Tag with a Dead Person

Mauthausen Memorial – KZ-Gedenkstätte

Site Map:

1. Visitor Centre. Willkommen. Would you like a site map? Sure. Thanks.
The visitor centre is clean and modern. Tourists float around in silence. No one makes eye contact. Concentration camps don’t lend themselves to small talk.

I pace around before buying a book I won’t open for weeks. I’m afraid of flipping through the pages and finding a photograph of my grandfather, his striped rags hanging from his hollow body like dirty laundry from a clothesline.

I’m afraid but I’m also obsessed. He rarely spoke about the camps. And never to me. I couldn’t ask him questions when he was alive. So now I chase his ghost, his ghost haunts me. I’m playing tag with a dead person.

I found his name on a list of surviving prisoners of CC Mauthausen. He was liberated from this camp 80 years ago today: May 5, 2025.

How long does it take to see the whole site? About four to five hours.

I leave the visitor’s centre and walk towards the 2. Various SS Barracks. It’s raining. I walk past empty spaces where buildings used to exist. My audio guide tells me about these lost buildings where guards drank beer and laughed loudly while my grandfather screamed.

I imagine the guards, rosy-cheeked and jovial, throwing open their barracks’ doors, whistling Wagner and jogging to the 3. SS Sports Grounds, where they’d kick around a soccer ball. People from the nearby towns would come to watch them play. Somehow the townspeople were able to ignore the sounds and smells of dying coming from the 4. Russian Camp/Hospital Camp, which was built right next to the soccer pitch.

I follow the road and wander through 5. Memorial Park. This is where countries from all over the world have installed bleak monuments that say profound things about war and humanity. I stand in front of the Yugoslavian memorial. That’s where my dad watched German soldiers arrest my grandfather, shove him in a military vehicle, and drive away.

I look down into the 6. Wiener Graben Quarry pit. Wet birds sing. There’s a special area called the 7. Parachute Jump. This part of the cliff is where the SS forced inmates to push each other into the quarry pit below. Prisoners who were working in the quarry had to watch humans splatter on the ground next to them as they collected stones. The SS thought it was funny to call the people who got pushed “parachutists.” My grandfather wasn’t pushed over a cliff.

Using the 8. Stairs of Death, I go down into the quarry pit. 186 steps. Prisoners carried massive stones up these stairs. Many collapsed dead under the weight of the stones. One man’s collapse would cause another to topple over, then another, ad nauseam. Like dominoes or a human avalanche.

I pace up and down the stairs picking flowers because I don’t know how to behave. I watch the oak trees that watched my grandfather.

What are the 9. Messerschmitt Production Facilities? I don’t know. There’s a plaque, but I just stare at the grass and the clouds. I have a pocket full of fallen oak leaves. They feel nice in my palm.

I leave the pit and pass the 10. SS Headquarters, but I don’t notice them. It’s still raining. I’m cold, my fingers are numb. I think of his fingers, aching and knobby with arthritis, holding a pencil, teaching me math at the dining room table.

I approach the 11. Gate and my breathing gets shallow. On the other side is where the prisoners were imprisoned. Behind walls and barbed wire and sniper towers. My grandfather walked through this gate. I feel close to him, knowing I am walking where he walked.

My breathing returns to normal when I reach the 12. Wailing Wall. Inmates would stand here when they arrived at the camp. My grandfather stood here. Twice. He was imprisoned here twice. A woman approaches me. She works at the camp. She asks me if I need help. I’m not sure how to answer.

I go inside 13. Barrack 1. I’m out of the rain. It feels good, which feels wrong. This building housed the brothel. Did you know concentration camps had brothels? I did not. I dry heave thinking about those women being raped.

To visit the 14. Roll Call Area, I go back out into the rain. This is where they made sure all the prisoners were accounted for, that no one had died or escaped. My grandfather told my grandmother and my grandmother told me: During the last days of the war, those who were called never came back. They kept calling my grandfather’s number, and he didn’t answer. I try to hear them calling his number: 129023. I try to see him pretending he doesn’t hear.

My site map is quite wet. I dry it off as I enter 15. Barracks 6 and 11. This is where the inmates slept. This is where the nightmares started. My grandmother said he would wake up screaming. I picture his still-living carcass on a crowded cot.

High school kids on a field trip flirt and laugh as I pass 16. Camp 1.

