Deportiert! Ein Wiener Jude berichtet – Deported! A Viennese Jew reports – by Samuel Graumann – prisoner in the Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Mauthausen camps, who despite all he endured survived the inferno and after the war documented in writing his harrowing tale, and the terrible story of the death camps. Published by Stern, Vienna 1947 – first edition.
Report by a Jewish prisoner from Vienna documenting his tale from March 11, 1938 until the collapse of the Third Reich in spring 1945 in three concentration camps. First, Samuel describes the antisemitism in Austria with the German invasion, the theft of Jewish property, the forced labor imposed on Jews in the streets of Vienna, the attitude of the Austrian church towards Jews during the war aimed to push Jews out of public roles even before the war broke out, and more. Samuel describes his arrest at home, separation from his family and deportation first to the Buchenwald camp. The deportation was on Yom Kippur and he describes the singing of “Kol Nidre” by the group of Jews led with him on their way to the camp: “I am not a devout Jew but the screams of these hundreds… penetrated deeply into my soul…”. In several chapters, Samuel documents in depth the atrocities of the Nazis against Jews in Buchenwald, the harsh punishments, the terrible sanitary conditions in the camp, the torture and executions. In Buchenwald he remained for about three years alongside the daily death in the camp. In spring 1941 he was transferred with a group of Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, selection was carried out, Samuel was sent to live together with a group of 400 people in a room that could barely accommodate 150. They were tattooed and received striped prisoner clothes that he calls “rags with pockets”. There they met a nurse who said no one survived in Auschwitz for more than six weeks alive. In the chapter “Inhumane Lives” he documents the terrible horrors he and his friends endured in Auschwitz, horrors that almost led him to end his life were it not for a good friend stopping him at the last moment. Despite the terrible horrors he endured in Auschwitz through slave labor that exhausted his dying body, he managed to survive in Auschwitz until January 1945, that month as the Allied forces advanced the Nazis transferred him with another 90 Jews to Mauthausen. Conditions in Mauthausen were better since Nazi control of the camp began to weaken towards the end of the war and inmates had more opportunities to obtain food. After a short period in Mauthausen he was transferred to Theresienstadt where he remained until his liberation by the Red Army at the end of the war. After the war he searched for his wife and children and learned that they had been murdered in 1943.
165 [2] p. Very good condition.