15 Țigări – 15 Cigarettes – by Alexandru Antoniu (Colonel în rezervă – Colonel in reserve). The testimony of a Romanian battalion deputy commander who was captured by the Nazis and, after the war, recorded from memory the months he spent in the Mauthausen camp (“only the important things, ” in his words), suspended between life and death. Published by Editura Militară. Romania, 1966 – first edition. Extremely rare. In Romanian.
A chronicle of the days of Alexandru Antoniu, who served as deputy commander of a battalion in the 1st Regiment of the “Tudor Vladimirescu” Division – a battalion numbering one thousand: “A thousand soldiers, officers and NCOs. Soldiers ready to clash swords with the enemy who had invaded our country. I knew almost all of these young men with arms of steel and hearts boiling with sacred hatred for the crimes of fascist Germany, ” he writes. At the end of 1944, he operated with his unit in the vicinity of the village of Vidra, attempting to repel a Nazi assault. After a surprise artillery ambush prepared by the Germans, he and his comrades were wounded and taken prisoner. For about a month, the Germans forced them to march on foot through Hungary to Vienna, where they were imprisoned at the Kaisersteinbruch prison. There, he and his comrades were interrogated under torture by the Gestapo, who tried to extract as many details as possible about the unit in which they had served. At the end of December 1944, Antoniu was transferred from prison to prison, repeatedly interrogated about his past as a Romanian army officer. At the conclusion of the investigations, Antoniu was deported to the Mauthausen camp. Upon arriving at the camp, he witnessed a brutal execution carried out by the Nazis against several prisoners using attack dogs. Within minutes, he understood that all the suffering he had endured until then was nothing compared to what awaited him in Mauthausen. His head was shaved, his clothes replaced with prison garb, and he was given the inmate number 284024: “From that evening on, in the extermination camp Mauthausen, I ceased to have a name. I became number 284024,” he writes. From this number, he attempted to calculate how many inmates had been murdered before him, since he saw almost no prisoners in the camp with lower numbers. From here, he recounts in detail his experiences in the camp: the torture endured by him and his comrades, the exhausting morning roll calls, forced labor, life in overcrowded blocks, starvation, the daily brutality of the kapos, the executions that occurred daily in the camp, the desperate struggle to keep working despite total exhaustion in order to avoid being sent to the crematorium, the fight for survival through the mutual aid prisoners gave one another to ease their suffering, the fate of fellow inmates he had known before being taken to the camp, and how their condition steadily deteriorated, and more.
Toward the end of the war, as the Nazis began to reduce the number of prisoners in the camp, Antoniu was on a list of inmates slated for transfer to Gusen. However, the camp was liberated before the transfer took place, and he was thus saved. After the war, he returned to his homeland, Romania.
The title 15 Cigarettes refers to an event he recounts in detail in the book, in which he bribed an SS officer with 15 cigarettes – and thus his life was saved on the very day he was meant to be executed.
Extremely rare. Only one listing in the WorldCat global library catalog, in a library in France.
143, [1] pages. Very good condition.
