There is no way to really fathom all of what we experienced today. We visited the Mauthausen concentration camp, which is located just outside of Linz, Austria. I had been anxious about this trip since the start of the program, knowing that my experience would be deep and complicated. I had heard many stories of the Holocaust in my Jewish education, through books, pictures, and second and first-hand accounts.
I analyzed the experience of visiting a concentration camp and the politics of memory in regards to remembering the past events of the Holocaust in my term paper. So, I’ll take this opportunity to use the blog as more of an emotional processing of Mauthausen. With every new building we encountered (and especially in the execution room), I was taken aback with emotion. I couldn’t fathom how the camp was once filled with tons and tons of people, Jews, homosexuals, political “enemies” of the Third Reich, and many other groups of people, all united under oppression. Of course, this unification did not allow for the imprisoned to rise up– they lacked the resources and were far too weak to do anything drastic in opposition to their oppressors and had to wait for the United States to liberate the camps at the end of the war.
I agree to a certain extent with Ruth Kluger’s opinion of concentration camps. Although I’m not as militantly against them, I find that the experience cannot be understood fully when the visitor is capable of leaving the camp. Also, since its basically been transformed into more of a museum than anything, it lacks the real horror it used to possess.
However, the experience really did affect me, which I think is the real intent and purpose of Mauthausen. After visiting, despite my agnostic leanings, I’ve decided that I’d like to raise my children Jewish. I think that after everything Jews went through in the Holocaust, it makes sense to carry on the Jewish tradition, even if spiritually, I don’t find myself identifying as much with the Jewish religion.
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