On our way to Vienna, we stopped a few times to visit some cities we had read about. I wasn't expecting to see what I saw.
Linz, Kulturquartier.
The Kulturquartier, a free space for aesthetics, an oasis in the city, aiming to make culture more accessible. Its immersive experiences involve contemporary architectural installations around the Old Cathedral of Linz, as well as photo galleries and film productions with a social purpose.
Mauthausen Nazi Concentration Camp, Upper Austria.
Classified “Grade III”, where the most “incorrigible political enemies of the Reich” were sent to be exterminated, often through exhaustion by grueling forced labor.
Photo taken by Francisco Boix, a Spanish prisoner at Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp, who risked his life to save negatives and evidence of the atrocities committed at Mauthausen. The film "The Photographer of Mauthausen", directed by Mar Targarona and starring Mario Casas, tells the story of the photographer.
List of all names of those who died at the Mauthausen camp.
The Nazi camp is located on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, by the river Danube. One of the most shocking things was to think how such a beautiful place can hide such a monstrous history.
The stairs of death
Several times throughout the day, prisoners of the camp were forced to carry blocks of stone, weighing as much as 50 kilograms, up the 186 stairs of the so called "Stairs of Death". Often, exhausted prisoners would collapse and drop their load on top of those following, creating a horrific domino effect with prisoners falling onto the next, and so on, all the way down the stairs. The heavy stones would crush their limbs and bodies. People died on these stairs every day.
Prisoners transporting stones on the "stairs of death", between 1942 and 1944 (photo credits: NIOD, Amsterdam).
Salzburg.
Apfelstrudel at Café Tomaselli.
Views from Fortress Hohensalzburg
Augustiner bräu, Kloster Mülln. A brewery.
On the way back to Vienna, we went South. In next article, I will post some of the most breathtaking scenery of our lake route, all along the Alps... Thanks for reading.