From Afar

I often find it difficult to describe to friends and family back home just what it is about this place that keeps calling me back.  My default answers are flawed attempts to explain the culture, the cuisine, the experience, and I almost always fail to wholly convince them of this place's allure.  Many, not understanding my motives, are puzzled as to why, if I wanted to travel and experience something foreign to my own way of living, I didn't select to travel to a new region of the U.S.  Why travel thousands of miles away from home to experience something which could be explored a mere few hours away?  Mountains, old buildings, coffee and cake, beer, rivers and blue skies - all things which can be found at home.  But put them in the right context, a different context, and they mean something entirely removed from the learned conceptions people have who have experienced them in only a singular, or very limited, frame of reference.  It really takes being here, seeing the differences, both obvious and subtle, that one starts to comprehend why I speak about this place the way I do.  Two weeks ago, it was my parents' turn, and recently, I was able to show two friends my home away from home.

My best friend arrived last Tuesday, and after a quick tour of the city after flying through the night, the day was over.  The next morning we traveled to a sleepy village called Gmunden on one of the eastern lakes of the Salzkammergut.  Pastel colored buildings, a single church steeple rising towards the sky, a tree-lined promenade ran along the street-car avenue that leads up towards the quiet train station.  Before us, a wide, blue lake ever-expanding to the bases of snow-capped mountains in the far distance, interrupted only by a lonesome castle, the sole occupant of its tiny island, a tired bastion against the lapping waves.  Sun, fresh air, and a good chat by the shore - it was wonderful.  Over the next few days, we explored with another friend Munich, Vienna, the Obersalzberg, and Linz, as well as, naturally, Salzburg and its environs.  We ate countless times (too much, for certain), walked all over creation, had tons of good laughs, and above all, it was just great to see two good friends, one of whom I hadn't seen in nearly 4 years.  This place brought us all together again, and I think it's charm helped break down any remnant of misunderstanding.  Sometimes, "a day in the life" is all that's needed for one to understand everything, and I think we had a terrific time exploring, catching up, creating new memories.

The final resting place of 5,600 murdered victims of Nazism.

One of the more interesting visits we made during their stay was to Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp on a beautiful hilltop overlooking the Danube valley not too far from Linz.  I had been there once before, but for my two friends, it was their first visit to one of the camps.  There, at this place in the sun, thousands of people lost their lives to hatred.  Much of the original camp is intact, and that's partly due to its construction.  Mauthausen is one of the richest granite deposits in central Europe, and from its quarry, the fortified camp was constructed.  Its prisoners were forced laborers in the quarry, cutting stone and carrying it up an uneven and perilous staircase known as the "staircase of death."  For the amusement of the SS guards, groups of workers were occasionally marched off the cliff above in "parachute practice," to their deaths below.  Though it was not an extermination camp like those of infamous stature in Poland, Mauthausen was equipped with gas chambers and crematoria.  At one spot, one can stand on the mass grave containing nearly 6,000 people.  Memorials, images, and texts constantly remind visitors of the oppressive brutality and human anguish that occurred in the not too distant past.  It is sad, or at least it should be - and that is something that troubled me.  Seeing people around me, fellow visitors, young and old, with tears in their eyes, hearing gasps and quiet appeals to God, seeing the discomfort and sadness on faces - all appropriate reactions.  But surprisingly, and disturbingly to me, I felt nothing.  I walked through as if it had been a museum on dinosaurs, or some Roman settlement.  Names were only numbers, ovens only museum exhibits, graves only parcels of land.  Having been to almost a dozen camps, and having learned so much about this era in history recently, I feel like I've been desensitized to what others find grotesque.  I remember my first visit to such a camp, which was with a high school group on my first trip to Europe in 2007.  We went to the place most frequently associated with the camps, the place which must have been the deepest level of Hell, of greatest despair and violence, to Auschwitz.  I can remember being nearly physically sick - being in the same place where over a million people perished, smelling death 60 years later, wondering if the dust I had on my sleeve after brushing up against a wall was human ash or simply disturbed dirt.  It was terrible.  And now, they all seem the same.  No reactions, flattened affect, a place to be analyzed, a task to be done.  I always questioned how on earth people who had childhoods not unlike mine grew up to systematically follow orders and kill people in the camps without hesitation.  I guess, for some, after the first time, it only gets easier until it becomes such a mechanized action that it ceases to be a question of consciousness.  I feel as if the closer I have gotten to understanding the Holocaust, the further I grow from acknowledging the human element that seems to integral to it.  What a frightening and terrible field!

2 days of teaching, 6 weeks left, and still lots to do!