ps. Heart Mountain Relocation Center

This time I want to write in Eng­lish for my Eng­lish speak­ing friends. It was dif­fi­cult to be at the Heart Moun­tain Inter­pre­tive Cen­ter. But it was­n’t this camp that made my heart heavy because  my first thoughts went to the camps of Nazi Ger­many. But it is too sim­ple to hear ‘camp’ and put all togeth­er. It is just not correct.

When we speak of camps from WWII, we speak of Exter­mi­na­tion camps. It was the sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly killing of peo­ple by the Nazis: Jews, Romani peo­ple and Sin­ti, but also homo­sex­u­als, Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties and peo­ple from all coun­tries where the Nazis were, last but not least polit­i­cal ene­mies of them.

The camp which is known all over world is Auschwitz. This is the Ger­man name of a small city in Poland named “Oświęcim”. Auschwitz and oth­er very big exter­mi­na­tion camps were in the east of Poland and Belarus. There were 3 camps which belonged to the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz. One of them was a labour camp, the oth­ers exter­mi­na­tion camps. Even the labour camp were inhu­man and dif­fer­ent to any­thing else. Many peo­ple were trans­port­ed to these camps and imme­di­ate­ly killed after they arrived. This can’t be com­pared with any oth­er camp. At least 1,1 mil­lion men were killed. At least, we don’t know the exact number.

At least 1.3 mil­lion pris­on­ers died at Auschwitz, around 90 per­cent of them Jew­ish; approx­i­mate­ly 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holo­caust died at the camp. Oth­ers deport­ed to Auschwitz includ­ed 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sin­ti, 15,000 Sovi­et pris­on­ers of war, 400 Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, homo­sex­u­als, and tens of thou­sands of peo­ple of diverse nation­al­i­ties. Liv­ing con­di­tions were bru­tal, and many of those not killed in the gas cham­bers died of star­va­tion, forced labor, infec­tious dis­eases, indi­vid­ual exe­cu­tions, and med­ical exper­i­ments. (1)

And Auschwitz was just one.

There were 24 KZ base camps which had more than 1.000 sub­camps all over the “Reich” that was all over Europe wher­ev­er they were. These ’nor­mal’ abnor­mal camps were most­ly labor camps, some were incred­i­ble hard.

The biggest camp in Aus­tria was Mau­thausen. I was there a long time ago. And I had no breath to stand it. I saw the stones of the quar­ry they had to break and to car­ry up on the top. The stairs were so big that it was hard for me to take them. The stones were so big that I hard­ly could imag­ine how a per­son can car­ry them. You can see some pic­tures at Wikipedia. I can’t describe them. The steps of death don’t look so high on the pics but believe me I could hard­ly take them. I could hard­ly walk. Can you imag­ine to walk on ground where almost every­where some­one died?

Mau­thausen had gas cham­bers too.

100.000 died in the base camp. 120.000 in one of the 54 sub­camps out­side of Mau­thausen. Mau­thausen was not Auschwitz.

There­fore I say you can’t com­pare. It is impos­si­ble to com­pare inhu­man behav­iour. There is no way to say this is more inhuman.

I have a friend whose father and broth­er died in Mau­thausen. Anoth­er friend is the grand­daugh­ter of Vik­tor Fran­kl, he was in Auschwitz. He was the only sur­vivor of his fam­i­ly. He wrote Nev­er­the­less, Say “Yes” to Life: A Psy­chol­o­gist Expe­ri­ences the Con­cen­tra­tion Camp. I always admired him that he was able to spend his life encour­ag­ing peo­ple to look for the mean­ing of life.  He was the founder of logother­a­py, which is a form of exis­ten­tial analy­sis, the “Third Vien­nese School of Psy­chother­a­py”. It made me hap­py that I was allowed to sing at the bap­tism of his great-grandchild.

This is the dif­fer­ence between the con­cen­tra­tion camps  of Nazi Ger­man and the relo­ca­tion camps in the USA.

Don’t com­pare cru­el­ties. I had tears in my eyes in Mau­thausen and I had them in Wyoming too. I was afraid to go there because I could remem­ber my heavy heart more than 30 years ago.

Why did I write about it?

I heard twice that there are signs to Auschwitz 200 km apart. There­fore I want­ed to take the time why com­par­i­son with Auschwitz should­n’t be made. One was Anton Treuer who spoke about it on video on. He is an Amer­i­can aca­d­e­m­ic and author spe­cial­is­ing in the Ojib­we lan­guage and Amer­i­can Indi­an stud­ies. He said that there are no such signs in Mau­thausen and Dachau (which is a big, sim­i­lar con­cen­tra­tion camp in Ger­many). Hon­est­ly I don’t know. I read in an arti­cle that you need to know that Auschwitz is Oświęcim. So there might be a sign but not everywhere.

It is nec­es­sary to talk and think about this time. We all need to know what peo­ple can do. One sub­camp of Mau­thausen was Ebensee. In Feb­ru­ary a film was pre­sent­ed about this vil­lage made by Sebas­t­ian Brameshu­ber. Und in der Mitte, da sind wir. His­to­ry isn’t just past, it made us, we are chil­dren of the past.

I spend years of my life that I can stand it. I had dif­fer­ent jobs which super­fi­cial­ly had no con­nec­tion to it. But I knew it had. And I learnt, it is too easy to judge and there are many things peo­ple do and did which break my heart. Nev­er for­get! (I am not proud that the Aus­tri­an Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Ser­vice has dif­fi­cul­ties to finance it’s work. But I am proud that young Aus­tri­ans want to work for it.)