Aug 24 - Day 1 in Mauthausen

I am writing this blog long after I went on the visit. This is actually my very last blog, the one I could not bring myself to write – mostly because, even now, I do not know what to write. I have all these thoughts – just stray thoughts, no conclusions, no sentences, no structure – running through my head. Nothing to explain any of today.

I didn’t take notes while at Mauthausen. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t take pictures either – it was enough for me just to be there, to feel there. Ruth Kluger’s words ran through my head – “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” and her thought that “A visitor who feels moved, even if it is only the kind of feeling that a haunted house conveys, will be proud of these stirrings of humanity.”

Yet how can you not be moved? I did not feel proud there. But I did not sob, like I did while reading Holocaust memoirs, watching films and documentaries. Being there made me overcome with anger. I was devastated. I was not satisfied. Nothing was answered, just more questions, more whys.

The memorial plaques. So many people, so many types and individuals, all died and suffered here. In a gas chamber there was a swastika on a memorial plaque. Our tour guide said someone in the guidebook wrote they wished the camp was still active. How do you deal with that hatred?

I do not know how I feel about parts of the camp being rebuilt after the storm. I do not know how I felt walking there. But I felt wrong, sad, lost… as I said earlier, my words are not enough, not right – I do not know the words.

This experience will haunt me. Maybe in time I will be able to articulate it.

I can do what I can with it – historically. Mauthausen was a concentration camp, mostly for intellectuals and political prisoners, until more prisoners were brought in from the East. Many were worked to death in the quarry, with its Stairs of Death (I walked a smoothed over version). The Stairs of Death I saw were smooth, easy to traverse, led to a grassy meadow. It did not look like the pictures I found online. A gas chamber was also built in Mauthausen, completed in 1941. Many died there.

I just have to keep reading, keep learning, and pay attention.