Austria.

We arrive at Mauthausen, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps in Europe. My stomach tightens and I start to feel a little ill. I know I am in for a heavy experience. The place is huge and made from cement and stone. I find out that the Nazis made the first prisoners of Mauthausen build the camp themselves.

My hair stands on end and as I pass through the gate and I mentally put myself in the place of a prisoner. A heaviness sets over my whole body and I feel this deadening sensation. I imagine how it would feel to have no freedom, to have your spirit broken. As someone who values my freedom so much, I am immensely sad. I am crumbled in this state of mind and so devastated for the people who actually had to live this unfathomable experience. I feel such shame and disbelief for the atrocities that human beings can be capable of in the name of prejudice. 

Front gate of Mauthausen

The barracks are set up near to the way they used to be with narrow bunk beds placed close together. I learn that 300 prisoners slept in each barrack, 2-3 per bed. The beds are tiny even for one person.

Some of the narrow bunks that used to fill the barracks

(Image from ushmm.org)

I am shocked and horrified to see that right across from the barracks where everyone slept were two chimneys from above the gas chambers and furnaces. The reminder of death were around the people of Mauthausen at all times.

The chimneys from the furnaces and gas chamber

The camp was open from 1938-1945. Mauthausen was among the very last to close. It was a labor camp and the inmates toiled away every day in the granite quarry nearby. They used dynamite to blow the rock to pieces and then the prisoners had to carry it all up the giant hill one their backs.

The stairs are steep and uneven. I walked the them once, and even without carrying a giant granite stone on my back it was exhausting. I learned that the laborers didn’t just have to walk the stairs… their pace had to be much faster, a quick march kept by the pace of blows to their backs with sticks. All this on a meager diet of thin soup. The residents of Mauthausen looked like walking skeletons.

(Image from Wikepedia)

The staircase was nicknamed the “Stairs of Death” and was the site of numerous casualties. Many prisoners died from being worked to death, many were shot there or thrown off the edge of the cliff, something the officers called “Parachuting.” I stood at the top of the stairs in horror reading about the atrocities that went on there. The sign stated that sometimes at the end of a long day, when the prisoners were walking the stairs, the SS officers would push one of them and create a domino effect causing all of them to fall over each other.

Prisoners marching granite stones up the “Stairs of Death”

Then we visited the gas chambers. I was overwhelmed with an intense dizziness coupled with a sickening queasiness I’ve never experienced before. I tried to put on the mind set of those being brought there and couldn’t stay in it longer than a second. Unimaginable. There was a large room where bodies were piled after being gassed. The furnaces were next to that and it was the “privileged” inmates who were the ones to put the dead into the furnaces. I felt like I could throw up.

I was so relieved to leave this place and tempted to push it far from my mind. But I keep the memory in honor of the people who lived it and for the moments I need perspective.

I left the gate as free as I’d come, but deeply changed. 

Mauthausen is an important lesson in prejudice and history. 

I will never forget it.