Mauthausen-Erinnerungen 3: Jean Cayrol

French author Jean Cayrol (1911–2005), who came from Bordeaux, was arrested by the Paris security police on 10 June 1942, having been active for some time in the Confrérie Notre-Dame (CND), a Catholic resistance group. He was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp on 27 March 1943. Cayrol was thus one of the thousands of deportees taken to the German Reich in the wake of the ‘Night and Fog Decree’ of 7 December 1941, issued by Hitler himself. This decree allowed the German authorities to deport resistance fighters from the occupied areas of western Europe to Germany in secret. By making people vanish without trace, it was also a means of terrorising the civilian population.

At the Mauthausen concentration camp, Jean Cayrol was registered as a ‘political Frenchman’ under prisoner number 25305. His profession was listed as librarian and reason for arrest as ‘working for a spy organisation’. On his prisoner card – one of the many documents kept on each individual concentration camp prisoner – the SS noted his ‘personal description’ thus: ‘Height: 163 cm / Physique: feeble / Face: oval / Eyes: grey / Nose: normal / Mouth: normal / Ears: normal / Teeth: good / Hair: dark blonde / Language: French-Span.-Engl. / Distinguishing features: none’. On 7 April 1943 he was transferred to the Gusen concentration camp, which had been set up in 1940. There Cayrol was forced to spend six months working as a labourer in the quarry, in an extremely dangerous labour detachment in a camp that was deadly in the literal sense – more than 2,000 people died there during these six months alone. Suffering complete exhaustion, he was finally helped by Upper Austrian priest Johann Gruber, who as a prisoner functionary in Gusen had built up an aid network to help fellow prisoners and organised extra rations in particular for the group of Frenchmen to which Jean Cayrol belonged. Gruber was murdered in Gusen in 1944 and Cayrol later dedicated his poetry volume ‘Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard’ to him. On 24 November 1943 Cayrol was assigned to a labour detachment working for Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG, an arms firm producing weapons in the Gusen concentration camp. Only now did Cayrol find an opportunity to write texts in secret. For a long time after the war, he believed these texts had been lost until he received them in the post from an anonymous sender in Germany. In 1997 Cayrol published a selection under the title ‘Alerte aux ombres’. Translated by Ulrike Julika Betz, these texts are now available for the first time in German with the title ‘Schattenalarm’.

‘Schattenalarm’ does not attempt to portray life in the concentration camp in realistic terms. Rather it translates experiences into a sort of metaphysical poetry. Although the texts are consistently in verse form, Jean Cayrol did not wish to describe these ‘witnesses of a spiritual fight for survival’ as poems.