I found Dr. Garland-Thomson's lecture yesterday as interesting and fascinating as one can be on genocide, and it brought back some personal memories as well. This past summer, I went with the German Studies Department to Vienna, Austria, and on the last week of our trip, we went to Mauthausen, the site of a former concentration camp outside of Linz. I found the trip to be surprisingly mundane-all that is left on the site are a couple of barracks (which we did not enter due to structural damage) and a couple of other buildings used for rounding up prisoners. The rest was desolate fields. Even the gas chamber, while creepy (Dr. Garland-Thomson was right; this was the only way to describe it), still generally looked like a harmless shower. Our bored tour guide did not seem to care if we understood the gravity of our setting or not.
As with a lot of experiences I had overseas, however, I did not fully appreciate what happened that day until much later, including today. One of the first things we saw upon entering the camp was a set of memorials-each respective country had a monument for its victims who died at this camp and throughout Europe during the Holocaust. This camp was mainly used for political prisoners, so I do not recall seeing a memorial for the disabled whose lives were taken. While I understand that not every single group could possibly be represented and that very few disabled individuals walked through the gates of Mauthausen, in retrospect, I feel that this was a grave oversight. I'm sure I wasn't the only visitor to Mauthausen who had never been to a concentration camp before, and a memorial to the disabled would have educated myself and others about the grave injustices that occurred not only on the bases of race and class, but of bodily abilities as well. As Dr. Garland-Thomson mentioned, the extermination of the disabled exemplified the Nazis' uniquely "medical" reasonings for murder. If we do not remember the "reasoning" behind such atrocities, we will miss an invaluable opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.
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I would like to begin by saying that I too greatly enjoyed Dr Garland-Thomson's lecture in a manner that anyone can enjoy a lecture about genocide. What I also found interesting about what she was saying and about what you have said about your experiences overseas is something that greatly correlates with a topic that is being discussed in one of my other classes.
We currently reading Elie Weisel's "Night" and upon the investigation of the validity of the text and autobiographies as a whole my class has been divided into sections to prosecute the validity of the novel and holocaust revision. I was assigned to the team of prosecution, and as a result I have now read Richard E Harwood's text, Did Six Million Die? which was banned for some time in many countries in Europe. In his text he mentions these same monuments dedicated to the persecuted Jews; however, the death tolls that he describes are values significantly less than those that are believed to be true by the majority of the population. I did not enjoy reading his text at all, and found your post, while discussing a terrible topic, very reassuring to know that many memorial sites to exist not only to the accurate number of Jews who were murdered, but also to those with disabilities who were persecuted.
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