I'm taking the time to journal about what I did today in Germany, because I want to remember it really well. Not that the partying, and pretty shopping boutiques of the last few days aren't awesome, but today was special. Today we visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. I wish we had been allowed to take pictures, because it was EXTREMELY interesting.
We toured what's left of the camp (Allied forces destroyed most of it when they overtook it), most of which is original. I have to say the most haunting part was definitely the "cold-storage room", but more on that later. Most of the truly horrible facilities, the rooms where they killed and gassed thousands, are underground. Walking in is truly haunting, the temperature just drops because of the stone buildings, and it truly feels like it's haunted.
The first thing we saw though, was probably one of the most scary and bone chilling things. Our bus stopped in a parking lot, and we walked out into a beautiful green meadow. Wildflowers growing in the grass, the birds singing, a large cliff looking over it. And then we were told its story, as one of the walls of the quarry, known as the "Sky dive cliff", as for "fun" the SS soldiers would make the convicts stand in lines at the top, and then the second person in line would have to push the first off the edge. If the fall didn't kill them, the lakes at the bottom surely would. It was an odd feeling, to be standing on the place where hundreds of prisoners would have fallen down the cliff. Then, we had the task of climbing the Stairs of Death, aptly named. Although all I was carrying was a small, two or three pound backpack, they were hard to climb. I can't imagine having to carry up 50 kg chunks of granite. The thing that made them so horrible was that none of them were even, so the entire time had to be spent staring at your feet to make sure you didn't stumble. 186 steps up to the top of the hill, and I was exhausted by the top. Our tour guide told us stories about how the guards would push someone at the top of the staircase, sending them and their load tumbling down into the others.
After that we toured what's left of the camp, and then we got to go down into the crematorium and gas chambers. The gas chambers look exactly like the shower rooms, which was to make the inmates unaware of what was happening until they actually died. We also passed through the cold-storage room, a morgue where dead bodies were piled. There was a red walkway in the middle, with two concrete platforms on either side. I wanted so badly to step on one of the side concrete platforms, where the bodies would have been piled, but I just couldn't. As I said right after, I felt like I would be haunted forever if I stepped there.
At the very end of our tour, our tour guide told us about how the prison even had an orchestra, so they could show people and tell the government how "cultured" they were, although it was all a ruse. And the last thing our tour guide said was "but in some of the accounts of survivors, they said that "the music saved my soul"" which made me get all choked up because I can imagine that so vividly.
I'm glad we went to the concentration camp, because it's truly something I never would have gotten to see back in Canada, and it was deeply interesting and touching.
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rushed
excited
crazy
