Getting to Mauthausen from Salzburg is quite an ordeal.  It's an hour and a half train ride from Salzburg to Linz where we change trains to continue on to the very small little village of Mauthausen.  Then we either take a taxi or walk to the camp.  The taxi is better because the walk is a long, steep uphill climb which is brutal in hot weather as last year's group can attest. But our journey doesn't seem too bad when it is compared to how the inmates of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp must have felt on their journey to the Camp.  For some it was the last journey of their lives.

 

We arrived at the stark stone camp at about 11 a.m. on Wednesday.  The first thing we saw was a field where the Russian captives were kept.  The camp is in a beautiful area that makes it hard to imagine the ugliness that was going on behind the stone walls.  Then we moved toward the stairs, or the Todestiege (stairs of death), on which inmates were forced to carry huge blocks of granite on their backs from the quarry below the camp.  There were over 200 steps and unlike the stairs that are there today, they were uneven and some of the steps were as much as 1.5 meters high.  The inmates were shoulder to shoulder as they trudged up the stairs and if one inmate happened to stumble or fall, he would cause those around him and behind him to stumble and fall as well.

 

When our students got to the bottom of the stairs and into the quarry area, they saw that in the quarry are three pools.  One of these pools was used as an amusment for the camp guards.  They would force the inmates to line up single file at the edge of the cliff over the pool. Then the guard would force the inmate at the back to push the man in front of him causing a chain reaction with the inmates falling off the cliff into the pool below.  They were either killed by the fall down or drowned in the pool.

 

After the students climbed back up the stairs, panting and wheezing, we headed into the camp through monuments erected by several nations remembering those who had been incarcerated there.  Then it was through the massive gate into the camp where a very sobering experience awaited them.

 

The first stop in our audio tour was the "Wailing Wall" where new prisoners were forced to stand upon arrival for anywhere from a few hours to a few days, no matter what the weather.  Mauthausen is high and the winters can be severe whereas the summers can be extremely humid and hot. When inmates were taken from the Wailing Wall, they were processed and assigned to overcrowded barracks that were too small for such a large number of men.  Then they began living a nightmare with cruel guards with guns and vicious dogs that were ordered to attack prisoners that displeased the guards; high stone walls with electric barbed wire on top of them; lice, inadequate meals served every couple of days; inadequate clothing; inadequate to non-existent medical care for the illnesses associated with living in such cramped quarters and inhumane doctors that enjoyed doing experiments on living human beings. 

 

The tour included entrance to the gas chamber, the neck-shot room, hanging area and the crematorium ovens as well as a museum that had many graphic photos of the prisoners and camp life as well as a model of the camp.  To wind up the trip, we went into the visitor's center and watched a 45 minute documentary on the camp and it's heartbreaking history.  The documentary included interviews with former inmates, a man who helped supply the camp with food, a woman whose mother sheltered a prisoner that had escaped and an American Marine who helped liberate the camp.

 

This was a very moving experience for all of us and the students said they thought it was an important experience for them take part in.