Our outing last Sunday was supposed to be a sunny drive along the autobahn for two hours, a short tour of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, and a sunny drive on a slow road home through the Danube Valley, past quaint little villages here and there, each with its own ruined castle. We are learning that a forecast of "sunny" here probably means no more than that the sky will be a slightly lighter shade of gray than it usually is. Our drive began in light fog, which turned to middling fog by the time we reached our destination, and, like the somberness of the camp, the hung in front of us all the way home.
Like so many of the ruined castles along the river, the concentration camp sits high on a hill above the town. The Austrian Government has preserved and maintained it, and in 1970 it opened as a museum and memorial. Russian soldiers were quartered in the camp barracks after the war, probably resulting in at least some modifications to the relatively few remaining buildings, and the creation of the museum and visitor facilities, along with subsequent preservation work and the erection of numerous memorials across the grounds, has also done something to change the look.
Although much is gone, the walls, the watch towers, the barbed wire--those things alone would have been enough to evoke the ghosts of the 130,000 people who died there. Sometimes it was difficult getting a grip on what transpired: the room that served as the gas chamber looked smaller than I had expected, kind of like an extra-large closet. The ovens looked too small to admit an adult of normal size. Nearby is a quarry, where prisoners were worked to death.
The scale and depth of what occurred in Mauthausen created another kind of cold and fog--an impenetrable barriers to understanding. I could recognize the suffering only in some of the museum's photographs of individuals and through the introductory film, which provided brief narratives by survivors and accounts from some of the American soldiers who liberated the camp at the end of the war. The victims--a wide range of nationalities--included Jews, gypsies, criminals, Spanish nationalists, and large numbers of POWs, particularly Russians, hundreds of whom were slaughtered after an escape attempt. As townspeople reported, SS officers returned to their homes in the village below in the evening, tended their flower gardens meticulously, took good care of their pets, and played with their children. I cannot begin to understand it; I will leave the cultural psychoanalysis to others.
Like so many of the ruined castles along the river, the concentration camp sits high on a hill above the town. The Austrian Government has preserved and maintained it, and in 1970 it opened as a museum and memorial. Russian soldiers were quartered in the camp barracks after the war, probably resulting in at least some modifications to the relatively few remaining buildings, and the creation of the museum and visitor facilities, along with subsequent preservation work and the erection of numerous memorials across the grounds, has also done something to change the look.
Although much is gone, the walls, the watch towers, the barbed wire--those things alone would have been enough to evoke the ghosts of the 130,000 people who died there. Sometimes it was difficult getting a grip on what transpired: the room that served as the gas chamber looked smaller than I had expected, kind of like an extra-large closet. The ovens looked too small to admit an adult of normal size. Nearby is a quarry, where prisoners were worked to death.
The scale and depth of what occurred in Mauthausen created another kind of cold and fog--an impenetrable barriers to understanding. I could recognize the suffering only in some of the museum's photographs of individuals and through the introductory film, which provided brief narratives by survivors and accounts from some of the American soldiers who liberated the camp at the end of the war. The victims--a wide range of nationalities--included Jews, gypsies, criminals, Spanish nationalists, and large numbers of POWs, particularly Russians, hundreds of whom were slaughtered after an escape attempt. As townspeople reported, SS officers returned to their homes in the village below in the evening, tended their flower gardens meticulously, took good care of their pets, and played with their children. I cannot begin to understand it; I will leave the cultural psychoanalysis to others.
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