Day 7

James:  After breakfast we walked to Melk Abbey for a tour. You can see Melk Abbey from miles away. It is an absolutely enormous structure. When you finally get into town, the scale of it really hits you. It sits up on a hill and dwarfs the town.

God knows how much treasure and how many lives went into building it. It was so massive that it took four years to build. It is chock full of religious relics and iconography including the bones of saints that supposedly have healing power and splinters of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. It has commanding views of the surrounding countryside and one of the most famous libraries in the world. Who lives in this monstrosity? There used to be many monks and servants, but now there are only 21 and they are not even true monks. There is only one apprentice and he is 40 years old. It won’t be long until the facility will no longer house a religious order. Seems like a huge waste of time, energy and resources. Just sayin’.

We toured the various rooms and looked at their collection of relics. Our guide was informative and entertaining and even had a couple of good jokes to tell. The church itself is impressive. It’s huge and full of gilded figures and an elaborate fresco on the ceiling. There is a balcony probably 80’ above the floor of the church where the choir boys used to sing from. They wanted their music to sound like it was coming from heaven.

After the tour of the inside, we toured the elaborate gardens on the grounds. They are leafy and green and varied and immaculately maintained. There are some huge, ancient trees and dozens of varieties of flowers and greenery. There is a grove of 270-year old linden trees as well as fountains and statues. They went all out on every aspect of the place.

Susan: While Jim and some of the other men walked through the Melk garden, I went with some of the women to do some shopping before lunch. Melk has lovely old walking roads and cute shops. We stopped for lunch at a coffee shop where a few others from our group were going in for coffee.  I had a wonderful beef bouillon soup with vegetables served in a large tureen. 

We met back at the hotel and then boarded our coach bus. There we met our guide Sylvia who gave us a lecture on  Austria’s geography, provinces and history during our 1 hour bus ride to Mauthausen Concentration camp. We arrived at around 1:30 pm and Sylvia provided a guided tour.

James:  Mauthausen is a stark and sobering place. People were brought to there to work in the quarries to provide the Nazi regime with granite to build the grand cities in Hitler’s mind. The prisoners had to carry granite blocks up  180 steps. The prison camp was built and opened in 1938 and by the time it was liberated at the end of WWII, over 90,000 people from 40 nationalities died there. It was a horrific death factory. If the prisoners didn’t get worked to death, they died of starvation, torture, illness or execution.

We toured the memorials to those that perished there, the barracks and even the gas chambers. There are poignant displays and lists of every prisoner that died there. You cannot go there and not be deeply affected by the experience.

Susan: Sylvia said she always begins this tour by sharing a photograph of Francisco Boix, a Spanish photographer who was imprisoned there for several years. He was forced to photograph prisoners’ ID photos and daily life in the camp. He managed to smuggle some of the negatives out and pass them to a woman who lived on a nearby farm, and she hid them in her home. At the end of the war, those photographs revealed much of the horror that had taken place there and were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials.

When people first came to the camp, the Nazis took them to down to the shower rooms, had them take off all their clothes and then shaved off all hair. Then a doctor assessed them and designated if they were fit to work. They used badges to designate people for why they were in the camp. Sylvia stated that this was designed to try and create dissension between the prisoners. She told the story of one Italian prisoner who during roll call was going to collapse but two polish men on either side of him held him up so he did not fall down. If he had fallen the SS soldiers would have killed him, those two Polish men saved his life. This Italian man lived to tell that story.

Sylvia also shared with us the fact that children were born in the concentration camp and shared the recent CBS news story about the Holocaust's youngest survivors: born in a labor camp, on a death train, and in a concentration camp.

James: After the tour we boarded the bus again for a ride to Linz, the next stop on our itinerary. Linz is the third largest city in Austria with a population of 200,000. It has a colossal steel mill on the edge of town that employees over 11,000 people. They make high end steel for luxury automakers. There are also four universities there that represent almost a 1/4 of the population.

After checking into our hotel, we had an hour to kill before going to dinner. We ate in a busy place that seemed to be serving several parties. It was huge and packed. We had reservations, but it took nearly 2-1/2 hours to finally get all of our food. Many of our group left before dessert even arrived.

Susan: At dinner I sat next to Neil the 92 year old man who is from Augusta, Georgia. We were trying to translate the menu and I showed him how to do a screen grab of his phone so he could read it easier. He told me I was "smarter than a white rat." I guess that was a complement!