Mauthausen Concentration Camp

    Kalifa and I spent a couple days wandering around the Old City of Linz. It's really gorgeous! The main street is filled with stores and has both ends in a Christmas market. And if you go just a few steps into a side street, it's very quiet and empty. The interesting thing about Austria is that pedestrians are very quiet. It's kind of strange to walk past hundreds of people and hardly hear any thing.

   Then on Thursday, we got up early and rode the bus to a tiny town called Mauthausen about 45 minutes away from Linz. It's pretty cute, but that wasn't why we went there. We went for the Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp, a Nazi camp from World War II. It started as a single camp, but soon grew to be one of the largest labor-camp complexes. The prisoners were used as slave labor right outside the camp at the stone quarry and the plane-parts factory.

   It was so sad. I've never been to a concentration camp before. Most of the barracks have been torn down, except the ones lining the roll call area. Although we saw a few people at the beginning, we were soon the only people in the whole place. It felt so ominous and dead. It was difficult to match up the deadness to the chaos that had been. Thousands of people scrambling through the camp, barracks filled with gaunt men and the roll call area filled with saluting skeletons.

   We found a small entry way to the gas chambers and cremation chambers, located under the prison building. We somberly went through the dank rooms, stepped through the thick doors hanging open into sealed chambers, gazed at a few pictures of victims, walked around a cremation oven and found an empty body table. I honestly felt a little creeped out and very, very sad.

   After we came out of the gas chambers, it was raining. We made our way past dozens of silent statues standing where the guards barracks used to be. Behind a huge sculpture of barbed wire, we saw a huge gully, the old stone quarry. There were a few, deep, green ponds and the long, infamous Stairs of Death on the other side. We squeezed past a gate ( there was a sign saying we could proceed at our own risk in winter) and continued down a cobblestone road along the cliff. Kalifa stayed at the top, and I slowly walked down the steps and around the bottom of the gully. I couldn't believe everything that had happened. I slowly climbed the 189 steps, imagining the poor people that had to rush up the stairs with 100 kilos of stone on their backs.

   Mauthausen was very sad, but extremely interesting. And since it's not one of the most famous concentration camps, it's easy to avoid large crowds. If you ever find yourself in that part of Austria, I recommend it.

Spain to its fallen sons in Mauthausen
2 February, 1978

Old bathroom

Prison cells

Gas chamber

Stone quarry

Stairs of Death

Parachute Wall. The Nazi guards forced prisoners to jump off to their deaths