Where Is Joey Today?

Finishing up in Munich

After dropping Dad at the airport, I headed back and took the Ubahn out to the soccer stadium. Germany has the World Cup this time around, and Munich is going to be featured prominently. Around the arena there are tons of little kids practicing their soccer skills much in the same way youngsters throw the (real) football around while tailgating.

The train to Vienna was at 23:44 (it was the same one to Budapest) so I had some time to kill. I went to the Hofbräuhaus one last time to get lunch, and write a post card to my Marbella host family, which I subsequently misplaced. They may get a photo once I get home.

So after doing my first load of laundry since I arrived (I stretched a few days more than I should have) and was on the train to Vienna. At first my double sleeper appeared to be empty and like last time the conductor accepted a 10 euro bribe to get a single, a considerable discount off the normal price and well worth it.

Vienna

I got into Vienna around 6am and found the streets surprisingly empty. Turns out May 1st is a European labor day in most countries. My hostel was wide open so I took an hour or so snooze. As I was getting ready to leave my room, a girl comes in that looks sort of familiar. Naturally I just chalk it up to coincidence, but when she asked me where I was from and I said Tampa, she said she also lived there. Monica went to Dunbar, Ben Hill and even Sickles (for my Freshman year) with me. Without a doubt the weirdest coincidence of this trip and probably the last one as well.

Since little was open, I decided to forget going to Bratislava. I still had my rail day left, so I headed to Mauthausen. A small town near Linz, right on the Danube. If the name sounds familiar it will only be because it housed one of the most infamous concentration camps of the Third Reich. In the photo to the right, you can see a sign in the lower left hand corner.

It was a 6km walk to the camp and back which gives the visitor plenty of time to think. The camp stopped operations on May 1st and was liberated May 5th of 1945. Since all the photos are in black and white, we (or at least I) always think of only bleakness surrounding these miserable places. Instead, the immediate area looks more like the "Sound of Music" than "Schindler's List". It appears Mother Nature is blissfully ignorant of the location's history.

The camp tour is a haunting experience. I was fully aware of what happened there before going, but there was always a certain level of abstraction to that horror. It feels a lot more real when you go from saying, ''This happened at a place'' versus "This happened at this place"

This particular camp was different from most. Jews were in the minority with the majority being political prisoners, captured POWs and the like. It was an extermination by labor camp, with a gas chamber added at the very end of the war to accomodate overflow prisoners from Auschwitz.

The work was primarily in the rock quarry, which had an incredibly steep stairs that to this day seems dangerous to climb and descend. 186 steps to the top, sickly dubbed Parachutist's wall, where innocent prisoners were pushed to their death on the whim of the SS. The stairs were its own cause of death. Prisoners carrying 50kg stones on their backs walking up stairs frequently collapsed causing a literal, and horrific, domino effect.

One of the more famous prisoners was famous Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal.

It was a long 6km back to the train station. The train was packed so I had to sit in the aisleway with others people including a woman with a Jack Russel terrier who ended up biting me (did not break the skin) at one point. It is amazing how little complaining you do when things are put in perspective for you.

It was an incredibly memorable day and while depressing, I don't regret going at all. I highly recommend anyone spending time in Europe make a stop at one of the memorials.

--Joey