The Centro Sefarad-Israel and the State Secretariat for Democratic Memory are organising the exhibition Mauthausen: Shared Memories tomorrow, Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Centre’s headquarters, with the aim of raising awareness and reflecting on the shared history of the Spanish Republicans and the Jews who were interned in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
This exhibition has the collaboration of the Community of Madrid and Madrid City Council, and the support of the German Embassy, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Polish Embassy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation and Amical de Mauthausen and other camps.
The exhibition will be opened with speeches by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau, and the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez López.
A round table will be held with the philosopher Manuel-Reyes Mate, the professor Francisco Javier Fernández Vallina and the vice-president of Amical and other fields, Concepción Díaz Berzosa. They will reflect on the duty of remembrance and its ethical and philosophical dimension.
The National Socialist regime that ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945 exterminated nearly ten million people, including six million Jews. This genocide is known as the Holocaust, Shoah in the Jewish tradition. Other groups considered enemies of the German Third Reich were also targeted, including Roma people, members of the LGTBI community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “asocials” and political opponents. In addition, among the political opponents of Nazism were Spanish Republicans, exiled in France after Franco’s victory in the Civil War.
The Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria became the symbol of the final fate of most of the Spanish Republicans. Of the approximately 10,000 Spanish deportees, around 7,500 went to Mauthausen. Most of the Jews deported to Mauthausen were deported in 1944 from Hungary and in 1945, transferred from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp after the terrible Death Marches. Admission is free, subject to confirmation at this link.