My grandfather did not go to 17. Barrack 5, the Jewish Block. He was not Jewish. I am not Jewish. Once, I told a Jewish woman my grandfather’s story, and she assumed I was Jewish. She wanted to hold me and grieve with me like I was part of her family. I felt guilty. Like I misled her. I know her story is longer and more sad than mine. But I wanted someone to cry with. I think about her as I count the visitation stones.

The 18. Barbed Wire fence along this side of the camp was electrified by 380V. People committed suicide on it. Some were forced to throw themselves on it.

From the fence you can see the 19. Ash Dump. That’s what they call it. Not “repository” or “area.” “Dump” seems unnecessarily blunt. I thought maybe the grass here would be greener, what with all the human-based fertilizer, but it isn’t.

The thought of the ashes stays with me. 20. Tent Camp, 21. Barracks 16–19 (now mass graves), 22. Barracks 16–19 (now mass graves), and 23. Barrack 20 tell stories of bodies and burials and exhumations and gravestones and cemeteries and bones.

Leaning against a stone wall is the 24. Roller—an enormous concrete cylinder. Inmates were forced to constantly flatten the ground in the roll call area. I imagine the skeleton-men pushing the roller, struggling to level dirt that didn’t need to be leveled.

Close to 25. Camp 2 and Barracks 21–24, I see a family holding a Croatian flag. I stop them. They don’t speak English, but we smile at each other hoping that our grandfathers had some kind of connection even though they probably didn’t.

I’m curious about the 26. Execution Site. My imagination prepared me for blood stains, but there aren’t any.

One of the high school kids who was flirting is now crying close to 27. Camp 3. I want to offer her Kleenex and tell her it’s not her fault, but I don’t. Part of me wants her to feel bad.

Inside the 28. Infirmary Turned Museum, there are countless artifacts. I am drawn to a glass case. In the case, there is a hat. The striped hat you’ve seen in the movies. The one that matches the pyjamas. Next to the case, there are headphones. I put on the headphones. I listen to a story about a hat. A prisoner explains that he woke up one morning with no hat. He tells me that if you didn’t have your hat, they would shoot you dead. So he stole someone else’s hat and then watched that man get shot dead. I take the headphones off.

The 29. Room of Names is in the basement of the museum. They had to use a small font. 90,000 victims are listed. They use the word “victim” for people who died. Everyone died, just not in the same way. My grandfather’s name is not here.

30. Crematoriums are next. They are long brick ovens that make people throw up and wail and leave flowers and make shrines. Prisoners used a gurney to heave the corpses into the ovens. One at a time. The gurney is made of a long piece of leather and two long metal rods. The leather is stained.

I see a young woman touch the gurney. I didn’t realize you could touch it. I thought it was like a painting in a museum. I touch it. The rod. It’s colder than it should be. Weeks later I shudder when I’m cleaning the ashes from my fireplace.

I move slowly towards the 31. Gas Chamber. My change of pace is not deliberate. My legs become sluggish on their own. You are not allowed to go in the white tiled room. There’s a rope barring entry.

My grandfather wasn’t here. The air in this room is colder and moves differently than anywhere else.

I go outside understanding that this is a luxury. I enter the 32. Camp Prison. The walls are covered in graffiti. Visitors have written things like “never again” and “RIP dad.”
I want to sleep. I leave. I take pictures of barbed wire.

My grandfather told my dad that he survived for weeks by eating a horse’s hoof. That’s what I think about when I visit the 33. Kitchen Barracks. I wonder where he found the hoof. I think about it a lot. I invent stories. I try to imagine the taste, the texture. They did not serve horse hoof here. Just potato peels and grass.

The top of the 34. Laundry Barracks has been converted into a chapel. God doesn’t visit. The showers are in the basement. Upon arrival at the camp, prisoners were stripped naked and showered. When I get down there, I involuntarily gasp. My grandfather was here. Is he here now? I look at the rusted water pipes.

I’m outside again in the 35. Garage Yard. They deloused prisoners here. They piled corpses here. Now it’s the exit. I exit. My grandfather comes with me.

Dankeschön for visiting. Ok. Bitte?

I drive away. He’s in the back seat. I see him in the rearview. We go to a restaurant. Old men with greasy hair and leather jackets play cards. Heavy-set women sing folk songs and smell like tubes of old lipstick. We order a schnitzel and a beer. Both are good. My site map is still wet. It’s still raining.