• History: the origin of concentration camps
  • Opinion: The Spaniards of Mauthausen

"Two or three days before, the SS disappeared and suddenly, one day, with a blow and a thump, a tank on the street. I did not believe it. I have never returned, I have seen too many things ».

Juan Romero Romero is from Córdoba, has just turned 101 and is the only surviving Spaniard from the Mauthausen camp. He lives in Aÿ (France), where he married in 1947. At the age of 17 he joined the republican army, he fought in Brunete, Guadalajara, Teruel and the battle of the Ebro . In February 1939 he went to France, enlisted in the French legion, was arrested and after spending two months in a Vienna camp he ended up in Mauthausen. He worked in the quarry and then in the disinfection command. "I was collecting clothes and belongings of the new prisoners arriving in the camp," says deportados.es on the website, which collects about twenty interviews that Carlos Hernández de Miguel did between 2003 and 2004 with Spanish survivors in France and author of the book Los last Spaniards in Mauthausen (Editions B)

The setting for Mauthausen had been chosen by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man and maximum promoter of the Holocaust, after visiting the Austrian city in 1938 for its granite quarry .

“It was ten minutes to three when the first tank of the liberation appeared at the gates of the field. That was a moment of indescribable emotion, the skeletal crowd cried as never before hugging each other: 'At last we are free, free' ».

It is the testimony of Marcelino Bilbao Bilbao (Baracaldo, Vizcaya 1920-Poitiers, 2014), who entered the field on December 13, 1940. A nephew of his grandson, Extxahun Galparsoro , listened to his stories at the family home in San Sebastián and He decided to record them on about twenty cassette tapes. This is how the recent book Bilbao in Mauthausen emerged . Survival memories of a Basque deportee (Criticism), by Galparsoro himself. It includes not only the memories of Marcelino Bilbao but the daily life in Mauthausen and several maps, one of them of what the countryside might have been like around 1941.

Etxahun Galparsoro highlights the importance of the Ebensee sub- camp (about a hundred kilometers from Mauthausen), which in 1945 came to house 18,000 inmates and of which, he says, there is no trace in any publication in Spanish. "It was the Spanish who built it and the Alicante architect Antonio Arqués who designed its entrance arch," Galparsoro told ELMUNDO this Friday.

“Some Germans were killed. I do not. And to some Spaniards. We were there after the liberation for a month, nobody claimed us ».

José Alcubierre entered Mauthausen in 1940 at the age of just 14. He, his mother, and father arrived in Mauthausen by train from Angoulême, France, in "eight horse, 40 man" wagons. The women had to continue the journey. "I still remember how they screamed calling their husbands, including my mother," he says in deportados.es. Before Alcubierre, another 600 Spaniards had already arrived. "The next day they gave us a loaf of bread of about 25 centimeters for three, we cut it with the handle of a spoon." The commented quarantine was not respected. "When it rained [my father and others] would come up out of the quarry dripping with water." «One day my father gave me some bread wrapped in a handkerchief and the next day the same. It was his bread . In January they separated them and did not see each other again.

«You are Alcubierre, do you know how your father died?». The father, from Huesca, always went through Gusen (a subfield five kilometers from Mauthausen) with two prisoners from Teruel. One of them, after falling while chipping stone, was hit by a Polish corporal. The other two tried to stop him but all three were kicked to death and with sticks with pick handles at the hands of several Poles. “Five escaped from Mauthausen, took them and hanged them. They made us pass in front of them so that we could see them hanging ».

«How bad was Ramón, the famous Ramón! He was the one giving the injections into the heart. Sardinian, a Galician, was saved because when he was going to play, the training bell rang. Ramón was almost a neighbor of mine in Barcelona ».

France, in 2004, offered the widows and orphans of those deported from France (the case of the vast majority of Spaniards who ended up in the camps) two options: 500 euros a month or compensation of 27,000 euros. France honors its compatriots killed in the fields every year since 1946 every last Sunday in April. Spain took the same measure in May 2019, choosing May 5.

Of the 7,532 Spanish prisoners who passed through Mauthausen, 4,816 died (of them, 3,959 in Gusen, known as "the Mauthausen slaughterhouse"). 2,700 Spaniards came to survive. These data are provided by Carlos Hernández de Miguel, who claims to have compiled various sources, including that of Amical de Mauthausen, based in Barcelona. The organization was founded in 1962 among a group of survivors and relatives of Spanish deportees, but it was not legalized until February 1978, Juan Manuel Calvo Gascón, historian and member of its board of directors, tells EL MUNDO. Now there are about 800 associates who pay 50 euros a year .

“We weren't shot on the first day, as we thought. It was even worse.

It is the memory of José Marfil Peralta. His father was, perhaps, the first Spaniard to die in Mauthausen, 20 days after arriving. José was spared going to Gusen's fearsome subfield because he had scabies. "When 15 days passed we said '15 days! It was a victory.' Over time he considered killing himself by throwing himself into the electrified barbed wire, and although he lacked the final impulse, he was envious that others would do it. The day of the liberation, says in the documentary of Hernández de Miguel, "I waited for the siren to sound to go to work but nobody moved . Then there was a mess, people came from everywhere, many Spaniards ran to take rifles to see if they could catch someone and shoot him ».

That May 5 there were also excesses, when we returned to the field, we found the fearsome Chicaina, the most criminal kabo in Ebensee (...) And when we finally surrounded him, everyone shouted 'Go for him!'. Suddenly, about twenty prisoners pounced on the Chicaina, but this one, strong as a bull, dragged us from one side to the other. In any case, he soon had to give in to the number of razors that dealt him. And carrying him on our shoulders, we all took him to the crematorium, where we had carried his two compadres, with the difference that we introduced him alive into the ovens.

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