(March 13, 2012)
Note: this entry is about a concentration camp. It’s not a fluffy entry.
Back in the US, I was thinking about what I might want to do while here in Europe. One day, I thought, “I’ll take the kids to a concentration camp!” And it turns out right now, Michael’s English class is doing a unit on the Holocaust, so it was perfect timing. I had planned to go to Dachau, but it would have been almost 500 Euros for the train and bus tickets to Munich and beyond, plus, we’d have to find a hotel room and all. We were told that Mauthausen Memorial was very close to Linz. I had never heard of it. It turns out I should have. Mauthausen was THE concentration camp in Austria.
It was built in 1938 by prisoners sent from Dachau and was intended to be an “extermination through labor” camp. They sent the prisoners of war and other political prisoners here. The idea was that they’d work them so hard they’d die. The life expectancy in the camp was at first six months, but near the end of the war, it was three months. If you didn’t die from work, they had many other ways. One of the guards later reported that he counted 62 different types of ways of killing people used regularly at the camp including freezing to death after cold showers, being thrown on a high-voltage electrical fence, having a shot of poison in the heart, starvation, and medical experimentation.
During the course of the war, they don’t know exactly how many people died there, but the estimates range from 122,766 to 320,000 people. (Nazis destroyed many records when they saw the war would end soon.) When the camp was liberated in 1945, there were 85,000 people imprisoned there. The camp started out as men-only, but after other concentration camps were liberated (Mauthausen was the last to be liberated), women were also sent there.
Anyhow, now to our trip.
It was a cold, overcast day when two trains and a taxi carried us the 30 minutes to Mauthausen. It was a formidable, unwelcoming structure. It looked like a medieval fortress or something. I liked to think it had a happier history, but it was built of rock quarried out of the nearby cliffs and carried to the site by prisoners.
I am not sure what the cement structure in the front is. Perhaps a reservoir now drained?
We got our audio tour guides and walked across the chilly stone to the front door. I don’t know if most prisoners came in this way or not, but either way, it was imposing. A Nazi eagle used to be mounted above this door.
On the other side of this door was a courtyard. This is where the prisoners used to assemble for “roll call.” It was not just a simple making-sure everyone was there. It was another form of torture. The prisoners would stand for hours in the cold, most of them in rags or without shoes. Sometimes they would have to drill–march in formation for hours. Rain, snow, extreme heat or cold–healthy or ill. They had to appear and drill. Not to appear or to show that you were sick was almost instant death.
At the end of the courtyard, you turned right to go up a set of steps. These take you to the level where most of the camp was. The first thing was a balcony overlooking the courtyard. I could just imagine SS officers in their warm, wool coats smoking cigarettes and watching the ill-clad, skeletal prisoners shivering in the cold for hours.
Now, it might be good to give you an overview of the camp.
Let’s see if I can help it make sense. The courtyard where the kids walked before the big, wooden door is the bright yellow area. The maroon bit is Roll Call Square. The blue part that says “Entrance” is where the steps were. Those brownish rectangles are what you will see in a few moments as green buildings. Only five of the original buildings are standing. To the left, where it says “SS Barracks” and “Command Area” are now a memorial area with a lot of statues. And the brown quarry area is an overgrown quarry.
We had audio guides which were excellent. The tour of the place took around two hours with the guides.
The first building we went in was the laundry room. This building was also where the showers were located–real showers. I did not realize how fastidious the Nazis seemed to be about hygiene. I am sure it was just an intimidation technique masquerading as such, especially since the goal of this camp was to kill prisoners as quickly as possible. The first thing that they did to prisoners, male or female, was to shave off their hair. Then, they took their personal clothing and made them shower. Showers were required regularly. Prisoners had to line up by the thousands, naked or with only a shirt on, to get in line for a shower. “Free time” was usually spent in line for showers.
The showers were gloomy affairs in one communal room in the basement. I don’t know that there was soap. And I am sure there were no towels.
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Next, we went inside a barrack. Each prisoner (ostensibly) had a a bed (no mattress) and a wooden cabinet for personal possessions. Since there was no lock on the cabinet, it was impossible to keep things from being stolen. So, if food was mailed in (and not confiscated by the SS), it had to be eaten immediately or it would be stolen. There were a few tables and chairs, but I suspect that the exhausted prisoners, weak from lack of food and not much sleep (six hours or less every night), spent their free time in their bunks, not sitting at the tables.
We were not sure what these were. Sinks for everyone? They were in the living barracks.
Why were the prisoners so tired? They did a great deal of manual labor. The site for the concentration camp was chosen because it was next to a quarry. Prisoners worked chopping stone blocks and carrying them up “The Death Stairs.” These 186 stairs went from the base of the quarry to the outskirts of the camp. Men were forced to carry 110 pound stones up these steps, sometimes being forced to “race” one another at gunpoint.
The average prisoner (remember, they were all males!) weighed 88 pounds. He was on a diet of no more than 1,400 calories a day (which according to a website is 1/3 or less of what a man with that type of work should be eating in a day). Fainting and collapse were frequent. One man falling on the stairs created a domino effect that would have many men and their heavy stones tumbling down or tripping over each other.
This cliff was nicknamed “The Parachutist’s Wall.” The SS officers would put prisoners at the edge of the cliff and demand that either they push a fellow prisoner off the cliff or be shot themselves.
Back at the camp, things weren’t much better. I never thought about there being a prison inside a prison camp, but there was.
In the same building as the prison cells, we found more horrors.
