Chronicler's Diversion - Slovenia July 18th 2008

I just spent an hour walking amongst the alpine flowers and treading on the ashes of the 3000 souls who died building the Ljubelj tunnel between Slovenia and Austria. On the alpine border between these two countries, overlooking a steep ravine lies a little known outpost of the Mauthausen death camp. Here between 1943 and 1945, slave labourers, political prisoners from France, Yugoslavia, Poland and other places were worked until they were too ill or exhausted, building the road tunnel between the southern border of the Reich and the occupied territories. The ill and exausted either died here and went up in smoke at the little crematorium, or were sent back to Mauthausen to meet the same fate.
The hole in the ground that was the crematorium, lies in a now-beautiful ravine, shielding its work, from the camp barracks, the wash houses, and the football pitch. It's hard to imagine these tired and exhausted souls taking such recreation in such a place, but for them, the zwangsarbieters, the slaves of the one thousand year reich, this was their home, the place where they lived and more often than not, died.

Now marked only by ruins and few memorial wreathes, Ljubelj-Mauthausen reminds us of the depths and the heights of the human spirit. The guards and the guarded. Their long-dead voices whisper at you through the pines and the ruined buildings, and the memorial iron skeleton reaches up to heaven looking for a god that 60 years ago looked the other way.