José María Aguirre Salaberría

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Stumbling block in Palma

José María Aguirre Salaberría ( March 25, 1919 in Marquina ( Bizkaia ) - September 6, 2009 in Palma ) was a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp , where he was interned for four and a half years. He became an important contemporary witness .

Life

José María Aguirre Salaberría was the oldest of eight siblings. The family moved from Marquina to Irún . At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War , the family fled to Hendaye , France, as Irún was quickly occupied by the Franquists . Aguirre, then 17 years old, and his father Doroteo, 39 years old, went to Catalonia and joined the resistance against Francisco Franco there. After the end of the civil war and Franco's victory, he fled back to France. There he was interned first in the camp of Saint-Cyprien , then in the Camp de Gurs . He signed up for the French army, was assigned to a work detachment and helped build the Maginot Line . He was captured by German troops; first he was brought to a camp in Strasbourg and from there on December 13, 1940, together with 866 other Spaniards, deported to Mauthausen concentration camp . Here he got the number 4553. He was assigned to the César Command, named after the Kapo César Orquín i Serra. He was an educated Valencian, member of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo , spoke fluent German and, with the promise of higher productivity, achieved the formation of a special command of Spanish republicans. The Sonderkommando was better fed. Aguirre was deployed in the Vöcklabruck, Ternberg and Redl-Zipf satellite camps. Finally he was transferred to the Ebensee concentration camp. He survived erysipelas and medical experiments. He should have been killed with a fatal injection of gasoline into his heart, but was saved from it by a Catalan doctor. His language skills also helped him survive; he was used by the SS as an interpreter. On May 6, 1945, the camp was liberated by the US Army. He came to France; there he was imprisoned in La Santé , the French did not know what to do with the many exiles. In 1953 he came to Mallorca, where he worked in several hotels due to his language skills. In 1957 he met his future wife, Sarah Bajar. With her he had at least one daughter. Initially he only spoke to his wife about his experiences during the war. In the 1980s, after the end of the Franco dictatorship, he began to report on his experiences in schools and institutions; he also gave many newspaper interviews. José María Aguirre Salaberría died on September 6, 2009 in Palma.

His sister Mercedes Aguirre married Marcelino Bilbao , with whom Aguirre was interned in Gurs and later also in Mauthausen.

Commemoration

On December 15, 2018, a stumbling block was laid for him in front of José María Aguirre Salaberría's former home in Palma .

literature

  • Bermejo, Benito; Checa, Sandra: Libro Memorial. Españoles deportador a los campos nazis (1940–1945), Madrid 2006, ISBN 84-8181-290-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ El País : José Mari Aguirre Salaberría, superviviente de Mauthausen , accessed on March 27, 2020
  2. ↑ Diario de Mallorca: Cordero y buen vino a la salud del preso 4,553 , accessed on March 29, 2020
  3. ↑ baskultur.info: Marcelino in Mauthausen concentration camp , accessed on March 28, 2020
  4. ↑ Ultima Hora: Palma honra este domingo a sus víctimas de los campos nazis , accessed on March 29, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Aguirre Salaberría, José María
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish survivor of the Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration camps, contemporary witness
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Marquina , Bizkaia
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 2009
Place of death Palma