Mauthausen concentration camp to be restored

According to a recent news article, which you can read here, the Mauthausen concentration camp, which is now a Memorial Site, is to be restored and revamped; the initial phase, which will cost $2.4 million, will be finished in 2013.

My photo of the Mauthausen camp, May 2003

I think this is a great idea; the Mauthausen camp should be restored to the way it looked when it was liberated by American troops in May 1945.  Especially, the gas chamber, which should be reconstructed to show how the gas was put into the room. As it looks now, the Mauthausen gas chamber appears to be a harmless shower room.  Visitors need to see the ingenious method of gassing that was used at Mauthausen.  

the orchestra that played at Birkenau as the Jews marched to the gas chamber

A follower of this blog e-mailed me a link to a web site about the book “Spectator in Hell” by Colin Rushton.  The sub-title of the book is “A British soldier’s story of imprisonment in Auschwitz.”  The book is about Arthur Dodd, who was a prisoner in the E715 POW camp that was just outside the huge factory complex near the village of Monowitz; the British POWs worked in the Monowitz factory complex, alongside Jewish prisoners and German civilians.  The POW camp was very close to the Auschwitz III prison camp, aka Monowitz, where the Jewish prisoners who worked at Monowitz lived.  The POW camp was seven miles from the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau.

This quote is from the web site about “Spectator in Hell”:

Life in the camps for the Brits, at first, was bearable. Daily life began at five, with the macabre sounds of a Jewish orchestra playing as the trains disgorged their latest human cargo – some to the gas chambers, others to work details. Escape was near-impossible: there were triple rows of electrified fencing, together with machine-gun towers and sentries.

The follower of my blog questioned whether the British prisoners at E715 could have heard “a Jewish orchestra playing as the trains disgorged their human cargo.”