Mautehausen

I don't know how to explain better than the email I sent home that day. 

Well everyone... hello!

The last few days have been intense on the personal, worldly, and spiritual levels. I have been in some places where horrors committed by men are so ungodly they are hard to comprehend. We left Salzburg, and I will be honest its my favorite place as far as feel good places go. We left around 8am and everyone was sad to leave. Knowing what lay ahead of us in the next few hours the ride was relatively quite. We arrived at Mautehausen. We drove through this quaint little town on the Danube river, up this little country road to the top of the hill that over looks the valley. This place of lush green hills wild flowers and endless farming land is the place of the concentration camp. When we got off the bus it was all but silent. We went into the museum, where they have pictures and watched a movie. They informed us in the movie of the different ways in which this camp was used. It was a labor supply camp mostly then, switched into an extermination camp. Upon the cliffs at the lower end they would quarry rocks and make them carry them up these impossibly steep stairs, if you fell the weight of the rock would kill you or they would shoot you and push you off the cliff next to these horrid steps. The video also informed us that the prisoners would line up along this ledge and the. S.S. would make them push each other off the edge to the bottom of this cliff , where if they didn't die from the impact they would roll into the pond and drown. I am only retelling these horrors to help you understand what its we are supposed to learn from such ungodly places. Once in the camp you are faced with long empty barracks, the Kitchen building, the officer buildings, the basement gas chambers, the cold storage room, the oven rooms. As I walked about this somber place with a sense of protection. I found myself looking through a window into a closed building. I looked into the room and. When I saw my reflection, I had been crying, and tears were rolling down my face. It was this window that taught me a lesson that I will never forget. I realized that this window stands for more than just a window, but a reality that we live by. Everyday people come through this camp Grasping for some kind of understanding of what really happened here, and they will never get it but understand what I do through this window, its a reality I will never have to live through but this view through this window is one we as a human beings can not ever allow to happen ever again. In one of the cells is carved, " if there is a god, he owes me an apology." I know that this world is messy, a little scary and often a bad place to be but our Savior will never leave us alone, or allow us to experience these things without a purpose that will only benefit us. I know he felt the pains and sufferings of all the people in this camp. That he knew these suffering people by name, and sent the strongest ones he knew to this camp. He lives, he loves us and will always present us with Windows and cliffs in our lives and we must always do as he would have us do with them. I love you all very much and hope I was able so share with you a tiny piece of knowledge and the spirit I have been feeling on this trip. I am so grateful for this opportunity and blessing of being on the trip.

Always,

Hayley