East Bridgewater, Massachusetts

1921-2006

 
Thirty Minutes at Mauthausen

As the column of POWs tromped uphill, they were directed to look at the house where Adolf Hitler was born.  There was nothing special about it. A house like all the rest.  That was the day that Vit Krushas met a little Bavarian boy carrying a knife engraved with a swastika and the words “Blut und Ehre.”  Blood and Honor, the SS motto.  Just hours later, an SS storm trooper held the muzzle of a submachine gun to Vit's face and accused him of  stealing a can of food. 

One day, Vit noticed dead bodies along the road.  Then more and more bodies, “like rocks in the fields,” he says, and the road turned from dirt to white powder.  Yellow-green smoke fouled the air, a burnt smell.  Then he saw the smokestacks and the high fence and the huge gates with the Nazi eagle over it.  Through the fence, he saw windows on the barracks with skeletal heads looking out, screaming.  Maybe they imagined we would liberate them, Vit wonders.  That we would storm the place and take them to another world.   That we were soldiers again.

The march halted.  A German officer stood at the gates of Mauthausen, a concentration and extermination camp.  Smiling, he pointed at the POWs and swept his arm inward. Come in, you're invited.  What, nobody interested?  Then Vit turned and watched as a work party of Jews moved double-time down the road, returning to camp.  Heads shaved, in black-and-white pajamas, they were “staring at the sky,” he recalls, “skin pulled over their bones, reaching for God, for food, grabbing at birch twigs and trying to eat them.”

Then “the worst thing.”  If you didn't let it change you, you weren't human.  Vit saw two Jews helping a comrade along, holding him up between them.  The man had no teeth, no kneecaps, and his dead legs dragged, making grooves in the road.  Finally, his friends couldn't carry him any longer and he dropped away.  An SS officer pulled out his gun and shot the man on the ground.  They left him behind. 

Vit cried, right there.  The POWs spent 30 minutes at Mauthausen, no more, and then continued on their way.