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    K.L. Reich
    K.L. Reich
    K.L. Reich
    Ebook373 pages6 hours

    K.L. Reich

    By Joaquim Amat-Piniella

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    About this ebook

    Available in English for the first time, Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s searing Catalan novel, K.L. Reich, is a central work of testimonial literature of the Nazi concentration camps. Begun immediately after Amat-Piniella’s liberation in 1945, the book is based on his own four-year internment at Mauthausen.

    “When the war is over, remember all this. Remember me,” implores one of the book’s characters on his deathbed, and it is this call to bear witness that Amat-Piniella takes up in his account of the Spanish Republican fighters who were exiled in France at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and soon swept up into the German concentration camp system. As an already organized anti-fascist army, they played an important role as a nucleus of resistance within the camps, and their story is little known to English-language readers.

    Because of the length of his internment, his decision to write his book as fiction, and his staggering powers of observation and recollection, Amat-Piniella’s portrayal of life in the camps is unmatched in scope and detail. It is also a compelling study of three powerful ideological movements at work at the time: anarchism, communism, and fascism, all within the desperate and brutal world of the camps.

    “My book does not seek to deepen wounds or differences, but to unite people before cruelty,” said Amat-Piniella. This is an essential text as we ponder the twentieth century and its meaning to us today. This edition includes a new preface, annotations, and a translators’ note.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateJun 23, 2014
    ISBN9781771120197
    K.L. Reich
    Author

    Joaquim Amat-Piniella

    Joaquim Amat-Piniella (1913–1974) was born in Manresa, Catalonia. In 1936, he enrolled as a volunteer in the Republican Army to fight against the fascists. In 1939 he went into exile in France. After being captured by the Germans he was sent to Mauthausen on January 27, 1941. He returned to Catalonia in 1948.

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      Book preview

      K.L. Reich - Joaquim Amat-Piniella

      1963

      CHAPTER I

      It was a biting cold. No need to pinch oneself awake. Toes jammed for three days in damp boots and dirty socks surrendered without resistance to the frozen ground. Without its honed edge, the dawn might have seemed unreal to those hundreds of men, shaken from their sleep. Through fog that thickened as the day dawned, nothing but the loom of the surrounding landscape could be made out. Diffused light from the snow seeped into the early morning. A thick pillow, smooth and undulating, covered the steep roof of the station. The railcars, immobile on their invisible tracks, looked like rows of gigantic corpses abandoned under the drifts. On the other side of the road, on which the new arrivals were struggling into a ragged line, rose the sheer cut of the scarred hillside.¹

      They wore the motley uniforms of the French Army: some sky-blue (from the First World War), others dark-blue, still others khaki, with belled coats, and on their heads they wore berets, two-pointed caps, balaclavas, and even the red caps of the Senegalese.² They milled about, anxious and confused, in a vortex of panic, each trying to find a place, among the suitcases, bags and bundles, in the wavering line. The snow churned under their hobnailed boots, its pure white ground into the muddy road, while only the clink-clink of their army dishes, their tin cups and water bottles tied to packs and suitcases, broke the dawn silence. In contrast to that same silence came the guttural and terrifying commands of soldiers in the green uniform of the German Army, who, with their rifles at the ready, their fingers on the triggers, cordoned off that mass of prisoners. New voices, foreign, full of hidden menace to men who did not know the language.

      —And the overnight case? —one of the prisoners asked his companion.

      —Didn’t you bring it?

      Emili rolled his eyes and, under his balaclava, smiled fatalistically.

      —Then you might as well give up on having anything to wash your face with, —he said, hefting his heavy knapsack from the ground.

      —They’ll have soap. Don’t worry about it.

      —What worries me, Cisco,³ is we won’t be needing it. I don’t like the look of this.

      —Like it or not, we’ll have to lump it. We’ll soon see what’s up.

      Francesc looked at his friend’s red nose, which stood out even in the thin light, and tried to catch his eye. He smiled. He knew Emili’s tendency to see the dark side of things. True, the treatment when they got down off the train had been rough, surprisingly rough, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions. He preferred to think that the guards had only been annoyed at having to get up so early, or at the cold, or at the foul temper of the officer in charge.

      —Germans aren’t barbarians, —a lieutenant had said to him when he took him prisoner—. We’ve got a great sense of comradeship. You’ll see.

      And it was true, in the prisoner-of-war camp from which they’d come the Spaniards had been well treated, even with a kind of deference. The fact of their having fought in a war, their industriousness, the quaintness of their habits in German eyes, these were all probably reasons. But why then, as they got down from the train after a three days’ journey, had this new type of German appeared, so different from the one they’d come to know? Why the blows from rifle butts, why the kicks and the beatings, the shouting, the threats? Everyone would have got off the train just the same, without the big rush, and the line could have been formed more easily, maybe, and with less confusion and

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