August 23rd 2012
Today our class took a field trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp out in the Austrian country side. One of the questions raised in the reading for this course by Ruth Kluger, a holocaust survivor, was whether or not visits to the concentration camps had any value. Kluger doubted if any meaningful lessons could be learned by visiting the camps, and suggested that the tourism of camps eased visitor's feelings of guilt rather than teaching any sort of lesson that might prevent a future genocide. Reading Kluger challenged my exceptions for this visit, so I decided to keep an open mind about the educational value of the camps, and see if I agreed or disagreed with Kluger after I had time to reflect upon what I saw.
I can confidently say that I learned things I would not have otherwise been able to learn from visiting Mauthausen, but most of what I learned is not directly applicable to preventing or overcoming the kinds of intolerance and hate that led to the holocaust. I mostly learned about the mindsets of the Austrian people living around, and working in the concentration camp. My first lesson was that the camp was fully visible from the town of Mauthausen, meaning that every person who lived in the town would have had to known about the camp, and have at least some idea what went on in there. No train tracks led directly into the camp, so prisoners had to be marched up from a lower train station, and up a large hill to the camp. Furthermore, when we pasted by a grass field, our tour guide told us the camp guards would play soccer matches on the fields, and that only a chain link fence separated the soccer field from the camp. This meant that all the towns people that came to watch the games fully witnessed the brutality of the camps forced labor program. This meant that as much as people who lived through the holocaust might deny knowledge of what was going on, people had to have known about the death camps. People could see the camps from their homes, as well as the raising plumes of smoke from the crematoriums. They would have to seen prisoners going to the camp, but never coming back out again. And although a lot of construction took place in the camps, I imagine it would be fairly clear to anyone paying attention that the amount of prisoners being brought in exceeded the capacity of the camp. Seeing and visiting the camp taught me that the cruelty of genocide can, and in the case of Mauthausen had, become a normal part of life for people. One can learn to accept it, and not notice the mass suffering of human beings, even if it's right in front of their eyes.
Examining the camp also taught me a great deal about how the Nazi's working in the camp viewed themselves. A number of recreational faculties for the guards such as a swimming pool, officers club, and the aforementioned soccer field suggest that the Nazi's lived normal lives despite working within an environment of killing and human suffering. The Nazi's at Mauthausen did not see the camp as a war situation, or anything unusual, they were simply career minded soldiers working on making there careers in the Nazi party. Indeed, our tour guide commented that the Nazi culture was very focused on displaying rank and hierarchy, to quote him "It was a place where you knew who was up and who was down." Even the prisoners in the camp were marked and sorted with a kind of ranking system, with political prisoners and criminals being regarded as higher status than Jews or anti-socials. The people working in these camps were like ever day people. They were concerned with their careers and their families, and were psychological normal individuals. The regularity of the camp and the focus on order led me to realize the extent to which the killing and brutality had been normalized. Everything in the camp, from dehumanizing the prisoner by making them appear identical to each other, to the shower gas chambers that broke up the killing like a factory floor divides labor, everything in the camp was set up to distract from the fact that people were being killed, brutalized, and abused.
Seeing the structure and position of the camp taught me how people can personally distance themselves for genocide by controlling their own outlooks and memories, but seeing the monuments around the concentration camp taught me how the memory of something as horrible as the holocaust can be manipulated and politicized in order to accomplish a similar goal on a mass scale. Comparing the dates of various holocaust monuments around Mauthausen shows that many groups of victims were excluded from memory for long periods of time, and were only deemed worthy of being remembered at a later date. Surprisingly, the first monuments at Mauthausen were not set up to honor Jewish people. Instead, countries how had lost prisoners of war to the Nazi's put up monuments to commemorate their countrymen who had died in the concentration camps, even nations like the U.S., who only lost an very small number of people to the camps set up memorials. Many of the communist countries of the could war era set up memorial for political prisoners to the Nazi's years before any monuments were set up for Jewish victims, or for criminals set to the camps after their sentences in jail were over, even though such criminals made up the majority of the prisoners at Mauthausen. Some groups of victims, such as gay victims, didn't receive any kind of memorial until the 1980's, and some groups of victims, such as the anti-social group, still do not have a monument at the camp.
Looking at the earlier memorials made me very aware that our memory of the holocaust is socially constructed, and subject to change over time. It used to be viewed as the brutal killing of prisoners of war by the Nazi's, but over the years it has changed to our more modern perception of racial intolerance. Visiting the camp has made me aware that our conception of the holocaust as the ultimate consequences of racial hatred and intolerance is very much a reflection of our contemporary moral values. I still believe that such intolerance was a central part of the Nazi regime, and an important element to the holocaust, however I am know more aware than ever that the holocaust is a deeply complex historical event, so much so that it may likely be impossible to fully understand it by viewing it from anyone standpoint. This realization has lead me to recognize the insight into Kluger's views about visiting concentration camps. I do not think there is any one lesson to learn from the holocaust as a whole, so I don't believe that visiting a camp will point anyone toward a "correct" lesson or narrative about the genocides that took places there. However I disagree with Kluger's assertion that visiting the camps lacked value. For me personally, visiting the camps taught me that I knew much less about the holocaust than I thought I did. Essentially robbing me of my preconceptions, and opening my mind to things I would have never considered before visiting. I believe that in and of itself, the realization that the holocaust is more than just a tale of racial bigotry taken to it's tragic extreme, makes the visit more than worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment