Born Survivors (35 page)

‘When we headed out of there, there was only one way to go. There was nowhere else left,’ said Anka. ‘We were going to Mauthausen …’

All seemed lost.

Many knew what that name meant to the ‘enemies of the Reich’ and they blanched at the thought. As a Nazi concentration camp, Mauthausen had been notorious even in the ghettos. While Anka was in Terezín, news had spread that the famous Czech singer-songwriter Karel Hašler had been murdered in Mauthausen. The information may even have come from two prisoners who’d escaped from Auschwitz and hidden in Terezín for a time. Hašler, a Gentile married to a German, had been arrested by the Gestapo for his patriotic songs and sent to the camp in the Austrian hills where, in December 1941 – having been tortured – he was turned into an ‘ice statue’: taken outside, he was stripped naked, repeatedly doused in icy-cold water and left to freeze solid.

Shocking as that was, the camp was most feared for the means by which most prisoners were worked to death. ‘The business of Mauthausen was death – via a quarry,’ Anka said. ‘Everyone in Terezín knew that … People were forced to cut stone there and then climb one hundred and fifty steps or so or be killed. It would be the most dreadful end for us all.’

After all the women had been through – their years under Nazi tyranny, their survival in the ghettos, escaping Mengele and Zyklon B, avoiding death by starvation, disease, exhaustion or Allied bombs, and finally clinging to life on that train – suddenly they were frighteningly close to the end.

Mauthausen. One night away.

Not far from Linz, the huge granite camp was just a short train ride along the Danube valley. Salvation would come too late, it seemed. They and their babies – born and not yet born – were about to be delivered by train to one of the most notorious terminals in the entire Nazi genocide network.

It was the end of the line.

7

Mauthausen

Picturesque Mauthausen, on the banks of the Danube

In spite of its fearsome reputation, KZ Mauthausen had perhaps the most picturesque location of any Nazi camp. With commanding views over much of Upper Austria as far south as Salzburg, it sat at the top of a hill in a region admired for its enchanting scenery.

Close to the borders with Germany and the Czech Protectorate, the town of Mauthausen on the River Danube enjoyed direct access to the continent’s second-longest river as well as to an efficient road and rail network. Vienna was less than two hundred kilometres east and Linz twenty kilometres west. Adolf Hitler had grown up in Linz and it was the place he considered home. He reserved some of his grandest plans for the city he decreed ‘the most German in all Austria’, earmarking it as one of his five so-called ‘Führer cities’ along with Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and Hamburg.

The showcase building was to be the
Führermuseum
, a grand gallery designed by Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, to rival the Uffizi or the Louvre. With a 150-metre façade of Roman-style columns, it was to be filled with fine art looted or confiscated from museums and private collections, much of it owned by Jews. The finest-quality golden granite needed to build this enduring monument to Hitler’s glory, as well as his planned opera house and theatre, would come from the
Wiener Graben
(Vienna Ditch) quarry at Mauthausen, blasted out and chiselled into blocks by the most expendable enemies of the Reich.

The quarry had been owned by the city of Vienna for decades and its stone already paved the boulevards of the Austrian capital. After the
Anschluss
in 1938, the quarry was leased to the SS-owned German Earth and Stoneworks Company, which not only advertised its wares widely in glossy brochures right up until 1945 but also exported its products across Europe for use in monuments, construction projects, industrial complexes and
Autobahnen
. Career criminals imprisoned in Dachau built the concentration camp, designed to house the quarry’s slave labour force, from the ground up on an adjacent hilltop. This monolith to the superiority of the Nazis, complete with gatehouse and watchtowers ringed by an impregnable granite wall, opened in 1939 and was visible for kilometres around.

Many of the earliest inmates were political and ideological prisoners and members of the intelligentsia, including university
professors – all sentenced to extermination through hard labour. Among them were
Häftlinge
from every creed and occupied nation, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, priests and Spanish Republicans. Even after Auschwitz and other camps were evacuated in early 1945, Jews were in the minority at Mauthausen and there were few women in the camp (apart from those forced to work as prostitutes in the brothel) until 1945. The Soviet POWs were treated most brutally of all and less than two hundred out of 4,000 survived. They were not only worked to death in the quarry, they were given half rations and made to sleep naked in windowless huts. By the time they’d completed the building of their own ‘Russian camp’, their number had decreased so radically that the barracks were instead used as an infirmary camp, although it retained its original name.

One of only two ‘Class III’ punishment camps, and known within the Reich by its nickname of
Knochenmühle
(‘bone-grinder’), KZ Mauthausen quickly gained a reputation as one of the camps with the harshest conditions and the highest death rates. One senior Nazi official is reported to have declared in 1941, ‘No one leaves Mauthausen alive,’ and many of the prisoners’ files were marked RU, standing for
Rückkehr Unerwünscht
(Return Undesirable). Designed to turn a massive profit for the SS, Mauthausen and its more than forty satellite camps, including nearby Gusen (the other Class III camp), had access to an unlimited supply of prisoners. By 1944, this complex proved to be one of the most profitable camps in the Nazi empire, making more than eleven million Reichsmarks a year.

