Grein

Jewish memorial at Mauthausen
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Here's Doug on yesterday, a challenging day both physically and emotionally.

Every day on this trip brings a mix of many things. Today started with a ride through Linz back to the Danube. The city is modern with a sense of style and is obviously trying to be on the cutting edge. Our hotel, the Marriott, is in the Europa Center and our room overlooked the Design Center. We rode east along the Danube opposite the massive steel and chemical plants and shipping facilities on the south shore. Linz has invested heavily in pollution control and claims to have the cleanest air of any industrial city.

More contrasts

Bicycle bridge in the Mostviertel
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Late morning brought us to Mauthausen, the most notorious Austrian concentration camp. Built a few years after Dachau, it also served a s a slave labor camp, with a nearby granite quarry, and also for control and elimination of dissident or other problematic persons. What western society was able to do 65 years ago is still hard to understand. Terror seems not to be as foreign to us as we hope. Besides the new information building (with a 45 minute movie) and museum exhibits in the surviving buildings (including a surprisingly small gas chamber), there is an impressive collection of national monuments built by most of the nations that lost citizens here (100,000 over the life of the camp). The Soviet memorial is coldly monumental, the Greek a simple marble column, the Italian a chaotic but very human collection of personal and civic plaques. I don't recall seeing one for the gypsies. It reminded me of the state memorials at Gettysburg, but with an even wider range of national personalities displayed. We are freshly impressed with the massive and highly organized complex of concentration camps throughout Europe, of which Dachau and Mauthausen are but examples.

Mauthausen
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The quarry just below the camp had a deep stillness and hauntedness that reminded Lisa and me of the quarry in Syracuse, Sicily, where the survivors of the Athenian invasion during the Peloponnesian War were also worked to death.

The afternoon brought us through the slightly rolling countryside known as the Mostviertel, or cider country, on the south of the river. Most is fermented from pear and apple pressings and is like a thin fruity white wine, but comes in a half liter mug. The back roads we followed were lined with ancient pear trees, loaded with fruit and littering our way with roadkill fruit. The area was very scenic, but lacking in places to stop to eat. Lisa is a good sport and wonderful to travel with, but is not at her best when we don't find lunch before 4:00 p.m.

Sculpture on road up to Mauthausen
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We rejoined the Danube as it begain to reenter a steeper, narrower valley and found our hotel in Grein, a lovely small town on a river bend. As we walked through town, we wondered why American towns don't have central platzes or piazzas with cafes to take in the civic air.