In “Still Alive,” Ruth Kluger writes that holocaust memorials are unnecessary and actually disrespect the dead rather than commemorate them. Kluger is a concentration camp survivor herself, first in the ghetto Theresianstadt and then Auschwitz. She argues that the memorials today are nothing more than mere tourist attractions. In her opinion, “we don’t honor the dead with these unattractive remnants of past crimes; we collect and keep them for the satisfaction of our own necrophilic desires.” To her, these remnants do not contain any of the gruesome details they did in the past that would allow the viewer to identify with the victims—sights, smells, voices, hunger, etc. In her opinion, for one to truly understand something they have to be able to relate to it.
With this in the back of my mind, I entered the concentration camp Mauthausen. Mauthausen was not officially an extermination camp, but 100,000 people still died, out of the 200,000 that passed through the camp. The camp is situated on top of a large stone quarry which served as the source of materials used in the construction of the camp. The camp was largely built by the prisoners themselves, something that I find fascinating, because most of the prisoners had no prior knowledge of how to go about this. These were people from all walks of life, many of them not used to hard physical labor and zero knowledge of masonry. Masons had to be brought in from the town itself to instruct the prisoners on how to cut the stones. This meant that people in the town knew what was going on in the camp. On top of that, the SS had a very good soccer team, and many teams came to the camp to play soccer. In her book, Kluger writes that “cowardice is both normal and the norm.” I am not sure whether or not I blame the citizens who knew what was going on in the camp, primarily because I am not sure how I would act in the same situation. I think that people should not be blamed for cowardice because it is a natural and biological reaction to violence, referring here to the “fight or flight” response. The bystanders may have also feared for their own lives or those of their families.
The camp’s first wave of brutality was in the form of the prison trains. Hundreds of people could be packed into these small cars for days on end (the longest one our guide told us about was 18 days). The 100,000 that are said to have died here at the camp does not take into account the many that died en route in the squalid conditions the trains provided. Packed together, disease ran rampant as people urinated and defecated on the floors and each other, bowing to the inevitable after being cooped up for so long.
After debarking, they would be marched through the town of Mauthausen and past the watchful eyes of the townspeople, who were told that they were criminals, to the so-called Klagemauer, the wall just inside the camp’s walls where the prisoners were stripped and made to line up, once again sometimes for days. They were eventually given a uniform and made to work in the granite quarry. Mauthausen’s purpose was to work the prisoners to death. The guards took great liberties with this and often implemented their own sadistic ideas into their routines. For example, the prisoners would be made to run down a series of narrow steps into the quarry while being beaten by jeering guards along the way. At the bottom, they would pick up a heavy stone and run back up the steps, with the guards hounding them the entire way. If you fell with your stone, you were beaten. Hundreds of prisoners were thrown from the precipice overlooking the quarry, which came to be known as die Fallschirmsspringer wand, or the Parachutist’s wall.
The SS also recruited prisoners to act as supervisors for the other prisoners. These individuals, known as capos, were german speaking, not anti-Nazi, and generally willing to use violence in dealing with the other prisoners. Four capos would usually stay in one room and oversee the room adjacent to theirs, which usually contained 200 people. The room itself did not have enough beds for the number of people crammed in them. People would usually share a bed with someone else, if they were lucky enough to get a bed.
After Mauthausen, we went to the small town of Weidhoven, the home of Kathy’s friends. This town was sieged by the Turks in the fifteenth century, but the townspeople rallied themselves and drove out the invaders. According to the legend, several citizens of the town, smiths, and farmers—poorly outfitted for war--charged the Turkish position in the night while screaming, yelling, and making other sounds. The Turks were so surprised that they turned tail and fled the city. In recognition of this event a tower was built in the city. The city was also occupied by the Nazis and the city’s Rathaus even features a mural sized work of national socialist art, displaying the town with distinct Nazi features. When the Russians liberated the town, they did not destroy the painting, but simply required that the Nazi elements be removed. After the tour of this small town we gathered in a local restaurant for dinner and some local brew. On the bus ride back, the entire bus broke into song and we sang (if you can call a bus full of history students trying to sing singing) the entire way back to Vienna. Definitely an interesting contrast with the earlier gloomy mood with the group at the concentration camp. Maybe that was our way of dealing with the harsh subject matter we had been presented with today. Who knows?
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