Mauthausen concentration camp was a very brutal camp (even prisoners from Auschwitz I camp feared being transferred there). Estimates suggest up to 100-120, 000 people lost their lives there between its construction in 1938 and its liberation in May 1945. I had heard and read a lot about what life was like within this camp, and the varied (and often sadistic) methods of murder there. Again I will talk more about the history of the camp and give more details about my visit there in future blogs. But for me this was a site of special interest, and it did make much more of a psychological and affective impact upon me.
There are a number of reasons as to why this may be the case – I felt more personally invested in the place having watched hours and hours of documentary footage. As I wandered around parts of the site I could remember watching specific survivors retell their (often harrowing) accounts of the place whilst revisiting these places again. It was also a more difficult site to get to (with no convenient buses to the site) and a rather grim day to be visiting with gale-force winds and torrential rains throughout the day. The awful weather, location, and the fact that it was a regional Bank Holiday in Austria had the knock-on effect that there were far fewer visitors.
You had to be pretty determined to see the site to visit under these conditions and there were none of the family groups taking snapshots that, for me, characterised our visit to Dachau.
Before the rain began we took the pathway down the ‘Stairs of Death’ to the infamous quarry. We spent an hour or so down there alone, and I was overwhelmed with sadness there. There were numerous occasions at Mauthausen where the enormity of what had happened in this cold fortress-like place really got to me emotionally. With no visitors around there was the time to reflect, and I was less self-conscious of my reactions to the site. The Memorial Park was quite affecting.
As the rain began, I wandered around the individual memorials undisturbed by other visitors. A solitary guided tour of schoolchildren bypassed me as I was leaving to enter the main camp. Inside the gates of the camp there were more visitors but there was not the frenzy to take pictures as I had witnessed at Dachau. And certainly no queues waiting to photograph or even touch ‘landmarks’ of the site (the gate, the shower-heads, etc.). It seemed less tourist-dominated, and the visitors seemed much more subdued and respectful of the site. Mauthausen seems a very authentic site – with so much of the original camp remaining intact and far more personal historic relics being incorporated into the exhibitions and installations. I was also very moved by the memorials and in particular the personal messages, photos, flags and wreaths which had been left by people from all over the world who had come to remember a specific family member or a group of individual prisoners who had perished here.
