Brody's View of Vienna

This is one of the hardest days of my life. Before I tell you anything about the truly terrible history of this awful, awful place, I wanted to first share my emotional reaction.

Getting off the bus after driving through the town of Mauthausen was different than any other stop we've made on this trip. People were somber, the view was terrifying, and there was a sense of dread in the air. No one wanted to be faced with this. How could we? I didn't feel comfortable taking photos in the camp because I felt as though it would detract from the emotional and intellectual impact of being there to divide my attention in such a way, especially when other documentation of the camp exists and my personal photography would not have added anything to enhance someone else's understanding of the atrocities that happened here.

We walked past the walls of the Concentration Camp to get to a far newer building that had been put up by the Mauthausen memorial foundation. We were supposed to eat at the cafeteria and I tried to have a hot dog but it was nearly impossible to eat any of it because my stomach was twisting itself into knots. Even with minimal knowledge of what happened here, I felt overcome with emotion and did not feel prepared to face the rest of the day.

We met with Daniel, our guide for the day, who was extremely engaging, knowledgeable, and intelligent. Without him, I don't know what this experience would have been like. The tour was not only informative but necessary to understand the weight of everything that happened at Mauthausen. While walking around the massive complex with him, I noticed many groups of American and Austrian tourists wandering around aimlessly. Some were laughing. Others were on FaceTime. Others still just seemed to be taking a walk as though they were in a public park and not a place explicitly designed for the mass-slaughter and enslavement of innocent people. Without a guide, they were left alone to be disrespectful, obnoxious, and ignorant, something I do not believe they should be allowed to do.

The first stop on the tour with Daniel was the hospital camp, a large empty field where once stood buildings that would house injured and infirm prisoners of the camp. Though medics did work there, the area existed so that prisoners would spread disease to one another and kill large numbers of the prisoner population. Their injuries were not meant to be treated. They were supposed to die.

Next to it was a soccer field where members of the SS working at the camp would play against local teams from other cities. The residents of the city of Mauthausen would walk up a road the enslaved prisoners had constructed to root for their SS team. This made the SS more deeply involved in the day-to-day goings on of the town, turned them into local heroes, and normalized their presence for the people around them. Rather than psychopathic monsters, these people were very young, very normal men who were willingly carrying out some of the worst deeds humanity has ever performed.

While looking at this area, I had my first of two panic attacks of the day. I don't get panic attacks often and when I do they only happen once per day. That is the impact of standing at this place. Your body physically responds to it in ways it doesn't respond to anything else. What I was looking at was a field but what happened there was so horrible and so deeply affecting that I couldn't handle it.

From there, we made our way past monuments that every major nation whose people were kept in the camp have put up to commemorate their victims. Looking at these memorials was interesting as their message felt powerful and important as they towered over a staircase where prisoners would march up from the quarry carrying heavy stones as SS officers pushed them down to watch them fall like dominoes and die for fun. The one phot I have chosen to include in this entry is a historical photo of that staircase, and it is one of the most famous and horrifying pictures to come out of Mauthausen.

Leaving the memorials behind, we made our way to the showers where new prisoners were stripped naked, forcibly shaved, and blasted with boiling hot water to prepare them for entry into the camp. Those who survived the walk up the staircase and the grueling trek from the Mauthausen train station received no reprieve and were almost instantly tortured here. This sight began my second panic attack and instantly I was crying.

After a few moments away from the group to deal with my emotions, I rejoined everyone in the barracks where prisoners had to fight each other for the opportunity to clean themselves before going to bed in cramped, freezing cold quarters. All of this was in an effort to dehumanize the people enslaved at Mauthausen. They were meant to feel subhuman and act subhuman so that, when they were killed, it felt morally correct to eradicate them from the Earth. The rules of society and the every-day pleasantries we pride ourselves on maintaining are utterly destroyed in the Concentration Camps. People are meant to break down and stop functioning. I cannot stress enough how much violence this place inflicted and how truly terrible it was for the prisoners here.

I cried again for some time before walking through a museum exhibit that had been set up to explain the history of the camp and its prisoners, much of which I have already shared here. This exhibit, while informative, exists to prepare visitors for entering the gas chambers and crematorium as well as the Room of Names, a memorial which contains the name of everyone murdered at Mauthausen.

Walking into the crematorium, my hands were shaking and I could barely breathe. Everything in the room, from the walls to the ovens themselves were covered in memorials to people killed here. Candles, pictures, poems, posters, anything you can imagine was put there by the loving families of people who lost someone because of this place. It was hard for me to stand in there but I can't imagine the strength it must take to place a memorial for your own family member in this room knowing what they went through here.

From there I made my way to the execution room. Mauthausen was a labor camp, meaning most of the murders that took place here were through medical neglect and overwork rather than the poison gas that most people associate with death in a Concentration Camp. Though that may be the case, nearly 10,000 people were killed in this very very tiny room that was packed with 60 people at a time. I stared at the chamber for a while. This is where so many people had their last memories. The last thing 10,000 people saw were these walls. I get to walk away. They didn't.

At the end of all of this, we got to go eat schnitzel. We got to drive away in our bus, listen to music, drink beer, and have a lovely evening in Vienna. Unlike the nearly 200,000 people who died within this camp's walls.

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