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Simon Wiesenthal
Letter 09
17-Dec-1994
Forced march to Mauthausen
Simon Wiesenthal
Jewish Documentation Center
Vienna, Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthal:
Here is your story of the forced march to Mauthausen in early
February, 1945:
When the convoy arrived at the railroad station at Mauthausen in Upper Austria on
a cold, clear Friday night, only 1200 of the original 3000 passengers were still alive.
Another 180 died on the four-mile uphill hike they were forced to make from the station to
the camp.
Wiesenthal was almost one of the casualties. Trudging over frozen snow, with each
man's steps crackling thunderously like drums of doom in the silence of the night, he
linked arms with a Polish prince named Radziwill, a relative of the one who later married
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' sister Lee Bouvier. For a while, Wiesenthal and Radziwill kept
each other up, but when they couldn't go any farther, they simply sank into the snow.
"Are you alive?" a voice barked in German and, to remedy this condition, its owner
fired at them. But the SS guard's hands were cold and his shot landed in the snow between
Wiesenthal and Radziwill. Then the two men drifted into sleep as life and death passed
them by.
Well before dawn, the camp authorities sent trucks down to collect corpses and
spare the sensibilities of villagers going to work in the morning. Frozen stiff,
Wiesenthal and Radziwill were taken for dead and flung aboard with a pile of bodies. Simon
doesn't know whether it was the motion or the warmth of the other bodies that revived them
a little, but when the truck delivered them to the camp crematorium, the prisoners working
there noticed that both men weren't quite dead. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp.
63-64)
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And here are a few questions that spring from this story:
(1) The convoy that arrives is a convoy of trucks � why then does
it stop at the railway station?
(2) This convoy of trucks has been carrying its load of
prisoners for six days. The train station where the prisoners are dumped
is a mere four miles from the final destination of the Mauthausen camp.
If the trucks were able to travel at only thirty miles per hour, that
would mean a mere eight additional minutes of driving to bring all the
prisoners and all the guards right to the camp. Why then did the truck
convoy not take the prisoners all the way to the camp?
There are many reasons why the Germans should have preferred to
drive all the way: the guards would not have wanted to walk four miles in
the bitter cold when they could ride; those 180 fallen prisoners wouldn't
have had to be shot and then later picked up; it was already dark, and
with 1200 prisoners being marched along a country road, escape attempts
would have been anticipated.
(3) You say of the trip in the truck convoy that "during the
six-day trip, there was no food or water" (p. 63). Now recollecting that
all the prisoners must have been in a state of inanition even before that
trip began, and that in all likelihood they were inadequately clothed � possibly
in sockless shoes rather than winter boots, for example � then at
the end of this six-day trip, it seems incredible that a single one of
them could have managed to trudge four miles uphill through the snow.
(4) Isn't it a strange coincidence that your strength and prince
Radziwill's strength gave out at exactly the same instant? You say (p.
62) that "Those who faltered or fell were shot on the spot," so that I
must imagine that if either of you had the least iota of strength left,
then that one would have continued on without the other. In the given
situation, the stronger member of the pair would not be assisting the
weaker by remaining with him � rather, by staying he would only
purposelessly be giving up his own life.
(5) You fall down in the snow with prince Radziwill and are
unable to continue, and so the German guard is obligated to kill the two
of you. How is it that the guard thought that he could kill both of you
with a single bullet? If you were one behind the other with respect to
the guard, then such a thing might be possible, but in this case, the two
of you are lying in the snow side by side � we know this because you say
yourself that the single bullet passed between you. How, then, could
this German guard have imagined that a single bullet would be able to
kill two people that with respect to him were side by side?
(6) I would have thought that cold hands would not affect the
German guard's aim � after all, at point-blank range, one can tell quite
accurately where a rifle bullet is going to go, and if for any reason the
rifle is not pointed properly, a fraction of a second is all that it
takes to readjust the direction of the barrel.
(7) In any case, if because of cold the German guard pulls the
trigger prematurely, he would be able to see where the rifle was pointed
when it went off, and so would know that he missed his intended target,
and would be able to try again.
(8) I would have expected the guard to verify his shot by noting
a movement at the point of impact of the bullet, by noting the appearance
of a bullet hole, by seeing blood, by seeing the expression on the face
of the victim appropriate to having been shot � which expression the guard
must have had a close acquaintance with as 180 prisoners fell behind and
had to be shot on this one march alone. In the absence of all such
signs, how is it that this guard imagined that he had succeeded in
executing you and prince Radziwill?
(9) If you were so weak that you could not go another step, so
weak that once left behind by the Germans you could not stand up to
escape, could not crawl to seek shelter � then how is it that you survived
the night? Even had you been bundled up in a warm coat, you would have
frozen to death � and I assume that the Germans did not provide their
Jewish prisoners with warm coats. You refer to your "steps crackling
thunderously" in the frozen snow, which suggests extreme cold, as snow
becomes soft or slushy when the temperature is warmer. I doubt that you
had gloves, and yet you do not report losing fingers to frostbite; I
doubt that you had socks, and yet you do not report losing toes.
(10) How could you have been revived by the warmth of the bodies
that were piled in the truck? Surely a body that lies out in the cold
for even an hour will have no appreciable warmth radiating from it, and
one lying out in the cold all night will have even less. In Justice Not
Vengeance (p. 12), you say that the cold was so great that even living
men packed tightly together in the trucks froze to death, and yet here
you say that men long dead provided enough warmth to revive you.
(11) You say that the other factor that may have revived you is
the motion of the truck, but as this provides no warmth, then I don't see
how it could have helped.
(12) This forced march to Mauthausen is such an extraordinary
event that it is a wonder that it was altogether omitted in your earlier
account in Justice Not Vengeance where the impression is given that the
trucks did the sensible thing, which is delivering all the prisoners
directly to Mauthausen.
(13) Did it ever occur to you that as a result of your having
eventually remembered this forced march and the assistance that you and
Prince Radziwill rendered each other during that march, that you might be
in a stronger position to solicit donations from the Radziwill and the
Kennedy families � even from the Onassis family � toward the support of
your Jewish Documentation Center? Would you happen to know if Prince
Radziwill has written down his account of this same forced march and if
he has published it?
Yours truly,
Lubomyr Prytulak
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