It is a strikingly beautiful place, on the top of a mountain with vistas that extend for miles and miles. It is a memorial site, Mauthausen Concentration Camp, marked by memorials from many nations whose citizens were killed there. Much of the camp remains. Mauthausen was built near Linz, Austria, the town where Hitler had grown up. Hitler had ambitious plans for a newly created Linz. I had seen a picture of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, with Hitler examining the model for a new Linz. For such a project they needed a huge amount of granite. The proximity of a source for quality granite at Mauthausen marked the beginnings for a camp opened in August 1938 where nearly 100,000 died at the hands of their Nazi captors. It also served as an extermination camp to the end of the war.
I had never been to a concentration camp before. The guide explained a few things and then simply read the words of witnesses and survivors. It was unimaginable in its dehumanization, crowding and brutality. It was haunting to walk in silence through places which once had been filled with shouting, panic, screaming and death.
It was on a Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, that I received a tour through Mauthausen. I couldn’t help but think about: suffering, inhumanity, evil and hope. One thing was abundantly clear. We have ample evidence from our last century of the capacity of human beings to participate in unthinkable evil. Making such an acknowledgement suggests that we may understand a need for human deliverance from evil. At the same time, it pushes us to a hope greater than the power of evil, to gratitude for such a hope, and to the commitment to using our life for good: to love and to serve. Jesus did not explain evil. Instead, he gave his life up, sharing in human suffering. But it wasn’t the last word. The last word is the triumph of God.
Mauthausen was the first camp to be liberated by American forces on May 5, 1945.
