Mauthausen, the town and the concentration camp

Before I made a trip to the former Mauthausen concentration camp several years ago, I consulted several travel guide books.  The guidebooks all recommended that visitors to the former camp should not stay in the town of Mauthausen, implying that this was an evil place where one would not sleep well at night.  Another town, several miles away, was recommended.  Against this advice, I decided to rent a hotel room in the town of Mauthausen.  As it turned out, Mauthausen was the most beautiful town that I’ve ever seen.

Today, when I read here about a new documentary film entitled Six Million and One, I remembered the town. According to the news article: “The first image one sees in David Fisher’s new documentary Six Million and One is a crumbling stone doorway bridged by a spider web. The visual irony is striking, with the rough yellow stone breaking down, the wispy lacework sturdy and undamaged. That irony is, perhaps, at the center of Fisher’s film.”

Spider web door on Chalet Wedl in Mauthausen, Austria

Chalet Wedl in the town of Mauthausen, Austria faces the Danube river

You can see more photos of the town of Mauthausen on my website here.

I am not sure how the irony of the spider web door fits into the documentary; the buildings in the Mauthausen camp are also beautiful.

Door in Mauthausen concentration camp

Mauthausen concentration camp

Mauthausen Commandant Franz Ziereis

You can see more photos of the former Mauthausen concentration camp on my website here.

Both of David Fisher’s parents survived the Holocaust.  His father Joseph was a prisoner at the Gusen and Gunskirchen sub-camps of Mauthausen. You can read about the Gusen sub-camps of Mauthausen on my website here.  The Gusen camps were an end destination for some of the prisoners who were death marched out of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945.  However, Joseph Fisher might have been one of the Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz in the Spring of 1944 and then transferred immediately to Gusen and Gunskirchen to work in the munitions factories. He probably never had the opportunity to see the beautiful town of Mauthausen, nor the Mauthausen main camp.  You can read about the liberation of Mauthausen on my website here.

So what does Joseph Fisher’s story have to do with the spider web door in the town of Mauthausen?

Convicted Holocaust denier captured after 7 years on the run

Gerhard Ittner, a German Holocaust denier who has been on the run for seven years, was captured in Portugal and will be extradicted to Germany to serve a 33-month prison term, according to The Times of Israel.

“Bavarian officials say the one-time member of the now-defunct German People’s Union party was a known Holocaust denier who used the Internet to spread far-right propaganda between 2002 and 2004.”

Oh no!  Not far-right propaganda!!!  As everyone knows, only far-left propaganda is allowed in the mainstream media and on the Internet.

In other news, Michelle Bachmann visited a Synagogue in Chicago on Yom Kippur and a number of congregants walked out of the service in protest.