Work in the quarry was especially harsh and involved the digging, blasting and shaping of huge blocks of granite, often by hand or with pickaxes. Then each block – with an average weight of ninety pounds – had to be carried on prisoners’ backs up a steep shale cliff which frequently subsided beneath bleeding feet, sending them sliding to their deaths. Later, 186 steps were rough-hewn and dubbed the ‘Stairway of Death’. Armed guards frequently
waited at the edge of the steps to harry, beat and jostle those struggling with their load or trying to step over those who’d perished before them.

The Stairway of Death at Mauthausen quarry

Inmates also faced the daily threat of being forced off the sheer edge of the quarry in a spot the Nazis called The Parachutists’ Wall. As the guards laughed and shouted, ‘
Achtung! Fallschirmspringer
!’ prisoners were shoved over the edge to be dashed on the rocks or
drowned in the stagnant pool at the foot of the cliffs. Those not killed immediately were left to die, a process that could take days. Many jumped voluntarily rather than face the gruelling twelve-hour shifts on starvation rations in extreme temperatures, with brutal treatment meted out daily. Aside from being worked to death, there were more than sixty methods of murder catalogued in Mauthausen including beatings, shootings, hangings, medical experiments, injection with petrol, and various forms of torture. The final death toll in the camp complex is unknown, as many prisoners were killed in a mobile van or sent to a nearby castle to be gassed. That was, until the inmates were commanded to build their own gas chamber in 1941. Estimates vary as to how many died in total, but it is thought to be approximately 100,000, of whom more than 30,000 were Jews.

To begin with, the corpses were transported by truck to the town of Steyr or to Linz to be disposed of, but doing so openly was considered too great a risk, so a crematorium was commissioned to take care of them. The ashes were scattered in the forest behind the camp or in the waters of the Danube. As late as autumn 1944, when plans were being made to evacuate Auschwitz II-Birkenau, ten large ‘waste incinerators’ were dismantled there with the intention of rebuilding them at Mauthausen – a plan that was never carried out even though a local company was awarded the contract in February 1945.

This genocide took place within a few kilometres of the pretty riverside town after which the camp was named. Many of its 1,800 mainly Catholic residents watched new inmates march through their midst from the station, never to return. They witnessed those who collapsed being put against a wall and shot, and afterwards they washed away the blood. They heard prisoners being brutalised or murdered in the quarry and they gathered by the ferry to stare at the strange-looking men in striped uniforms being transported downriver to satellite camps. That was, until the SS threatened to shoot ‘curious onlookers’ and moved them on.

Despite the announcement by the Reich in 1938 that the creation of a concentration camp at Mauthausen was a ‘special distinction’ for the district, few can have welcomed it. The presence of its four hundred or so SS guards, however, ensured that the town was kept well supplied and soon became a vital lifeline to the local economy. Its bars, shops and restaurants did especially well from the brisk trade, and the inn nearest the camp became the most popular haunt of the SS. Many other locals profited from the money the guards spent freely on everything from cider and bacon to fish. There was also a thriving black market in soap, food, clothes and jewellery stolen from the camp, and several local women struck up relationships with the guards, sometimes even marrying them. Civilian workers and stonemasons were well paid as supervisors at the quarry, while slave labour from the camp was ‘loaned out’ for domestic and civil projects for the town, including decorating, gardening, farming and building. In 1943, Polish artist Stanislav Krzykowski, a prisoner at nearby Gusen, was commissioned to create a statue of a deer in repose for the garden of the chief of the SS.

The Nazi guards frequently joined local hunters for game shooting and they created their own football team, which played on a pitch the prisoners built for them overlooking the Russian camp. Sited just outside the main walls, it even had stands cut into a grassy slope. Once the Mauthausen 1 team was promoted to the regional league, all home games were played at the ground and the team were cheered on by local supporters who must have seen, smelled and heard some of what was going on. The games were reported by the press, who casually commented on the sight of prisoners sitting on the rooftop of the infirmary to watch games.

Close to the football pitch, a deep concrete reservoir constructed by the prisoners in case of fire in the camp was later used as a swimming pool for the SS. Selected locals were invited to swim there and to visit the camp cinema, although not on days when the crematorium was in full production. There was also a walled vegetable
garden and orchard where prisoners were forced to tend to produce they would never be allowed to eat.

The townspeople were under no illusion as to the deadly intent of the uniformed men who guarded the camp up on the hill. There were warnings posted throughout the town that anyone found trying to help the prisoners would be shot, and civilian workers were arrested and imprisoned if they were overheard speaking about conditions inside the camp. One stonemason sacked for complaining about the inhumanity was later sent to Buchenwald, so people quickly learned to stay quiet and keep their heads down.

Historians have found a few instances where the townspeople did complain or try to help. A woman named Anna Pointner, who was a member of the Austrian resistance, hid documents and photos of the camp taken secretly by Spanish prisoners. Another young
Frau
, Anna Strasser, who worked in the accounts office of a warehouse opposite the railway station, watched transport after transport arrive. The condition of the prisoners horrified her and robbed her of sleep, so every day at midday she went for a walk during her lunch break and, through a small slit cut in the bottom of her pocket, deliberately dropped pieces of bread, sachets of salt and sugar, needles, thread and buttons in the hope that the next transport might discover them. She also found identity cards and desperate notes wedged between the planking of the wagons with messages pleading for someone to ‘warn my family’. She stopped her humanitarian efforts only when her boss – a married Austrian with a family – was arrested after a guard saw him throwing bread to some prisoners. He was later sent to his death at Dachau.