Mauthausen: A Nazi Concentration Camp and How it Affected An American

On a recent overnight trip to Salzburg, we made a mandatory stop at Mauthausen.  Between 1938 and 1945, around 190,000 humans from over 40  nations were sent to this Nazi concentration camp nestled on a rolling hill overlooking the Danube river.  At least 90,000 prisoners never came out.  As Allied liberation became imminent, 200 a day were systematically killed.

The mood arriving at the camp, 9 passengers in a rented van, was somber.  We prepared ourselves for what we were about to experience.  Chris prayed over our circle that gathered in the parking lot before entering.  We obtained the audio guides at the registration desk and made our way through the tour.  Seems weird to call retracing steps of intentional evil a "tour".

I can not describe the scenes we viewed.  The images sat heavy on tender hearts.  Not only did we read detailed accounts of atrocities committed, human toward human, but we also imagined ourselves in the same scenarios.  What would WE have felt?  What would WE have done?  What would WE have experienced?  It's too much.  It's all just too much.

After leaving Mauthausen, we continued our trip to Mondsee and Salzburg.  Later that evening, we arrived at our Austrian guesthouse, ate in a candlelit room, and then took a stroll under a stary, mountain sky.  Breathtaking.  Before retiring in our wooden, alpine beds, we gathered in our room to debrief our collective experiences at Mauthausen.  Four parents and four girls needed to put words to feelings that engaged our hearts in that awful place just hours before.

This morning, I am still profoundly pondering the events of Mauthausen.

Psalm 13: 1-2:  "Lord, how long will You forget me?  How long will I store up anxious concerns within, agony in my mind every day?  How long will my enemy domintate me?"  

Where these their prayers?  The political prisoner from the former USSR, the Jewish mother who witnessed her child's death, the 10-year-old twins confined to the medical experimentation ward, the Hungarian Jew who was crammed into a wooden structure with hay for a bed, the Polish Jew forced to push his fellow prisoner off the walls of the rock quarry for the Nazi soldiers amusement.  Where these their prayers?

Psalm 13: 1 - 2:  "Lord, how long will You forget me?  How long will I store up anxious concerns within, agony in my mind every day?  How long will my enemy dmiate me?"

These are also my prayers ... and perhaps yours.  The times when friends die when we prayed for healing, the times when children have fevers in the middle of the night, the times when my thoughts turn toward bank accounts and relationships and poor self-image issues and past hurts and soul hungriness.  These are my prayers.

How does one survive a prison camp?  How does one survive life in 2019?

Psalm 13: 5-6:  "But I have trusted in Your faithful love; my heart will rejoice in Your deliverance.  I will sing to the Lord because He has treated me generously."

By their own admission, survivors had to change their inner world.  They had to shut out the madness of their reality and live in a place that imagination and soul created.  It was a safe haven in a dangerous world.

For those who have chosen a new life in Christ Jesus, the same mentality is offered to us.  In the power of the Holy Spirit, we are afforded a way out.  We can shut out the madness of our reality and live in a place that we are intended to operate from.  That place of the Spirit is given to us as a safe haven in a dangerous world.  Jesus knew all too well and by real-time experience that earth life was hard.  Yet, when He left, He gave us a secret weapon in the form of the Holy Spirit.

The struggle is not so much the outside forces that make us question God's attention.  The struggle is our internal desire to make sense of those outside forces.  Why is this happening?  Where is God?  When will this end?

How do you cope?  How do you survive?  I believe and speak to the reality of my own experience that survival only comes in the form of a person, the Holy Spirit.  Because I am in Christ, and because I have the living Holy Spirit dwelling inside me as a child of God, I have the ability to rise above and see from a new place.

How can a heart rejoice in deliverance before it's delivered?  Knowing the One who sees me.  Knowing He has offered me a way out.  Knowing He has already given me tools to master emotions and live in a place of the Spirit.  Knowing He has already delivered me from sin and will continue to deliver me from sin.  Knowing He will someday bring me to an eternal home where no more pain, suffering, or torment will dominate my life but true life will be lived - forever!

As I ponder, again this morning, Mauthausen, these are my expressions of how that awful place affected me.  It's important to remember the past.  It's important to come face to face with evil.  It's important to remember that Nazi ideals and unthinkable torture could not crush human spirits.  There were no tools of punishment that could penetrate places of soul rest.  May we, living in 2019, have the same inner tenacity to strengthen that inner place and fight like hell to stay there!  This is the place from which we were created to live!