Mauthausen, città ermetica – Mauthausen, The Hermetic City – Documentation of the atrocities of the Mauthausen camp by the Italian prisoner Aldo Bizzarri, who spent twelve months in the camp’s execution area. Published by O.E.T., Edizioni Polilibraria. Rome, 1946 – First edition. In Italian. Rare.
“Everything Is Forbidden at Mauthausen” – Memoirs of a prisoner who spent twelve months in the Mauthausen camp. Aldo Bizzarri [1907–1953], an Italian writer and screenwriter, was arrested by the Gestapo on charges of anti-Nazi activity and taken to Mauthausen in the spring of 1944. He worked for many months in the camp as a porter near Barrack No. 20, where prisoners destined for immediate execution were brought upon arrival. Each day, he witnessed horrifying scenes of prisoners entering the barrack unaware of what awaited them, enduring torture, and being executed. He describes terrible scenes of prisoners he observed and the ways they arrived at Barrack 20 – entire groups brought to the camp from Czechoslovakia, Italy, Austria, and other places – and the various “methods” used by the SS to “handle” those prisoners in the barrack. He was a witness to tortures carried out by Commander Schulz just meters from his workplace almost daily, and he testifies that he could still hear the victims’ horrific screams months after the war. According to Aldo’s estimation, over one hundred thousand people were murdered in this barrack immediately upon arrival, before they were ever registered in the camp records. He also describes the hunger, the horrific conditions of the prisoners, the hierarchy among the SS commanders of the camp, the tortures and “assignments” imposed on prisoners when SS commanders would wake them in the middle of the night with terrifying orders, the dreadful treatment of the sick, and the unimaginable sight of freshly murdered prisoners’ bodies scattered throughout the camp. He details the division of forced labor tasks – and, worst of all, the tortures endured by prisoners in the camp’s infamous quarry (that same tall staircase from which prisoners were thrown to their deaths in horrific ways). A full chapter is dedicated to the quarry and how the Nazis abused the helpless prisoners.
In lengthy chapters, Aldo documents the numerous torture methods inflicted on prisoners – punishments for the smallest “offenses, ” providing precise details of what those punishments were and how the Nazis carried them out. These chapters are extremely difficult to read, but they hold immense historical importance.
In the final chapters, Aldo documents the chaos in the camp leading up to its liberation, as the Nazis began transferring prisoners to Auschwitz, large transports of women began arriving at Mauthausen, and rapid executions were carried out. Aldo records the horrific phenomenon whereby, even after the camp’s liberation by Allied forces, prisoners continued to die as a result of drastic weight loss and the effects of torture they had endured prior to liberation. He completed writing this testimony in September 1945, and in the final chapter he explains the duty he felt, as a prisoner who had lived through it all, to publish these accounts for future generations – as a call to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. In the following year, Aldo published the book Forbidden to Live, in which he expands further on the events of his imprisonment. In his later years, he worked in cinema and wrote several screenplays. He passed away in May 1953 at the age of 45.
117 [1] pages. Original cover with the illustrated dust jacket, complete. Good condition.
