Mauthausen

Today we went to Mauthausen, an old concentration camp. It was pretty...awful. Like you hear about everything the Jews and thousands of others went through, but standing there, standing where they did roll call for hours, shot people, beat them, just because, it feels different. You can image thousands of people being herded into a small, hot space. Clad in their stripped, heavy work clothes, being beaten for no reason, held inexplicably captive.

We walked through the barracks, that were meant for 300 people, but usually "housed" up to 2,000. The bunk beds we narrow, and they forced two people to sleep on each one. So four to a set of bunk beds. They dressed bigger people in too small of clothes, and smaller people in bagger ones.

We stood by the wailing wall, a spot between the barrack and the gate. People would stand there and weep, pray, just wail to get out of there.

We walked through the gas chambers, another chamber were they kept all the corpses, and finally the room that they cremated the bodies in. Adjacent to the furnaces was a room with a single, operation table. That's where they would cut the tattoos from the corpses and send the skin off to sick people, some who made lampshades, book covers, among other things, out of it. It all smelled of death.

It was terribly hot there, felt like a desert. Made the whole tour and experience feel more real, and more dreadful.

Although this experience kinda made me feel sick to my stomach, I think it's an important thing to see. To realize the cruelty that is in this world is the first step to making it a better place.