Yes, that means “Gas Chamber.” Mauthausen didn’t have a gas chamber at first. But then, they built one that could hold 120 people at one time. I went into it. It was about the size of a bedroom. So, in order to hold that many people, they’d have to have been packed in as tightly as possible.
I expected to feel eerie the whole time I was there. So many people had died. Yet, this was the only room which made me want to get out right away.
After we came out of that room, we noticed these on the side of a wall. “Mom, what is that?” Libby asked me.
I wasn’t sure. Metal coils… and it was in the same room as this white-tiled area.
Oh. That’s what it was.
Why would they want to do that? Well…
When your goal was to kill people as quickly as possible, you wound up with a lot of dead bodies. They disposed of them by burning them and dumping the ashes in a huge pile on the edge of the camp. At first, Mauthausen had one Crematorium “stove.”
They found they had to ship their dead bodies to other places, they had so many of them.
So they added two more in 1944.
They had a place in the back to put wood to make the fire. They’d slide the body in on the stretcher, pull the stretcher out, and leave the body to be burned.
They have turned this room into a memorial room filled with plaques and photographs honoring those who died at Mauthausen.
Now, I knew they killed people at concentration camps, and I know that it was really tough to be there, but there were some things I didn’t know. Yes, I am probably stupid for not knowing them, but here they are.
1. Concentration camps didn’t just have Jewish people in them. They also had a lot of prisoners of war.
2. The standard uniform for concentration camp inmates was a striped top and pants which is where the title of the movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” came from.
(This photo shows fellow prisoners having to perform as a man is led off to be executed.)
3. Prisoners wore triangular badges of different colors to show what sort of prisoner they were. Jews had to wear a Star of David in addition to the triangular badge. (The “offenses” are all written in German in this photo, but some of them are as follows: political criminals, foreign forced labor, professional criminals, sex offenders (homosexuals), pacifists, gypsies, and prisoners of war.
(Wikipedia has an interesting article on all the badges HERE.)
Strangely, Mauthausen had a hospital. But everyone knew that it was the worst place to be. The SS “doctors” used patients for experiments of all kinds. They were not there to heal the sick, but to kill. There was a prisoner-run “hospital,” but they didn’t even have the most basic of medical supplies. Often, the sick were given half of the already-meager rations, windows in the hospital were left wide open in the winter to “air it out,” and cold baths were administered regularly.
This was a “Quarantine Area” where new prisoners went first. There used to be barracks in here, but they were torn down.
As I mentioned earlier, the SS barracks area has been turned into a memorial site with many countries contributing memorials. Although the USA had a plaque on a wall, they did not contribute a memorial. This might be because few Americans were imprisoned here. On the day that the camp was liberated, of the 85,000 here, only two were Americans.
A weeping willow stands outside the camp. That seemed very fitting.
Before we came to Mauthausen, I looked at their website. They had a number of quotes from survivors. Inside the visitor’s center, they had about 15 screens set up with earphones and videos of interviews of survivors. The videos were about 40 minutes long, so we only had time to watch two of them. The first was a man who was 13 years old and was arrested along with every man in his Czech village one day. He related how his cousin was torn apart by dogs at the camp, how he was “taught the ropes” by older prisoners, and how it was coming back to his village. 200 men left and only 60 returned.
The other interview I saw was one I searched for. One of the online quotes said, “I was a heavily pregnant skeleton.” The interviewee was a dignified woman who was originally from Prague but who had moved to England after the war. She said that she knew she was Jewish, but that her wealthy family never practiced any form of religion at all. She and her husband moved into a ghetto at first. (I just learned this from reading Schindler’s List–the Jews were first made to move into small sections of a city “for their protection.” These were the ghettos.) She wound up pregnant while here and had to sign a paper saying that she would “give up her baby.” Her little boy died from pneumonia at two months old.
Near the end of the war, in late 1944 or early 1945, her husband was taken to Auschwitz. She was three months pregnant at the time, and she soon followed. She was not showing her pregnancy at the camp, and 10 days later, she and a group of young women were sent to a factory to work. Her job was to sweep the factory floor for 14 hours a day. When she was nine months pregnant, she was put on a cattle car. She said that at one point on the two week trip, a guard opened the door for air. She stood there, “a heavily pregnant skeleton.” A farmer saw her and brought her a glass of milk. She said that nothing in her life ever tasted as good as that milk. Soon, the train stopped for good. When the door was open and she saw the word “Mauthausen” on the train platform, she went into labor.
They put her in a cart with dying and sick women. She had her baby there. Someone wrapped the baby for her and put her in a bed. Three days later, she asked a nurse (fellow prisoner) to please give her little boy a bath. The woman took the baby and said, “This is a little girl!” She had only fed the baby and tried to keep it warm. A few days after the baby was born, Mauthausen was liberated, and she and her daughter got to leave.
I expected to be very emotional seeing this place where all the suffering happened. But I found myself saying, “Oh, they had beds? That’s not so bad. And 1400 calories? That’s about what I eat in a day.” And then, I had to shake myself as I stood there in my warm coat and gloves and boots complaining about the cold and heading into the cafe for a cup of hot tea. Maybe we as humans just don’t want to understand suffering of that magnitude? We see it. We see the pictures. But, the true horror of the situation is distilled somehow, like it is just a story in a book or a Hollywood movie.
I tried to think about people I love being there. Who were my Jewish friends who might have been rounded up and had their heads shaved? Which ones would have been prisoners of war? That helped me to understand it better.
The most emotional I got was when I saw this photo display:
The camp was liberated on May 5, 1945, by the US 11th armored division. Those are our guys in the tank! That made me want to tear up.
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