L’INFERNO DI MAUTHAUSEN – “The Hell of Mauthausen (How 5,000 Deportees Died)” – The Shocking Story of the Italian Prisoner and Resistance Fighter Gino Valenzano, Detailing the Unimaginable Tortures He and His Comrades Endured in Mauthausen. Published Immediately After the War, While the Memories Were Still Fresh and the Pain Still Echoed. S.A.N. Publishing, Turin (Italy), 1945 – First Edition – Dedicated and Signed Copy by the Author.
The author, born in 1920, lived in Turin before the war and served as an aviation officer in the Italian army. On October 20, he learned that the Republican police had received orders from Rome to arrest all anti-fascist suspects, and that his name was on the list. He fled Rome and briefly joined a partisan group. While en route to Naples, he was arrested by the SS together with his brother. After an interrogation in a local prison, he was deported a month and a half later, along with his brother and other prisoners, in cattle cars to Dachau in Germany. After a brief period in Dachau, he was transferred to Mauthausen, where he first encountered the horrifying sight of Muselmann prisoners: “They looked like walking skeletons, their faces were no more than skulls covered with dark skin… When we asked who these prisoners were, we were told they were Italians like us, deported from their homeland after September 8.” Valenzano concealed his past as an aviation officer from the Nazis, knowing that if it were discovered, he would endure severe torture. From this point, he provides a harrowing account of the brutal tortures he experienced in the camp: the daily lashes he suffered during forced labor, the mass murders he witnessed, the countless times he narrowly escaped death, and the suffering of Jewish prisoners: “They were thrown naked into the snow, beaten bloody, in agony from starvation…”,
At one point, the Nazis transferred him to work in the infamous Mauthausen quarry. The book provides graphic descriptions of the unimaginable horrors and tortures endured by him and his fellow prisoners in the quarry. After nearly a month, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Following brief treatment, he was sent back to the quarry, where, completely exhausted, he continued to work for another four months! This is especially significant as the average prisoner survived only a few days in the quarry. He writes: “We climbed 186 steps, then another 800 meters of exhausting ascent, about twenty times a day! Over four months, I lost all my muscles due to emaciation… We worked barefoot… Those who collapsed from the pain in their feet were forced to rise under deadly blows…”. After four months, he was granted “permanent worker” status and transferred to lighter labor at an airplane factory several kilometers from the camp. Gino survived until the liberation of the camp by Allied forces. He describes how, as the Allies approached, the Nazis intensified the mass killings of prisoners, both by gas and by gunfire. Out of approximately 6,000 Italians deported to Mauthausen, only 340 survived, and of those, only 100 were able to walk on their own.
Upon liberation, Gino entered the Nazi command office in the camp, examined the prisoners’ records, and found details about the fates of many Italians he had known before the war. On May 21, he was transported to Switzerland by a Red Cross truck. In the years following the war, Gino Valenzano became a successful race car driver, participating in 39 races between 1947 and 1955.
The book is accompanied by graphic photographs depicting prisoners in horrific physical conditions, those who perished, and scenes from the camp.
Rare. Only three listings appear in the WorldCat global library catalog.
118 [1] pages. Original binding with the illustrated dust jacket. Condition: Very Good.
