August 22

Today we skipped class and took a bus to the Mathausen concentration camp. This camp was started in 1940 as a labor camp. It grew to be one of the biggest Nazi labor camps in German-controlled Europe. I had never been to a concentration camp, and I can’t say that I was excited about going because I knew that it would be intense. I was expecting the camp to be located in a more deserted area, but it was actually located on top of a hill right next to the town of Mathausen. There were houses and farms located all around the exterior of the camp. The first thing we did when we got to the camp was walk around the surrounding areas to look at the monuments and to walk down the stairway of death into the quarry where the prisoners worked. The stairway down to the quarry was called the stairway of death because it was a long staircase full of high and uneven stairs that the prisoners were expected to run up and down while carrying heavy stones and dodging the blows of the Nazi officers watching over them. Many of the prisoners died here from either falling down the stairs, collapsing from exhaustion in the quarry, or being pushed over the edge of the quarry cliff by the Nazi officers. The stones that the prisoners collected out of this quarry were actually used to build the camp. After visiting the quarry we went to look at all of the monuments erected for the prisoners of the camp. Most of the prisoners here were men, but there were some women and children also. In fact, one of the monuments was built just for the children prisoners. It has become a tradition to place pebbles and stones on the monuments as a sign of respect for the prisoners, so many of my classmates did so. After we looked at the monuments, we went on a guided tour of the inside of the camp. We first saw the wall were the prisoners were originally brought in and lined up. Many of them were killed here because they were too old or tired to become good workers for the camp. We were then brought to the shower room where the prisoners were cleaned off and their belongings were taken from them. Some of them who resisted were made to take a shower in scalding hot or freezing cold water. The tour guide then took us to the bunk houses where the prisoners slept. In these bunkhouses, the prisoners had to share one bathroom and washroom with thousands of other prisoners. They also had to share their tiny bed with one other person. It was really hard for me to walk around in these rooms because there were pictures on the walls of how the prisoners looked and how they had to live that made me feel really mournful for them. After seeing the bunkhouses, we were taken to a room where some of the prisoners were hanged or shot. This room was located right next to the gas chamber, where many of the prisoners were killed from the different kinds of gases that the Nazis tested out to see which kind was the best and the cheapest to use for killing. We then went into the cremation chamber room, where the bodies were burned. This room was full of pictures and plaques dedicated to the camp’s prisoners. At this point in the tour I was getting a little emotional and looking at all of the pictures of the people that died in the camp was hard for me. At the end of the tour, I walked through the museum full of pictures and examples of the prisoners clothing and then went to go watch the video. We all sat in the video room to watch a movie about the camp. The part of the movie that really got to me was when one of the American soldiers who came to the camp at the end of the war tried to tell about what he was feeling when he came here and he started crying. He could barely even talk about it. It must have been a intensely horrifying experience to come to this camp and find the thousands of prisoners that were in the shape that they were in. At the end of the video, we left to go back to Vienna. I know some people believe that it is wrong to go and visit these concentration camps, but I think that it is ok because it is not out of disrespect. It helps us to learn more about what actually happened to the prisoners, and it gives us a c=sense of appreciation for our own lives.
The German word of the day is krank, which means “ill”.