A clean gray garbage bin on wheels, except for color exactly like one in San Francisco. I try not to make a wrong turn on the spotless road. I feel I’m braving peer pressurea nice person doesn’t investigate the detritus of other people’s neighborhoods. How quickly I absorb what I imagine is the prevailing norm. Keep walking.īeside a stone wall that lines the main business road of the village, I see terrain that seems innocent, orderly, even boring, but walking alone into a strange town with earphones, I can be singled out, almost as though I were wearing one of the ugly yellow stars of the Reich.

Walk in time to the footsteps on the tape. I press the IPod button and hear a narrator provide directions. Two blocks separate each audiotourist so I walk alone. The interwoven voices on the audio belong to Gusen camp survivors, past and current residents, former air force soldiers and SS camp guards, all of whom Mayer interviewed. In not knowing, Mayer wasn’t unusualAustrians didn’t speak of Gusen for decades. Mayer hadn’t known about Gusen until he was fourteen years old and a neighbor asked him if he knew the town had been a labor extermination camp. Georgen an der Gusen which adjoined Gusen II Mayer’s grandfather had joined the National Socialist Party and his parents still live in St. Administratively the Gusen complex was categorized as a satellite of Mauthausen, but the three Gusen camps covered an area large enough to include four towns and in 1945 held 25,000 inmates, double the number of Mauthausen.Īudiowalk Gusen, The Invisible Camp, is an art project by Christopher Mayer who grew up in St. When I saw an audiotour of a concentration camp in Linz, I signed up.īut when the bus arrived at the site, instead of concrete walls and barbed wire, I saw a yellow church steeple on a hill and beige houses with geraniums in window boxesthe concentration camp was now a middle-class housing development dotted with parks, newly built houses and remodeled camp buildings on roads like Gartenstrasse where I would soon walkas nondescript as the small town in which I grew up.įifteen km from Linz, the Gusen complex is the only extermination camp of significant size not memorialized as a site. If I had to go to Austria, maybe I could gain a small understanding of how the horrific ethnic cleansings of today occur. I had never wanted to go to Austria because of its Holocaust history but when my partner received an award at an arts festival in Linz, I went. Compared to Guzen, however, one might almost say that those camps were paradises.” Rabbi Rav Yechezkel Harfenes, Slingshot of Hell (BeKaf HaKela), 1988 This is not to say that the conditions at the other camps were not dreadful. As a resident of many camps, I can say that Guzen was the worst.

Slingshot of Hell by Yechezkel Harfenes