Sotto gli occhi della morte Da Bolzano a Mauthausen - Under the Eyes of Death from Bolzano to Mauthausen by Aldo Pantozzi, published by Opera pro orfani perseguitati politici e derelitti - Bolzano (Italy), 1946 - first edition. Italian. At the opening of the book is a names list of prisoners from Mauthausen who perished - Aldo's friends to whom he dedicated the book.
The autobiographical story of Mauthausen camp prisoner Aldo Pantozzi, who spent hundred days there, published eight months after the camp's liberation. A harrowing testimony documenting indescribable human suffering. Aldo, accused of resistance activities, was taken to several camps in the Nazi-controlled Italian region. Most of the time he was in the Bolzano camp where he performed various jobs under relatively reasonable conditions. At some point he was transferred to Mauthausen along with several hundred prisoners in a horribly overcrowded train ride that caused many of them bodily injuries. They were put in a barrack in the camp, and the first sight they met was a group of 200-300 limping or legless prisoners. In Mauthausen he worked in forced labor in the camp's industrial area loading heavy equipment onto carts under conditions of daily severe hunger. Aldo describes in his book the daily tortures he and his friends underwent in the camp, with the Nazis constantly inventing new methods to torment the prisoners day and night, with many of them collapsing to death one after the other. He himself lost over half his body weight under the harsh starvation conditions that grew worse over time. In the chapter "Extermination by Hunger" Aldo describes in detail how the Nazis announced food ration cuts, and the ways they tortured prisoners regarding anything to do with food - mixing garbage with the prisoners' food to cause illness, snatching food from prisoners mid-meal, a pile of corpses was constantly lying at the entrance to the barrack to show the prisoners' imminent fate, and more horrors hard to describe. Aldo describes how mortality in the camp increased over time - in the yard between Block 1 and Block 2 some trucks loaded around 400 bodies every two-three days.
Aldo survived until May 4th the day the prisoners noticed American trucks parked in the least expected place - the American trucks stood along the wall road where executions in the camp took place. On that day the prisoners understood liberation was near, but typhus raged in the camp and many prisoners died during the few days before liberation. Aldo was taken to the Red Cross hospital where he was reunited with his mother who had also survived. Of those days he writes: "Until then you dream in a world so far away. We re-discovered our personalities, which until then had remained cramped in a distant corner of ourselves; we restored ourselves, as if on a clean slate, the orders of existential values, many of which, until then, had always escaped us...".
Extremely rare. In the Worldcat library catalog there is a listing of the new edition of the book published in 2011. The first edition does not appear there at all. (In 2002 with the family's approval, the Trento museum published a new edition of the book).
107 [2] p. Slightly faded cover. Good condition.
