Eyewitness Testimony Furio Gabbrielli

--- PAGE 1 --- 28 Seven Germans, seven human beings who helped us live The memory The testimony of an Italian deportee in Kahla, where God really helped me. Also to keep that past away, which when it returns damages the brain and psyche. It lasts a moment but is terrible: I see my father dying of hunger on a straw mattress full of lice, in the barrack of the E camp. Next to him others dying of hunger, some skeletal, some swollen with nephritis. I have to leave him in the barrack every morning, I have to go work on the Walpersberg hill. Pick and shovel for ten hours, rain, wind, snow. Yes, because I am still standing even though I weigh thirty-nine kilos on the infirmary scale of the Grosseutersdorf camp. The doctor tells me that my father and I are two slackers, it is already a lot that he allows my father to stay in the barrack. In the evening when I return I do not know if he is still alive. There is a mass grave with quicklime near the barrack, there are many like him. We hope someone will help me carry him if he is dead. I could not do it alone. I am seventeen years old. It is a black and snowy December. At Christmas my father, swollen, bruised, unrecognizable, no longer has the strength to get up. On January tenth he dies. Since that day in 1945 I have been trying to keep that past away. To ease the trauma. To stay normal. Now I am seventy years old, I have almost succeeded... God gave me a hand. We were taken in August 1944 in Massarosa, near Lucca (Italy), with few clothes on. Twenty days later, after a stop in Dachau, we were in Kahla, in the E camp, near the village of Grosseutersdorf. Immediately to work on the Walpersberg hill. The climate was mild, we had a soup at Mittagessen (lunch) and 300 grams of bread at Abendessen (dinner), with salami, or margarine or jam, sometimes butter. We were all sure to survive, but we were wrong. Already at the end of September the cold and lice began to bite. There was no time to wash, and in any case we had neither soap nor towel nor change of clothes. The showers remained used only by the cooks, the nurses and the camp guards. by Furio Gabbrielli August 1944 … …October... In October the good soup of Mittagessen was abolished, we were given one at six in the morning, water and turnips, a miserable soup that gave us a terrible Durchfall (diarrhea). With those few calories in our bodies we marched six kilometers under the supervision of armed men to go to work on the Walpersberg site; for ten hours, with a half-hour break at noon to allow the guards to eat something. In the evening at the site they returned our Ausweis (identity card) and gave us the Abende- ssen Karte (the dinner ticket). With that miraculous card in our pocket we returned to the E camp without any surveillance. The guards were very sure that we would go at a good pace to the camp kitchen to get the thing we most desired in the world: a somewhat substantial soup, with some nice potatoes. Sometimes instead of soup there was a nice piece of 300-gram bread with some margarine or butter. But in mid-October the bread ration went from 300 to 150 grams. My father and I never had the luck to work in the Stollen (underground tunnels) “I was 17 years old and saw my father die of starvation.” The construction of an airstrip that was supposed to make Hitler win the war. A miserable soup for ten hours of brutal toil in the freezing cold. Then … Karl, Anna Bechmann and the others appeared “In front of the inhabitants of Massarosa, on April 16, ’44, two young draft dodgers, Domenico Randazzo from Agrigento and Vittorio Monti from Camaiore, were shot. In response to this infamous act, the partisans Taddei and Bertini stormed the carabinieri barracks and kidnapped the marshal, an action for which all the inhabitants of Massarosa were held responsible and were thus rounded up and deported en masse.” Among them was the author of this testimony.--- PAGE 2 --- 29 The slaves fell exhausted from fatigue and hunger ...November... ...December, January... sheltered from bad weather. During the twelve hours of life outdoors we took everything that fell from the sky. The next morning we put on the wet clothes. In November the cold became intense, they gave us gloves and long underwear, but many of us began to get sick. The infirmary doctor gave at most two days of rest for the most serious cases. And on his part, the Lagerführer (camp leader) immediately intervened against the Drückeberger (malingerers, slackers); those who pretended to be sick and stayed in the camp would receive only a half portion of food. And he had written on the barracks in many languages "Who does not work does not eat." Among the sick there were those who went to work to avoid starving, often some of them collapsed from exhaustion during working hours. In the months of December, January, and February the deaths increased. Those who could no longer get up in the morning to go to work were practically at the end of their days. It happened that some guard showed zeal: when one of us fell on the construction site, he immediately received a beating. The guard wanted to make sure it was not a malingerer. Our guards were almost all civilians in their sixties and older. Well-fed, well-dressed, well-shaven, with well-groomed mustaches, sometimes even of a gentlemanly appearance. But this did not prevent them from beating us when we worked weakly. The strongest hitter of all was the big boss, the engineer, a man