In These Walls

The night before our excursion to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, we had a typical dinner over at the Schloss. The food was well-prepared, but if you weren't a fan, you scooped yourself a big bowl of hazelnut ice cream and washed it down with wine. My friends and I congregated at a familiar table in Parker Hall, where all of our workshops and seminars take place, and we all sat near the window to get a breeze. The faculty soon instructed us to turn off our phones and electronics, because this next hour and a half or so was going to be serious. 

It's going to be pictures of emaciated and dead bodies, and a narrative from a member of the Jewish community. That's what people show you when they want you to feel somber about the Holocaust. I thought to myself.

Except they didn't start with pictures of the concentration camp, or its victims, but pictures of the Schloss Leopoldskron, where we're all staying.

To provide some historical backstory about the Schloss:

It was commissioned as a family estate in 1736 by the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg at the time, Leopold Anton Fresher von Firmian. He wasn't super popular after he expelled nearly 22,000 Protestants from Salzburg, so the Schloss was an attempt to reaffirm the social standing of his family. After a while, the palace experienced a time of decline, passing through various hands, including various kings and other important people. In 1918, the Schloss, which by that time had fallen into a state of severe disrepair, was sold to Max Reinhardt, Europe's most famous theatre director at the time. Reinhardt committed his considerable creative talents to the restoration of the Schloss, and he did a pretty bang-up job. He used the space to host plays and events for the theatre community. In 1938 the Schloss was confiscated by the Nazi government as "Jewish Property". Max Reinhardt was living and working in Hollywood at the time, but he never returned to Leopoldskron, but people say his heart never left.

In 1943 he wrote to his wife, Austrian actress Helen Thimig:

I have lived in Leopoldskron for eighteen years, truly lived, and I have brought it to life. I have lived every room, every table, every chair, every light, and every picture. I have built, designed, decorated, planted and I have dreamt of it when I was not there. I have always loved it in a festive way, not as something ordinary. Those were my most beautiful, prolific and mature years... I have lost it without lamenting. I have lost everything that I carried into it. It was the harvest of my life's work.

Until 1945, the Nazis used the Schloss as a summer residence. It was reclaimed by Helene Thimig, who in 1946, offered the use of the palace to Clemens Heller, a Harvard graduate student and creator of the Salzburg Global Seminar: what I am participating in right now.

The faculty began to show us pictures of the Schloss, where we eat dinner, meet with professors, and drink beer.

The Marble Hall, where we eat dinner, is where the Third Reich vacationed and discussed military action.

The Chinese Room, where we meet with professors who lead reading groups, is where men saluted Adolf Hitler.

The basement bar of the Schloss called the Bierstube, where we open up beer tabs and crack jokes, is where a Nazi family committed suicide in order to avoid arrest by Austrian police.

It made me feel like a sick person for previously enjoying these areas.

We continued to watch an old French film from the 1950s that contained some rare color footage from concentration camps. That wasn't any less strange to watch.

I use the word "strange" instead of "sad" because I have never gotten hysterical over the Holocaust, or any major international tragedy or issue. In the eighth grade, my class took a field trip to the Holocaust museum. While my classmates were wandering around, shielding their eyes from anything gory and muttering "This is so sad...", I was fascinated. I wanted to see everything because I was intrigued. I didn't feel any emotion other than what I can now identify as a passion to understand. I have always credited this experience as the first time I realized I wanted to be a journalist, or at least something of the sort. I wanted to inform others, and in doing so give people and events justice in the form of recognition and attention that they deserve. 

We went to Mauthausen-Gusen the next day. It was a long, indoor-outdoor tour with an experienced tour guide and 80 degree weather. The camp sits on a hill in the Austrian countryside, and if you cover part of your vision with your thumb, you can look at the beautiful fields in the distance without ever seeing a concentration camp- it's very eerie.

I saw the showers, the gas-chambers, the ovens. I don't think I want to talk about what it feels like to be where thousands of people were murdered, because it hits everyone differently. 

That night in Parker Hall and that afternoon at Mauthausen-Gusen were days ago, and I'm just now getting the insight to write this. I can now compile my thoughts with a level head and tell you why I love feeling this indignation and inspiration to learn more about a tragedy that I cannot change- it instills in me an obligation to carry history with me, but more importantly, it drives me to want to make a better world, little by little, for the names that are longer here to see one.

As I eat my lunch in Marble Hall, hear a lecture in the Chinese Room, and drink a beer in the Bierstube with friends, I am doing so as a part of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Within these walls, hate has prospered and succeeded, but these rooms now host a program that drives change and a belief that coexisting is one of the most important things we can learn how to do. Like Max Reinhardt did nearly a century ago, several new generations have come into this space and made it beautiful again. I can sit in-between a Lebanese girl and a Kenyan boy and not only accept their lives and perspectives, but befriend them, and learn from them as a student learns from a teacher.

Hatred once lived in these walls, but something far more powerful conquered it.