Date: 7 October 2003 Adventures of Gamblegirl - Mauthausen This email is not like my usual email updates and observations. By no means am I meant to be funny or amusing. This update will appear out of order to the the rest of my travels and don't fret, I will get to Greece, Venice, Austria and Munich, but in this email, I want to talk about Mauthausen. Sometimes the weather works with you. Sometimes it's applicable for the location or the mood. Sometimes it's as equally as important as the place you stand or the sight you see. The date is Oct 7 - my actual 27th birthday - but the day is insignificant. The occasion meaningless. It is pissing down, the sky gray, the clouds are the colour of ash, the icy winds pierce thru the multi layers of clothing. It's gloomy, doomy and ideal weather to be wrapped in the doona / duvert and out of its misery. I am not doing that. I am standing in the courtyard of Mauthausen, the last remaining concentration camp in Austria. Never has the weather reflected the mood of the location I am in so accurately. I've always wanted to come to a concentration camp ever since I stood in the Jewish Museum on some history school excursion and listened to a Holocaust survivor talk about her horrors, as she wept with her recants. I know the facts, I've heard the approx numbers, I've heard some of the legacies, but's always seem like distant non-fiction. A story I've read in a history book but never converted into reality. Until this day... As I stand in the courtyard, I can see to my left the living quarters, so close and cramped, such inhuman conditions for anyone or anything. To my right, I can see the crematorium, the location where the gas chambers are located. Around the compound are walls that seem to touch the sky and are impenetrable. Barb wire, sharp, twisted and cruel line the top of the walls, making them seem even more invincible. It's depressing, disheartening, it's morbid hell. There's a quarry that the slaves work in, 200 steps into the pit of hell. You worked until you died, starved and undernourished. One day the workers had to stop as a group of Jews pushed each other along, ultimately pushing the person in front over the cliff to their death. Many are told by the S.S Guards as they enter, "This is the way in," points to the gates. Then points to the crematorium. "And that's the way out!" Standing in the courtyard, suddenly my complaints, my whining and whinging seem so petty, my problems pathetic and trivial, my battle with sickness minor. I can't - no wont- guarantee that I will ever complain again, but as like Sept 11, I have a new appreciation, a new gratitude on my life, on how damn good that I have it. Emotionally, I feel so many things. Horrified that suddenly my distant non-fiction is slapping me in the face with reality. The barbarism, the horrors, they still linger in the air, eerily like lost souls needing to find their homes, to find peace. Shame, because someone of my race can perform such atrocities and can consider such psychotic evil as being the norm. And sadness - for the life of me, it's the best and sincerest word that I can use to describe it - for the lives lost. Confused because I need 2 questions how? why? answered, as I don't understand, my comprehension unable to make sense of it all. Guilt, not because of something that I've done but because something that my fellow man did. I have taken pictures, but now I am torn about what to do with them. One part of me wants to keep them to document what I'I've seen, the other wants to delete them out of respect. As I stand in one of the gas chambers, I can't help but apologise. the words I'm sorry seem so pathetic, so lame but it's the best that I can do. What I have just seen has had an impact on me. It will be something that I'll always remember. In all honesty it has been one of the best presents that I'll ever receive. To finish up, I want to quote a 2 line message that I read on the wall that I found to be very touching. "In beauty, evil has tainted. In tragedy, we find strength and clarity" Rebecca