The United States Army liberated today, 81 years ago, the Mauthausen concentration and extermination camp, where the Nazis murdered about 90,000 people through forced labor in quarries, starvation, torture, gas chambers, or experiments with direct phenol injections into the heart.
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Three weeks earlier, Dwight D. Eisenhower – the five-star general who orchestrated the Nazi defeat in Western Europe – visited Ohrdruf, the first extermination camp his troops liberated. The future Republican president of the United States turned pale and was physically affected. The hardened General Patton, who accompanied him, ended up vomiting, and then said: “It is evil made real.” They forced the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife to see the camp. Upon returning home, the couple committed suicide.
“Collect all possible material: film movies, get witnesses, because at some point in the course of history some bastard will appear and say this never happened,” Eisenhower ordered for the camps being liberated.
This was the goal that, in 1962, led a group of Spanish survivors of the camps to clandestinely found the Amical de Mauthausen at the España hotel in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood: to preserve the memory of the Republicans deported to the Nazi camps, especially the Mauthausen camp, where about seven thousand Spaniards were imprisoned. More than 4,700 would not survive.
Eight decades later, the “bastards” Eisenhower warned about are roaming freely, as well as another kind of bastardy: indifference. Juan M. Calvo, president of the Amical, recalls that in June 2019, near the Gusen crematorium (a subcamp of Mauthausen), he smelled burning meat: in the garden of a neighboring house, they were having a barbecue.
The last Spanish survivor of Mauthausen, Juan Romero Romero, died in 2020. Only babies remain: last year, three people of other nationalities who were born in the camp participated.
How to explain the extermination camps without witnesses? “Without generational replacement, there will be no memory,” says Calvo. For two decades, the Amical has worked every year with high schools from different parts of Spain in highly demanded educational programs that include a trip to the liberation ceremonies of the camp, with elaborate prior preparation. “They and the families of deportees are the protagonists,” he says. “The return that students make to society is very important. Over the years, it has been highly valued,” emphasizes Àlex Rigol, a board member.
Today Tuesday, at noon, the Amical organizes an event at the Deportees monument in Barcelona’s Ciutadella Park. And, as every year, the main events will take place this weekend at the Mauthausen and Gusen camps in Austria, where the only military unit that marches are the U.S. Marines, the liberators.
Without survivors and with an international protocol and ceremony that the Amical itself acknowledges is too long and institutional – “if the sun shines, people disappear” – and that one day will have to be reconsidered.
“The positive part is that students also see the institutional dimension. Memory acts are political acts,” emphasizes Calvo, who recalls something very current: “It was the blaming of entire groups that led to the creation of extermination camps.”
How to explain the death staircase of the Mauthausen quarry, 186 irregular and steep steps where deportees carried stones weighing up to 50 kilos?
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How to explain the quarry of an extermination camp now covered with beautiful vegetation?
How to explain the scene of an abyss now transformed into beauty? How to explain a quarry where the SS pushed deportees into the void – macabrely labeling the victims as paratroopers – when the cliff is today a beautiful festival of greenery?
“Students are explained this terrible contrast. Their faces and moods change,” says Calvo.
How to transmit memory in places like Gusen, where there is more indifference among the population towards the descendants of deportees and the students who attend the liberation anniversary every year?
“We bother,” explains Calvo. “In the town, they call us the locust invasion, because every year they come and go.”
“Without generational replacement, there will be no memory,” insists the president of the Amical, and indeed, their educational programs provoke situations that give special meaning to the more than six decades of the association’s existence.
Students from the Institut Forat del Vent in Cerdanyola del Vallès participated a few years ago in the trip to the Mauthausen events. They returned on a Monday, and on Tuesday one of the boys, Sergi, ate at home with his grandfather Joan and explained where they had traveled.
“My father was deported. He never came back,” the grandfather suddenly said. He didn’t know where or how, beyond that it was “in Germany.” The topic had never been discussed at home.
The grandson immediately searched his name in the Amical de Mauthausen database. And there it was: Fernando Damians de las Heras, died in Gusen on October 9, 1941.
Unknowingly, two days earlier he had been at the place where his great-grandfather was murdered.
The “bastards” Eisenhower warned about today swarm the same party he belonged to: Trumpist Republicans support Alternative for Germany, which favors forgetting this memory.
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In the face of this, all the locust invasions will be few.
