Mauthausen concentration camp
One quarry was at the bottom of a long set of 186 stone steps. Guards forced male prisoners to carry blocks of granite up the stairs, all day and in all kinds of weather. This was a very difficult and exhausting job. The blocks of stone sometimes weighed as much as 50 kilograms (110 pounds). These slave laborers were already starving and malnourished because the Nazis gave them so little food in the camps. Then they were forced to work all day in the quarries without food or water. Often, guards beat the prisoners or forced them to race while they carried stones up the steps. When one person slipped, died, or collapsed from exhaustion, he would fall onto the people behind him, who would then fall too. Prisoners would continue to fall like dominoes, one after the other, all the way down the steps. Doing this work killed so many people that inmates at Mauthausen named the steps the "Stairs of Death."