The way to Mauthausen: Local Holocaust survivor puts his experience in perspective

[Ian David]

<snip>

Bearing witness this morning is a boy who died on Christmas Day in 1944 while an inmate of Mauthausen. He was a Hungarian Jew, and both of his parents had been executed in the months preceding his own death. He was in bad shape. A Belgian priest, also an inmate at the camp, took pity on him because his suffering was notable even in this place of great suffering. Seeking solace, the boy told the priest he wanted to convert to Catholicism and so, secretly, the priest nurtured the boy in his faith, though all religious practices were forbidden in that camp. The inmates--political prisoners, gypsies, and Jews--were referred to by their keepers as nacht und nebel, "night and fog," the forces of darkness and the underworld, and because they were seen as subhuman in all respects--the enemies of the Aryan light--they were not worthy of religious practices.

On Christmas Eve 1944, at this place of horror, while the German guards partied with girls from the nearby town, the priest held a clandestine baptismal mass for the boy, and for 28 other camp prisoners. Lubertus Schapelhouman was in that number.

The boy was weak, but he spoke of his desire to go to heaven. At the moment the boy was baptized, the Germans and their camp Kapos burst into the room and began to beat everyone, a storm of blows and curses, a pandemonium of pummeling and kicking and the heavy thudding of rubber-sheathed truncheons breaking bones. A kick or a punch--he would never know the source--threw Schapelhouman's hip out of joint.

They were taken outside--the priest, the boy, and all the attendees of the forbidden Mass. It was 14 degrees below zero. The priest and the boy were made to strip naked and told to embrace, and then the guards drenched them with a hose. They froze in that position, died in that position, and the next day--Christmas--the entire camp was marched out to look at them--the frozen statuary of blasphemous baptism. "Augen raus." Eyes right. That was the command the Germans shouted as they marched the prisoners past the boy and the priest.

<snip>

The Kommandant at Mauthausen was a man named Ziereis. Bert spells the name carefully--"Z-I-E-R-E-I-S," then pronounces it again. "When his son turned 14, Ziereis brought him into the camp, down among the prisoners. He told the boy to pick out 50 of the inmates, then handed him his long-barreled Luger and told him to kill those he'd chosen, those he'd counted off. The first time the boy tried, he flinched, and only managed to blow off a man's ear, but soon he was proficient in the killing, and in 3 1/2 hours, he had killed all 50. His father hugged his son then and said for all to hear: 'Now I know he is a man.' "


SKIN AND BONES
Those who survived the camps were often near dying from starvation. When Lubertus Schapelhouman entered Mauthausen he weighed 160 pounds. When he was set free he weighed 78.
COURTESY OF NATIONAL ARCHIVE

More:
http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=359877

[Lurking Dem]

1. >tears