No. 4617 ARRIVAL AT MAUTHAUSEN, BECOMING No. 48294 AFTER BEING SUBSTITUTED FOR A DEAD MAN
I lived my life as a deportee like an animal, without asking myself too many metaphysical questions, thinking as little as possible, avoiding emotions. Constantly on guard, blending into the mass to avoid blows. I had become a transparent being with only one concern: to stay alive, to prove false the destiny the camp Commandant foretold for us when, with each new convoy of prisoners, he would say:
“You entered through that gate, and you will all leave through the chimney.”
Hearing this prediction, I would tell myself that one day death would pass through me.
I often came close to death; so much so that for some time after my liberation I considered myself, however unreal it may seem, not as “a survivor,” but as “one returned from the dead.”
For five years I lived in cold, hunger, fear, mistreatment, and constant anxiety, asking myself every day the question: WHY?
To begin to find an answer, I had to learn to understand the system into which I had been plunged, this world without temporal reference, and understand it in order to fight it.
It was daily events that brought me fragments of an answer which, added one to another, led me to the conclusion that we were instruments of an ideology whose purpose was to make people accept that there existed a superior race: the Germanic race.
A race to which we did not belong, because to our executioners—fanaticized by an indoctrination that denied their adversary the quality of being human—we were “sub-humans.”
I then understood that in the concentration camp system I had value only so long as I was productive, so my daily concern was to preserve my strength in order to be present at morning roll call—not to produce for the SS, but to thwart the plans of those who wanted to enslave me before annihilating me morally and, in the end, physically.
It was also, in the face of the degradation and humiliation imposed by the SS, the only response that filled me with courage. Every morning on the roll-call square, as the guard passed counting us, I would say to myself:
“Criminal, here I stand, present and upright. Franco did not defeat me, and neither will you!”