For the first time in my life, I heard screeching silence.
What I write is not a reflection, but a staunch warning--a warning to what we as mankind have the capacity to do. This past Thursday, I was witness firsthand to the remnants of a severely outdated and atrocious culture that materialized not too long ago--a testament to our own perception of what progression really is.
The Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party, at the dawn of the 20th century was considered to be a erroneous third party. Nevertheless, this right-wing fascist group, bolstered by popular support during the economic and social depression that characterized the Weimar Republic due largely to reparations from the First World War, grew to prominence by the 1930s under the leadership of a certain failed artist-turned-politician named Adolf Hitler. Hitler himself had become disillusioned with democracy, a view he had fostered during his time as a struggling artist through the First World War and to his rise as an infamous demagogue who would later lead the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party. He outlined his flagrantly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-communist, nationalist, and fascist philosophies in his work "Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle." As soon as he rose to chancellorship of Germany, these views soon manifested into policy as many of these groups were politically targeted by the Nazi regime. In an effort to promote the preservation of "higher" German race, Jews, political dissidents, homosexuals, Poles, Romanis, criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the intelligentsia, and other "undesirables" were actively persecuted under the Third Reich. If not executed, they were sent to Konzentrationslageren, or concentration camps. The atrocities that occurred at these camps were horrific, and their semblances are preserved today to memorialize those who perished under Nazi rule. We all have read endless literature (both in history and English) class about the concentration camps and life under the Third Reich. As an American student, I know for a fact that there exists no European history curriculum without extensive coverage of the Holocaust.
Yet, it was last Thursday that I realized that no film, no picture, nor book can portray the gritty realism of these concentration (and later death) camps as effectively as actually seeing the remnants of these horrors firsthand.
The Mauthausen Concentration Camp, a Grade III camp commissioned by Hitler at the start of his chancellorship as a "gift" to his hometown of Linz, Austria for "Incorrigible Enemies of the Reich," was the first and one of the most prominent camps of the Third Reich. People from all realms of Nazi rule were relocated here: Germans, Poles, Spaniards, Hungarians, British, Americans, Russians, and so many more. It was the first camp to host a gas chamber, a chamber that was functional up until its liberation by the Allied Forces in 1945. The camp sits silently upon a hill that overlooks the villages of Mauthasen and Gusen. This irony of a hellish camp that took the lives of over 140,000 people existing in a serene and eerily peaceful place could not have been any more apparent. The overcast sky and a ground wet from a soft drizzle further added to the darkness that already permeated every inch of the camp. We paced up the barracks that housed inmates and saw the horrors.
I could see inmates being forced to sleep in groups of five in bunks that were smaller than children's beds. I saw the gas chamber beneath the camp that was disguised as a shower. I could smell the still-ashy air that filled the basement of the camp's "infirmary," a facility that in fact housed the gas chamber and crematorium. I could see inmates being forced to carry in excess of fifty pounds of unwieldy stones from the camp's quarry up the Stairway of Death. I heard the testimonies of camp survivors. I saw the burial sites of numerous inmates. I saw Death.
These sites were far too difficult to comprehend nor even see. Words cannot describe the atrocities that had happened at this camp. It pains me ever more to say that the Austrian government had not actually begun its efforts to memorialize the camps until the 1970s, when Austrian Kurt Waldheim's campaign for the office of Secretary-General of the United Nations was marred by his suspected collaboration with the Nazi regime during World War II. In fact, much of what had happened in these camps had been excluded from contemporary history curricula in the Austrian school system. To this very day, there are those that campaign xenophobic and nativist platforms in Europe let alone Austria under the banner of "right-wing politics." I am not saying that rightist nor leftist politics is necessarily bad. But then again, to what extent can we do away with an intellectual culture and tolerate the intolerable? I'll let you answer that.
It is the duty of those who comprehend to make sure events such as the atrocities of the Nazi regime never happen again. Already, you'll say that my hopes are invariably ambitious (take Srebrencia, Darfur, or maybe even Syria for instance). I'll concede to that, of course. I refuse, however, to concede to the notion that humanity lacks the capacity to do what is right.
For, once again, it was the first time that I had heard screeching silence.