Mauthausen

Headed to Budapest
June 12, 2010
While I’m thinking about it, I’ll start with Mauthausen. Unsurprisingly, this was another intense experience. This camp was not originally intended as a mass extermination camp, but somewhere around 200, 000 people died there as either a result of being worked to death or brutal murder. This place was known for the rock quarry, from which the prisoners built the camp. Our tour guide put the nutrition issue into perspective. Each prisoner was maybe given 1400 Kcal/ day, maybe, and that’s pushing it. They were probably burning 3500 to 4000 Kcal/ day doing brutally hard labor, especially at the quarry where they were required to carry rocks that were probably 1 and a half square feet on their backs that more often than not weighed more than they did up 186 uneven jagged stone steps. Most prisoners at this camp didn’t make it past 3 months. They were required to do this rain, snow, or shine. The guards would sometimes push prisoners, or rather, make prisoners push each other off the cliffs hundreds of feet above the quarry, while those who were working had to watch. Just that thought makes me feel such an intense sadness and anger that I feel physically ill. We walked down to the stairs about a quarter mile down a jagged rocky path to see the quarry. The way it looks now is unreal. It’s the picture of total serenity, as if you would take a long hike in the woods to find this small lake where you could walk up and see this pristine view of the countryside.
We went into another gas chamber. The experience was still intense, but felt different from the first time. I guess it didn’t hit me like a ton of bricks, but I could still feel the residual energy. I made sure to take a picture of the inside of the door and thought about the fact that thousands of people tried to push their way out as one last attempt to escape, although it was futile. Our tour guide reminded us that it took hours to clear the room after everyone was murdered. They would be in such a panic that they would kind of curl up and hook onto each other in ways that they would be tangled. The crematorium was in the same building, in three separate rooms.
One other thing I noticed there more than the other 3 camps we’ve visited was that there was a lot of graffiti. High School students are often taken to camps such as Mauthausen as part of their curriculum. It felt so surreal to see these kids running around, joking, and kind of playing around in such a horrible place. There’s that disassociation again. I mean, I kind of identify with the inability to have a true idea of the horrors that actually took place there, but I dare not even say I felt hungry and wanted a snack while we walked around for a couple hours talking about how these people starved to death for months. The graffiti didn’t seems to have anything to do with the Holocaust or come across as being directed at anything at the camp, but damn, how distant does somebody have to be to write something like “so in so was here, 2008!”?
Some things that got to me:
The gas chamber and looking at the door from the inside.
Disrespectful graffiti.
Feeling hungry, but refusing to even say it while learning about how people starved to death. I had a full breakfast that morning and was carrying a bottle of water, waiting until the 2 hour tour was over to eat became a non-issue.
The pictures of prisoners who threw themselves on the electric fence, or were thrown on the fence by the SS, or were forced to run into the fence by the SS.
Pictures of naked skeletal children.
The thought of the SS forcing prisoners to push each other off the quarry cliffs.