Mauthausen; z pobytu a života v německém koncentračním táboře třetího stupně Mauthausen – From the Stay and Life in a German Concentration Camp of the Third Degree, by Antonín Hrbek. An early and harrowing testimony on the horrors of the Mauthausen camp by a prisoner who was held there for approximately three years. Prostějov (Czechoslovakia), 1945 – First edition. Czech. Rare.
“In the bathroom they lay on the floor, completely naked, helpless, with terrible wounds all over their bodies. Black phlegm and pus, from which worms crawled in the hundreds, emitted a dreadful stench. I saw dim, vacant eyes that turned toward us with a silent yet urgent plea for food. And these were people who had once lived and worked, who had their own names and their own will, who had families. And today – skeletons with a terrible odor, mere numbers devoid of feeling, lacking independence and almost insensitive to wounds, yearning only for food. This is what German Nazism, the most terrible and dangerous poison of humanity, has made of them. The German Nazi octopus, the SS monster, wrapped itself completely around them with its arms and sucked them to the marrow of their bones, and cast the bones it could not digest into the flames. I saw horrific sights that made my blood run cold. A sick prisoner with severe phlegmon in his leg was brought into the bathroom and placed beside the unfortunate man, who only groaned faintly. After some time, the groaning prisoner recovered, sat up, looked around with blurred eyes, and fell upon the prisoner with the phlegm. Immediately afterward a terrible roar was heard. The starving prisoner bit into the phlegm of the wretched man lying beneath him and sucked the pus from the wound. He bit so fiercely into his fellow prisoner’s leg that we could hardly pull him away… When we saw this chaos of human skeletons crawling over one another, screaming, crying, and dying, we who were present nearly went mad. Yet the supervising SS men walked among them with a cynical smile, examining them as though we were looking at some repulsive vermin meant to be crushed. They laughed loudly at the most painful sight…” (From the chapter in the book: “Experiencing Mauthausen at Midnight”).
The personal memoirs of Antonín Hrbek, who was held in the camp for an extended period of approximately three years. In his book, he describes the impossible daily life in the camp – the harrowing events he experienced firsthand and witnessed, in many passages that are extremely difficult to read due to the daily horrors described in them. The author, who belonged to the “National Resistance Group” that operated underground against Nazi Germany after the German occupation, was arrested in October 1941 as the underground official responsible for postal, telegraph, and transportation matters. After being taken to the Gestapo cellars and interrogated for 11 hours, during which he lost consciousness three times due to severe beatings, he was sent to prison for 24 hours, where he was sentenced by a military court to be sent to Mauthausen. The Gestapo commander in Brno informed him that he was being sent to the camp where “he was to die within three months.” He arrived at Mauthausen in February 1942, and already at the initial reception two of his companions were executed before his eyes. In his book, he recounts in detail the horrific and sadistic acts of the Nazis throughout the long months in which he was held in Mauthausen, in a manner that is difficult to describe here. He details the methods of killing and the burning of bodies carried out in the camp, as well as the various forced labor tasks in which prisoners met their deaths daily. He experienced Nazi cruelty firsthand countless times, and as he describes: “The SS men were trained only for scientific murder. They knew which parts of the human body were the most painful, they knew how to strike so that the prisoner would suffer as much as possible, and they knew how to prolong torture and death, and they had a veritable system in this field…. After all, the SS men were recruited mainly from people who were corrupt and flawed in character… and this cursed rabble was proclaimed by the Nazis to be the flower of the nation. Of course – what kind of nation is it whose flower is such as this. And the nation as a whole was corrupt and evil from the root. If we take their ‘experts, ’ as we came to know them in Mauthausen, by our standards we must declare that they were people with the intelligence of primitives, who did not know how to add, multiply, or divide – people foolish by nature, who could never do any useful or productive work. Their ‘genius, ’ which they proclaimed, was expressed only in murder, in astonishing boastfulness, and in idiotic devotion to their leader.”
Despite everything he endured, out of a group of several thousand prisoners who passed through the camp during the three years he was held there, he and a few dozen other prisoners managed to survive and recount his terrible story at the end of the war.
At the beginning of each chapter in the book appears a woodcut depicting a harsh scene from the camp, created by the Czech painter, graphic artist, and illustrator Antonín Kameník (1886–1959). Facing page 122 appears a depiction of Hitler composed of sentences hurling at him all the blame that rests upon him, and the crimes he committed, created by K. Pavlík.
Rare. Only four records in the WorldCat global library catalog.
122 [4] pages. Leaves partially detached. Overall good condition.
