World War II has always seemed like a distant moment in history to me. As most kids in school, I learned about it in my history classes and lectures growing up. I watched war films and read books that would touch on the subject. But as a child, I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the war that had happened in the not so distant past.
My dad was actually alive during part of the war. He remembers the victorious fireworks and happiness of U.S. citizens at the end of the war. Hearing that always struck me as astounding because the war seemed so far off from the world I live in and the reality I know to be true in my life. But to think of my dad being a witness to even the most distant aspect of the war throws the timeline into perspective for me.
Once I got to high school, I took further history classes and began to more fully understand what World War II actually meant to the hundreds of thousands of people it affected and the world as a whole. This was also the time I began to do some research into the Holocaust on my own. I was interested in the subject and began to read more literature on it outside of school. Beyond my own curiosity, and the few history classes I took in school, I had no other educational connection to the Holocaust. World War II and the events of the Holocaust would occasionally come up as dinner conversations as I grew up but that was mostly because my dad has an interest in war history. Growing up in the states in a non-religious household, the Holocaust was not something that touched my daily life very often.
Today I live in Austria as I study abroad here in Salzburg. Being here, I have seen a completely new side of what the Holocaust was and what it meant. My school took our program on a tour of the Mauthausen concentration camp, which is located in Upper Austria. The camp was the central camp in a group of Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
Before we went to tour the camp, we had an introductory lecture on it by one of our teachers. A documentary about the camp was shown and we were able to discuss it. At home in the states, every time a class would talk about the Holocaust, it would seem very distant to me. Being here in Austria, in a room with Austrians, the topic took on a whole new meaning. The air was heavy with tension and I felt extremely unnerved. The documentary itself was very difficult to watch, but it was the feeling after the film stopped playing that got to me. I felt chilled and claustrophobic in the room. I felt deep, deep-seeded emotion on every side of my body.
Seeing the camp was much worse. We visited it on a day dampened by thick mist. I was bundled up and still shivering from the cold. We were guided around the barracks and fields by audio guides detailing the horrendous conditions of the prisoners who once lived there. I walked between the graves of countless people, feeling utterly empty inside. The whole camp was layered in tension, the air seemed almost brittle with it.
The tour completed at the gas chambers and crematorium of the camp. I felt sick to my stomach looking into the rooms that had been host to thousands of murders. It didn’t even feel real and it took me some time to process what I was seeing.
I walked away from the camp, completely shrouded in fog, with my heart heavy and my mind numb with confusion. I had not felt this way learning, reading, or speaking of the Holocaust when I was at home in the States. And as we boarded the bus and drove away from the camp, I began to understand the difference. Here in Austria, I am standing on the ground that was beneath the Nazis. I visited a place where I was in the presence of past horrors. I touched the wall of a gas chamber that had held countless individuals in their final moments of life. Learning about the Holocaust in the States is one thing, but being here and standing on this ground amidst the tension and the history, it does not feel so far in the past.
