MAUTHAUSEN - Mauthausen. Early Testimony by Mauthausen Camp Prisoner Parragi Gyorgy, Published by Keresztes, Budapest 1945 - First Edition. Hungarian. A copy with the author's dedication in Hungarian: "szövetséges katonáknak szentelve, akik megmentették életünket Parragi György" - "Dedicated to the Allied soldiers who saved our lives, Parragi György".
The author was captured by the Gestapo on March 24, 1944 with the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis. Following informing for being an underground activist. A black Gestapo car stopped near his house, German soldiers ordered him to come with them, to the voice of his little daughter who asked him: "Father, are the Germans going to kill you now?". They confiscated his typewriter, and took him to the Gestapo offices for questioning, when they learned that he was born on April 20, the SS men started yelling at him and beating him: "How dare you be born on the day the Führer was born? (Hitler)", after interrogation under torture he was taken to the basement where they sat About 40 people including members of parliament and well-known activists in silence. From there he was taken to the prison in Po-Utza, where he was thrown into a cell together with Peretz Korin - the president of the Bank of Commerce, Korin's body had severe signs of violence and he told him that he was beaten by the Nazis until he was forced to sign a document in which he admits that he sabotaged a German manufacturing plant. After a few days in prison, he was taken out and taken in a truck together with several other prisoners to Vienna, and from there to the Lanzendorf camp (Nazi subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp), 10 km from Vienna. In this camp began the series of tortures he went through with forced labor, long hours in the freezing cold, and a small daily ration. He describes how during the day any worker who dared to stop and rest was beaten on the spot with a whip - "Listening to the blood-curdling screams of the unfortunate victims was more difficult than all our personal suffering and sorrow... The lightest punishment was 25 lashes, but there were poor people who were whipped with 100 lashes and died as a result ..." . In the camp, the prisoners were separated into three groups: Aryan, Jews, and the other nations. Giorgi describes how the Jews suffered more than anyone, and details the atrocities the Nazis inflicted on the Jews in particular. After about two months in Lanzendorf, on May 4, he was transferred with several other prisoners to the Mauthausen camp. Upon arriving at the camp, he describes the appalling sight that unfolded before his eyes: "We saw a huge and crowded camp consisting of many barracks... everywhere we saw hundreds of prisoners with ragged clothes and starved looks, breaking stones for the road being built, carrying huge stones... and the foremen hitting with huge sticks and kicking In the people who fell to the ground... we thought we had already seen all the horrors of hell, but it turned out that this was only the beginning...". In Mauthausen, he was placed in block 19, in terrible overcrowding with several sleeping on one bed and often surrounded by fleas, and due to overcrowding many of them slept on the floor. Jews were separated from non Jews, and all freedom of movement for him and his friends was limited to a small yard where about 600 prisoners were crowded.
In a harch chapter, the author goes on to describe how he watched from the yard the abuse of the Jews by the German Kapos. diabolical abuse that is difficult to describe here. Jews who did not stand the torture threw themselves on the electric fence. The author describes it: "They threw themselves on the wire fence next to the block where there was a high voltage current, the electrocuted Jews were hanging on the wire like the swallows that came across the electric wires here... In the winter the situation was even harder...". The author has seen several mass executions, and comments on the details: "I will never forget the screams of death... the blood accompanied us everywhere... awake or dreaming, whether in the block or in the inner camp, in the quarries or in the outer workplace... blood, blood, blood, ..." . In another chapter he goes on to describe "the tragedy of the Jews of Holland": "The elite of Holland's Jewry was brought to Mauthausen... They were directed to a certain and painful death... to a quarry! As a capo they put the beastly monster Unk, who had previously had the blood of thousands on his hands... Every day he led the Jews to the quarry... where the Jews were forced to carry stones up a hundred and seventy steps, and those who failed the task were thrown from the top... In the evening Unk would return and tell his commanders about the number of Jews who had been killed with satisfaction...". In addition, He also goes on to write about Dr. Zoltan Klar's torture methods, the systematic and deliberate starvation of the prisoners, and the forced removal of beached prisoners who tended to die in the gas chambers every day. "The gas chamber worked around the clock" he writes, describing at length the process of murder in the gas chamber itself.
At the end of the book he describes the day of liberation on May 5th exactly one year from the day he arrived at Mauthausen. How in one day 30,000 prisoners who could not digest what was happening around them went free, it took them a few hours to believe that now they were not under anyone's supervision. The night before there were some Nazis who ran away and the thing they made sure to take with them was the bottles of brandy. He describes the American soldiers who arrived at the camp that it was the first time in a year that they encountered human faces. That day the prisoners captured several Nazi capo policemen and murdered them in the camp. The last chapters describe the great excitement that the author felt in those days of liberation, and his joy that despite everything he saw and went through, he remained sane. He returned to Hungary, to some of his family members who survived the inferno.
91 p. 18 cm. Slight tears at the edges of the cover. Some of the pages are detached. Good - moderate condition.
