[Berger_4_]

I haven't been to Auschwitz, but I was to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria. It's nowhere near the size of Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, but it was still...terrifying. There wasn't hardly a word said during our whole trip through there. I was on a trip with 100 other students from around the world all 16 to 18, so you can imagine how loud the buses we took would get from time to time. After the trip through there though, it was silent. The place was just so emotionally draining on everyone that we all just went to sleep for an hour or so.

I'll never forget walking past the wall where 100's of people were shot, where the shackles were hanging out for the prisoners to be chained to. The guide said that babies would be thrown against the walls until they were dead. Seeing this dark, grungy basement with a dirt floor that soaked up the blood of those beaten to a pulp. Going into the actual gas chamber was absolutely one of the most awful feelings a person could experience. It actually seemed to reek of evil, and stink of death. To see the ovens where the bodies were burned...awful doesn't begin to describe it.

The one thing that really, really stuck out in my mind though (other than the gas chamber) were the memorials for people. In the room just before the ovens, and in the crematorium itself, there were pictures and plaques of victims everywhere. And on one of the plaques of a Jewish victim, somebody had scratched a swastika. The disappointment and rage I felt towards humanity at that moment...I don't think I'll ever feel like that again. For somebody to desecrate a photograph of a person who was killed during the Holocaust like that...it's unbelievable.