Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria

This is the blog I have dreaded writing the most. Nonetheless, it is, without question, one of the most important. I hope I can do it justice.

I have not come to terms with our experience at Mauthausen - I don't think I ever will. I don't feel that I remember that day so much as I relive it. If I allow myself to think about it -which I don't often do - I feel as though I can recall every footstep, sight, smell, feeling...

As one would expect, it was horrific. Heartbreaking, disgusting, infuriating...and necessary. If you think to yourself,"I would never visit a concentration camp," I would argue that that's exactly why you should. As I said about our experience in Rwanda, this is something we have to face because humankind allowed it to happen. It is a horrible, sickening truth about what human beings are capable of, a truth so terrifying there are no words. To go and stand and learn and remember is another step in ensuring it will never happen again.

The experience of visiting a concentration camp cannot be extracted from reading books or watching documentaries. It isn't about the depth or breadth of your knowledge, or about how much you've studied over however long a period of time. It is about what you feel in the depths of your being when you stand in a gas chamber, or lay hands on an oven. It is about the full blown acknowledgement of what happened to these beautiful human beings while so many people stood by and did nothing. People like the ones we love; like the ones we are. It is a tangible glimpse at a side of humanity which many of us pretend does not exist because we don't encounter it immediately. It is an experience which imprints itself indelibly upon your soul in a way which perhaps we all need. 

In the hours it took us to travel to Mauthausen from Vienna we watched a documentary about the camp (which I'll get into in my next post). The one thing I remember more clearly than anything else about that video was a quote - found scrawled somewhere in the camp after it was liberated - which read: "If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness." Indeed.