I didn’t want to write much about our visits to the two Polish concentration camps because I have nothing insightful to add. Every visit is a profound statement of its own, and the experience has been described often and well by those who are more eloquent than I. Just adding this short note about a somewhat similar Austrian excursion. Ginny became friendly with a lovely woman (Sharon Hamilton - whose equally pleasant husband, Dennis, is attached to the Canadian embassy in Vienna) who invited us to join them for the drive to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp for the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of its liberation by American troops under Patton.
We ended up in a small Canadian embassy caravan and, after snaking through some very high end Viennese neighborhoods we had not (& likely would not have) seen to pick up the ambassador (he didn’t sit in our car – it would have meant he and I sharing a bucket seat and that might not have served international relations well) we hit the open road towards Linz.
Mauthausen is just outside Linz – about two hours by car from Vienna. It was much too lovely a day for this kind of occasion – warm and sunny. Somehow it feels as if these places should only be viewed in grey and somber weather. We parked well below the entry in a broad and deep depression – the dug-out stone quarry that was the reason the camp was located here. Our hosts went off to carry an impressive wreath of flowers to the ceremony, while we wandered through the camp barracks.
Mauthausen was technically a work camp, not a death camp, but the distinction seems slight. The difference is, I guess, that in the death camps there was little pretense at work – people were mostly marched off to die with disgusting (words fail) efficiency. In the work camps prisoners were killed through labor except when they were for sport. (A line of “parachutists” was formed at the edge of the quarry - push the person in front of you over the edge or be shot now). The Nazis had grand building plans and needed the stone for them, so people were made to work, and the sight of starved 85 pound men carrying 100 pound blocks of granite was, they say, not uncommon
When we got there, the central street between the existing rows of barracks was filled with thousands of onlookers as representatives of dozens of countries created a procession to placed a wreath on a memorial stone. Most of the official visitors represented nations where prisoners had come from – but not all (it included China, for instance). They carried flags and were appropriately solemn and in many cases, included survivors or their descendents. Speeches and announcements were made, a military band played, and two young women sang a variety of songs – mostly in German – very little English.
There were speeches in Italian, though. Many Italians were murdered there – mostly anti-fascist or resistance leaders. Other prisoners included political leaders from Austria, Roma, and homosexuals. Malthuasen was not a camp for all or mostly Jewish prisoners – though Jews made up the largest group killed there. It also included Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and Czechs. At the end of the parade were less official groups – representatives of many Italian cities and communes, and student groups, including a large contingent of the Austrian Youth Socialist Organization who came in singing an anti-fascist song – which was particularly moving given the ins and outs of local politics these day.
Still, the biggest contingent in the ceremony was from Israel – and it received the loudest and longest applause. It was also the only one that we could see that was bordered by security agents –plain clothes stern-faced men with white coiled wire coming up their backs to their ears, backs to their countrymen with eyes scanning the crowd. We saw several of them later walking through the exhibits. They were taking photos of the pictures on the wall (of victims in various states of degradation). I watched them doing this & imagined their thoughts (“this is why I do this job”).
Visiting Mauthausen was very different from going to Auschwitz. Besides being a smaller site it seemed more personal. One of the larger existing barracks had an extensive exhibit on what happened at the camp. Within this, there were areas of memorial photos and plaques that had individual names and seemed home-made, we think put together by family members in remembrance. There was no uniformity to them other than the uniformity of sadness and outrage. Near the outside walls, each country that lost citizens had its own memorial plaque, and beyond the walls were other, larger memorial sculptures donated by the various countries. They were adorned with wreaths and other commemorations that day.
We left the camp by wending our way through quaint and pretty local villages. Lest we be too entranced by them, our Canadian host told us a story as he headed toward Vienna to make the 2 hour drive in time for his evening plane to Bucharest. At one time, he explained, Mauthausen housed (worked, tortured) a captured cadre of Russian soldiers, who managed to successfully plan and execute a group escape. During the next day many local Austrian residents took down their hunting rifles and joined the German soldiers in a “rabbit hunt” – finding, capturing, and shooting fleeing Russians. Maybe the village is not so quaint after all.
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