about forty years old, with prominent incisors, always dressed in black. He wanted to show the guards how to treat the Untermenschen (subhumans, inferior beings). Such indeed we were due to dirtiness and physical weakness. I asked myself many times how it happened that men of such a civil appearance could put so much zeal into a job that required being so beastly. The only explanation I gave myself was that these men had let themselves be robotized by propaganda because they did not have the courage to react to the propaganda itself. In short, they were cowards. And I extended this judgment to all Germans. I had to change my mind when I met Karl and Anna Bechmann, from Kahla. One morning my team was sent to the Kahla railway station to unload iron beams from the wagons and reload them onto trucks. Ten hours of this work without eating under a very cold drizzle in December. In the evening, when we crossed Kahla to return to the camp with our miraculous Abendessen Karte (dinner card), I felt my strength fail. I leaned against a wooden fence near the cemetery, I don’t know for how many minutes. My companions abandoned me, they were too hungry to take care of me. Suddenly a man and a woman appeared in front of me, she a little taller, with a large white hairstyle. There was a bit of moonlight, I saw that they were looking at me. They approached to look at me better. “Oh… so young…” she said. The voice was full of pity. “Wie alt bis du?” (How old are you?) he asked. “Siebzehn,” (seventeen) I answered. It seemed like a miracle to me. It was the first time I saw Germans feel pity. This gave me strength and clarity, my German became effective, I answered everything, I said who I was, that my companions had abandoned me, that I had my Abendessen Karte in ta- Furio Gabbrielli and his sister in September 2000, in Kahla, when they brought flowers to the mass grave where the remains of their father are located.--- PAGE 3 --- The horror of the camp in the book of a young historian In Kahla, in the middle of the forests of Thuringia, in 1944-45 the Germans were building a launch pad for planes so “special” that they were supposed to make Hitler win the war. In the woods there were about a hundred concentration camps and in them several thousand deportees, an inexhaustible reserve of slaves. A young German history professor, Willy Schilling, during archival research discovered documents proving that those camps called "labor camps" were, in fact, extermination camps: indeed, 63% of the workforce was recorded as having died of starvation. A book of his titled “Kahla,” on the history of the city from 1919 to 1949, Geiger publishers, printed in Horb am Neckar, has been successful since the first edition. Subsequently, the author was informed that an Italian survivor, Furio Gabbrielli, could testify to the inhuman conditions to which the deportees were subjected. Willy Schilling asked him—some years ago—for a “direct and subjective” testimony. This testimony appeared in the third edition of the book, translated into German on pages 141-145, which we publish here in the original Italian text. 30 Seven Germans, seven human beings who helped us to survive ...who, in the barrack, were waiting for me with soup, who even my father was waiting for me... if he was still alive. The lady with white hair then told me that her name was Bechmann, that she lived at Rollestrasse 15, that she wanted to give me food... “Bitte komme. vergiss nicht...” (please come, don’t forget) even tomorrow... Her husband nodded. I reached the camp in no time, ate my soup, went to the showers, scratched a bit of dirt from my face and neck. The next evening from Walpersberg I rushed to Kahla, Rollestrasse 15. Frau Bechmann and her husband welcomed me with a loving smile. I ate. Two days later the same operation... and then again. My father died on January 10, but before dying he was certain that at least for the moment I would not die of hunger. It was, I believe, the greatest joy of his life. Karl and Anna Bechmann had given it to him. They had not let themselves be robotized. They had kept the courage to have pity and to disobey a regime that wanted them to be cruel. The Bechmanns were risking but were determined to do everything to save me. One day they said to me, “The neighbors have noticed that you come here often... it’s dangerous... for a couple of weeks don’t show yourself anymore... go to Frau Fanny Herzer, she is expecting you, I have already spoken with her daughter Rosemarie... they will give you food... then come back to visit us...” Frau Herzer lived on Bibraer Strasse with her daughter and parents. A stone’s throw from Walpersberg, easy to reach. They already knew everything about me. Frau Hannemann, a neighbor and relative, joined them. I ate at their place even three times a week. Then I started shuttling between them and the Bechmanns. The miracle continued and I was flourishing. When the Americans arrived I was an eighteen-year-old with an almost normal appearance. In the camp barrack, my surviving companions were less than half, they looked like larvae. Karl and Anna Bechmann, Frau Hannemann, Frau Herzer with her parents and daughter Rosemarie. Seven human beings who kept the courage to remain human in a time when Germans were asked to be inhuman. My judgment on all Germans has always been conditioned by these seven people alone. The memory The engine of a V2 rocket bomb for which the launch ramp was being built by the detainees in Kahla.