you a feel for what actually went on in the camps. I think I was able to identify more with the wartime camps and what occurred there by reading up on it, survivor stories and the like, than I was by physically being there. However, I know that many of my fellow had powerful emotional experiences and were literally moved to tears by being there.
After Mauthausen we went to the charming down of Waidhofen to learn about the town’s history, explore a bit, and go to dinner with some of Kathy’s old friends. The town is truly very nice and pleasant. Dinner was a three-course meal with soup, chicken or ravioli, and apple strudel. I had a German conversation with Kathy’s friends. They are very cool. On the bus on the way back we all sang old songs that we knew. Towards the end there was a lot of Disney involved. Kathy says that every year that she’s done Mauthausen, the group has ended up singing on the bus on the way back. She thinks it might be a form of release from the emotional trauma of visiting the camp. I think it’s not uncommon for groups of young people to sing songs they all know on buses, especially after they had a big meal with unlimited free beer. However, she may be right. I think the pleasantness of Waidhofen and the meal served as a kind of emotional bandage after Mauthausen.
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