Mauthausen concentration camp
The Second World War has interested me for as far back as I can remember and this interest has driven me to read countless novels and history books and watch numerous films based on this tragedy. I guess I thought I had quite a firm understanding of the Holocaust, but walking into Mauthausen concentration camp (established in August 1938) yesterday made me realise that we would never really understand the past. About 25 students from the Summer school came on the trip, which began with a discussion with our tour guide on our first impression of the camp and on Nazi ideology that was, as she put it, “the foundation of the walls of the camp”. Indeed, the question of ideology cropped up in every subsequent discussion we had. One of our first stops was a football field, right outside a courtyard where so many Jews and other Nazi victims died, their bodies broken from weeks, months, maybe even years of torturous labour. This football field was the playing ground of Nazi officials, used for evening amusement. What kind of man could play football knowing that humans were being murdered one by one next to them? The only possible answer is that the Nazis and their supporters were trained to think of Jews as little more than rats, and this dehumanisation gave them the excuse they needed to continue the slaughter proudly. We learnt early on that Mauthausen was probably the worst concentration camp in Austria, largely because of the slave labour, lack of food, and disease that was life in all concentration camps due to the cramped, unhygienic living conditions. Those who arrived at Mauthausen were aware that it would be their last stop – they would be forced to work until they died. One of their tasks was to climb two hundred steps with unimaginably heavy slabs of stone, which they would then use to continue fashioning their death camp. None of us dared to complain about the 200 narrow steps or the biting wind, realising that the minor irritations of our lives had no place in Mauthausen. Even more sobering was the news that Jewish prisoners were forbidden to wear shoes as they climbed the uneven steps. Nearer the end of our tour we were shown the barracks where the inmates were forced to sleep two to a narrow bed, as many as 200 in a small room. We were told that there were no cubicles in the bathroom next door to the bedroom, the first of the Nazi techniques we discussed that helped to humiliate and “break the personality” of the Jew. A further method of humiliation was shaving the prisoners’ hair on their arrival, and following this “cleansing” with communal showering naked, where prison guards often violated the female inmates. Our tour concluded with the gas chamber, which was disguised as a bathroom with water pipes and showers. Also positioned in the gas chamber was a crematorium oven in which Nazi victims were disposed of, their ashes later mixed together and sold to the families of the Jews, who were not only tricked into thinking the ashes were the genuine remains of their loved ones, but also were told that their family members had died of natural causes such as heart attacks, “saved” from knowing of the chilling reality of the concentration camps. In the museum we learnt how the concentration camp became more efficient with the installation of the first crematorium ovens in May 1940. Until then the corpses of the concentration camp inmates were transported to the crematoriums in Steyr and Linz. By May 1940 more than 2100 corpses from Mauthausen had been disposed of in these two crematoriums. However, due to the anticipated high morality and a desire to keep the slaughter of the Jews from the public eye, the Nazis began to build crematorium ovens in the individual camps in 1939. The final question of the day: “do you think something like this could happen again?” troubled me greatly, and yet it is something we must consider if we are avoid such camps from ever being used again. None of us really hesitated in nodding our assent in answer to our tour guide’s question, and we gave examples of how such things are happening on a smaller scale every day. I guess what we all took from the day was a heightened awareness of how fragile human life can be. It’s a fine line sometimes, if we who live in such a democratic society still consider the possibility of such a horrific event happening again. We need to really think about every moment, every word we say and action we take, if we are to avoid a second Holocaust, for every time we feel superior to another individual we risk becoming like the Nazis and their supporters. – Sarah Gingell
Bildnachweis: Andrew Lechler