Concentration Camp 'Mauthausen'

Living as an Afro-European has it's ups and downs, just like every other situation. In this Blog we try to document some highlights in our lives, telling our stories raw but with a touch of lemon.

From childhood we are taught to forgive and forget. Yet every year, starting from middle school (in Austria) we have to bite through History lessons on 'World War II'. Yes, we ought to know our history and what role we played and still play in making it, BUT EVERY SINGLE YEAR?? That´s like almost 6 years of having to listen to the same tragedy all over again ...and again.

We are forced to listen to the rise and fall of the monster Adolf Hitler. 
We are forced to mourn and feel the pain of the Jews and other "Non-Germans/Austrians", who were hunted, oppressed, tortured and killed for being humans. 
We are forced to memorize the stories of the dead.
We are forced to find a scapegoat to blame.
And most of all, whether willingly or not, we are forced to hate.

The purpose of our always repeating this topic in History is, according to my teacher, to prevent such an atrocity from happening again and to learn from our mistakes. Obviously she knows nothing about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, because one of his famous quotes is: 

"The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history." 

Nonetheless, as a conclusion of this year's dose of World War II -till next year I bet- my teacher proposed or rather declared, that we would be going on an excursion to Mauthausen, the biggest concentration camp in Austria, which is now more or less a memorial/museum.

As you can imagine the enthusiasm was sooo great, that most of us delayed the €20 payment till the very last minute and were sooo happy to stand under the rain and listen the same sad, sad, hate-generating, sad story once again but from a different voice.


Now let the pictures speak for themselves:

They actually built a castle just so they could lock up and torture 200.000 people.

And then the Nazis made a football field(right behind the huge tree) with more than enough audience room. Which meant they didn't even try to hide anything form anyone and no one seemed to care.

I still am astonished at the humongous size of camp.

Somehow I found this barbed wire fence very offending!

But it held us from "plunging to death"

And then we saw the notoriously famous "Todesstiege" = "Stairs of Death", where the inmates had to overcome 31 meters of height with the help of 186 uneven steps while carrying granite blocks -half their malnourished weight. And that daily!!

Memorial plaques upon memorial plaques on the wailing wall.

Every free wall was "decorated" by these.

There were probably soo many that a special room was built for them.

"There were no names anymore, we knew we were numbers. No one called: 'Mr. Pilarski!' 

It was just: 'Inmate 5579, come here!' It's a terrible moment when a person loses his/her personality.

You are an inmate, a number, with whom everything can be done without punishment.

We were aware of that, but we still hoped, that the war wouldn't last too long. We still believed, that it would all be over very soon and we would go back to our normal lives."

Just some of the names of the nameless, countless who died there.

 I wonder how they guys could be sleeping with all the souls weeping and wailing right behind them.

And still, these poor men can bring themselves to smile on the 5. May 1945, as the American troupes march in to free them. 

Nur im Krieg und in der Liebe ist alles erlaubt!