President Bronislaw Komorowski meets with former inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, 14.07.2011. Photo: PAP/Jacek Turczyk
President Komorowski is on an official two-day visit in Austria. President Fischer invited the Polish head of state to tour the Nazi camp site because, as he said, his country needed to deal with the dark side of its own history, as Austria had made significant contribution to Nazi crimes.
The camp, together with its subsidiaries, was located near the city of Linz, and functioned between 1938 and 1945. It was one of the most notorious concentration camps in the Third Reich.
“Looking at the gentle Austrian landscape, it’s hard to believe that here was one of the hells on Europe,” President Komorowski reflected, adding that “this camp was one of the hells where Poles perished.”
President of Austria, Heinz Fischer, expressed his “humility, sadness and dismay” at “the boundless cruelty,” and “disdain for human life,” that had been demonstrated at the site.
Some 30-40,000 Poles are estimated to have perished at Mauthausen, primarily members of the intelligentsia.
The Polish contingent made up about a quarter of the camp’s 200,000 or so inmates.
A major wave of deportation came in 1939-40, when Poles were sent from the Silesia, Wielkopolska and Pomerania regions.
After the doomed Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, a further wave was dispatched, dealing a further blow to Poland’s elite.
“It was hard. We had to work in the quarries in three shifts,” remembers former inmate, Henryk Czarnecki, who was part of the official presidential delegation this morning.
“500-550 people died in the camp daily,” he recalls. “People ate grass and bark from trees, anything. The desire was so strong that one didn’t look, just so long as one was able to put something into one’s stomach,” Czarnecki adds.
When the camp was liberated by the Americans, many of the inmates were no more than skeletons.
During his visit, President Komorowski was shown an exhibition chronicling the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia.
Noted Polish inmates at Mauthausen included Professor Wiktor Ormicki, a geographer, inventor Kazimierz Proszynski, architect and poet Stanislaw Staszewski and folklorist Karol Piegza. (nh/ek/jb)
Source: IAR/PAP