![\"Mauthausen](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/files\/2013\/06\/DSC07104.jpg\")
<\/a>Mauthausen KZ Memorial Site
(Photo by Matt Keyworth, 2013)<\/p><\/div>\n
Mauthausen concentration camp was a very brutal camp (even prisoners from Auschwitz I camp feared being transferred there). Estimates suggest up to 100-120,000 people lost their lives there between its construction in 1938 and its liberation in May 1945. I had heard and read a lot about what life was like within this camp, and the varied (and often sadistic) methods of murder there. Again I will talk more about the history of the camp and give more details about my visit there in future blogs. But for me this was a site of special interest, and it did make much more of a psychological and affective impact upon me. There are a number of reasons as to why this may be the case \u2013 I felt more personally invested in the place having watched hours and hours of documentary footage. As I wandered around parts of the site I could remember watching specific survivors retell their (often harrowing) accounts of the place whilst revisiting these places again. It was also a more difficult site to get to (with no convenient buses to the site) and a rather grim day to be visiting with gale-force winds and torrential rains throughout the day. The awful weather, location, and the fact that it was a regional Bank Holiday in Austria had the knock-on effect that there were far fewer visitors. You had to be pretty determined to see the site to visit under these conditions and there were none of the family groups taking snapshots that, for me, characterised our visit to Dachau.<\/p>\n
<\/a>“Stairs of Death”, Mauthausen (Photo by Matt Keyworth, 2013)<\/p><\/div>\n
Before the rain began we took the pathway down the \u2018Stairs of Death\u2019 to the infamous quarry. We spent an hour or so down there alone, and I was overwhelmed with sadness there. There were numerous occasions at Mauthausen where the enormity of what had happened in this cold fortress-like place really got to me emotionally. With no visitors around there was the time to reflect, and I was less self-conscious of my reactions to the site. The Memorial Park was quite affecting. As the rain began, I wandered around the individual memorials undisturbed by other visitors. A solitary guided tour of schoolchildren bypassed me as I was leaving to enter the main camp. Inside the gates of the camp there were more visitors but there was not the frenzy to take pictures as I had witnessed at Dachau. And certainly no queues waiting to photograph or even touch \u2018landmarks\u2019 of the site (the gate, the shower-heads, etc.). It seemed less tourist-dominated, and the visitors seemed much more subdued and respectful of the site. Mauthausen seems a very authentic site \u2013 with so much of the original camp remaining intact and far more personal historic relics being incorporated into the exhibitions and installations. I was also very moved by the memorials and in particular the personal messages, photos, flags and wreaths which had been left by people from all over the world who had come to remember a specific family member or a group of individual prisoners who had perished here.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Memorial to Italian victims of Mauthausen KZ
(Photo by Matt Keyworth, 2013)<\/p><\/div>\n
By the end of the day, I felt overwhelmed with emotions at Mauthausen, at times it was a distressing experience. There is such a commitment there (particularly in the new exhibition in the old infirmary) to telling individual stories, and combining the historical relics with video and audio accounts from former prisoners and former residents of the town. Mauthausen really confronts the stark reality of the camp system and the atrocities that took place there. A photographic exhibition in one of the old barracks showed the most upsetting and graphic archive images of the contemporary camp. There were stories and images there that remain imprinted on my mind, and continue to disturb and horrify me.<\/p>\n
The final site we visited was more of a \u2018hidden\u2019 site. Of the former satellite camps of Gusen I and Gusen II<\/strong> very little of the camps themselves remain, as they were largely destroyed and the land redeveloped into a private residential estate in the 1950s. Although the crematorium remained (and was made into a memorial site in 1960), a Visitor Centre, including its exhibition about the history of the camps, was not opened until 2004. It had taken years of campaigning from both survivors and the local KZ Gusen Memorial Committee, who felt that it was important to remember the brutality and inhuman conditions of these camps, and wanted to make the history of the \u2018forgotten\u2019 camps more accessible to the public. In 2007 this was further realised with the creation of\u00a0 \u2018The invisible camp\u2019 Gusen Audiowalk project. Visitors borrow an iPod and headphones, and navigate their way around the former sites of the camps. The walk takes about 100 minutes (over 2 hours if you include the walk back at the end). It starts at the Visitor Centre and goes from the remaining buildings of Gusen I (now residential and mixed in with the other houses), to the adjoining site of Gusen II (also covered with houses), follows the track of the old railway that went into the camps, past the town of St Georgen (the nearest town at the time), and to the site of the old Messerschmitt jet factory tunnels (where many prisoners worked in especially harsh conditions).<\/p>\n