Last Tuesday we spent most of the day at Matthausen outside of Linz.  Matthausen was one of the many labor camps set up by the Nazi's during WWII.

  Of the 190,000 people there, around 100,000 died, so though not an official extermination camp like Auschwitz, there were certainly plenty of people who lost their lives.  This camp housed political prisoners, and social outcasts which included Gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, priests, and of course Jews.

    This is the "welcoming station":

  Here are the barracks...you can't imagine how pitiful the conditions were inside...beds were very small and very crowded

  As we walked through this entire area, we all felt sick to our stomachs

       This is the chemical used in the gasing process...it turned blue when mixed with water

  here is the gasing chamber

   It was very hard to stand there and imagine the thousands of people who had lost their lives right there...men, women, and children

 They had a museum which included many pictures drawn by prisoners who some how managed to smuggle in paper, then hide them in the walls where they were later found....very, very moving

   Outside, every country has a memorial to those who died in the camp...there were people interned there from maybe 20 different nationalities including two Americans. 

   The Jewish memorial...

  The Jews leave rocks as a token of respect

     British memorial:

    Soviet memorial:

 perhaps the most moving was the wall of remembrance put up by the Italians with pictures of real men and women who died and dates of their birth and death...so many were so young, 15, 16 year old boys...

  It was a very emotionally draining day.  We all agreed that, though thankful for the experience, it was certainly our most trying day.  The question always is, how is one to understand such extreme brutality and cruelty??