My first impression of Mauthausen was one that I was completely not expecting. When our bus rounded the corner up the hill to get to the camp, and I first looked at those imposing walls and huge watch towers I felt a strong sense of dread surge through my body. There is no rationality behind it because we were only there to visit and not be interned, but something in the very foundations of the way Mauthausen was built got me to feel briefly like I was in danger. I can only image how it must have felt for those who knew they'd never leave this place.
I will always remember our tour guide, Daniel Tscholl. Never have I had a tour with someone who truly made me think about the deeper questions regarding the place I was visiting. He knew how to engage everyone he talked to and how to drive the message home. Daniel began by saying he didn't like to talk about numbers, and that ended up being true. I respect that he didn't focus on the things that most people hear about Holocaust events and places; that is, the number of people who died and of what group they belonged to. Instead he focused on the human experience of Mauthausen in every personal aspect.
I think the most striking and unforgettable things we talked about that day was the soccer field and swimming pool just outside the gates of Mauthausen. The soccer field was dug out by at least 1000 Russians, most of whom died in the process. Here, the officers of the camp would come to play soccer, and every once in a while they would compete with other teams from around Austria and Germany. All the while there was a huge camp less than 100 feet from the field that housed the thousands of quarantined sick prisoners who were left to die of their illnesses. The bleachers where the towns-folk of Mauthausen sat to watch the games had direct view through the barbed wire fences to the dying prisoners. I felt what a lot of the other students felt when I heard this; disgust.
The swimming pool was another horrifying story. It can't be more than 20 feet from the entrance to the camp, and yet the Austrians wanted to use it for an official swim match in the 1950's.
What Daniel emphasized the most on his four hour tour was how normal all of this was. It feels weird to call it that, but it's really important to point out that most of the people responsible for the horrors committed here were not mentally unstable, psychopathic, or anything else that would excuse their behavior. Mauthausen was an examination into the human capacity to desensitize itself. The officers and the towns-folk of Mauthausen let themselves, slowly but surely, adapt to the mindset that this was normal. If we don't realize that most humans are capable of this kind of terrible adaptation, then we put our societies at risk.
In my neuroscience classes, we often talk about something called habituation and I think it is a really good analogy to this situation, if not an explanation. Our model organism in this case is a slug like animal called aplysia. If you repeatedly stimulate its gill with some kind of tactile stimulus, its excitatory post synaptic potential (EPSP) will drop over time, eventually sometimes achieving no response. This is caused by a reduction in the influx of Ca2+ into the cell, making vesicle binding and neurotransmitter release much less frequent. Evolutionary it makes sense that if a stimulus is applied, and shows no sign of stopping, the body shouldn't continually use resources to notify you of its presence. Our brains basic mechanisms for habituation work exactly the same way. If someone were to rest their hand on your shoulder, you'd stop noticing it was there after a couple minutes because your sensory neurons responsible for sensing pressure would undergo the same reduction in EPSP.
In the case of the people all throughout Austria that sat and witnessed the destruction that the Nazis wrought unto so many people, the pressure of the Nazi touch eventually began to go unnoticed. Life goes on, people adapt.
One more story really stuck with me from this trip. Daniel talked to us about an interaction he had with a past prisoner of Mauthausen. This man was held there with his father, and they survived together for a little while. But one morning he wakes up to find his father dead and the first emotion he experience is extreme joy. He felt happy because he knew his father would always keep half a piece of bread under the bed to eat in the morning, and now that he was dead, the man could eat the bread. I think that story really shows the level of deprivation and inhumanity these people faced.
I only took one picture while I was at Mauthausen. All the photos I have posted so far have not been my own. It felt wrong to take photos, not because I think that people shouldn't take photos out of respect. In fact I think it more important that a place be remembered, and photographs certainly help to that end. But I was too much in the moment to even think about taking out my phone. I think that really speaks to the quality of our tour guide and the gravity of a place like Mauthausen.
Here is the photo I took:
Seeing this gave me goose bumps. To think of my country men so far from home, dying in terrifying place like this in the middle of Austria because of their political dissidence and objection to invasion really made the experience here even more personal. But the really depressing part about this is that there were only 77 Norwegians who died here, compared to the tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans and Jews who felt the same way.
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