Vienna, May 11, 2020. In the framework of the central acts commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the Cuban Embassy in Austria paid tribute to thousands of human beings, from more than 40 countries that there they suffered the horrors of fascism. "Humanity without borders" was the call that this year called for the commemoration.
The Cuban Ambassador to Austria, Loipa Sánchez Lorenzo, through a video transmitted on the sites of the Memorial Mauthausen and the Embassy of Cuba, expressed that this year, symbolically we placed flowers in the collective sarcophagus and in the Tarja that reminds the Cuban patriots Roberto Cortezón Martínez, Félix Llanos Alonso, Alberto Sánchez Martínez, José Luis Pérez Arocha and Manuel Sola Castillo, who were captured and delivered by the collaborators of the Vichy regime to the Hitlerite hordes in occupied France and confined as stateless in Mauthausen. They, like many other compatriots, integrated the International Brigades that from the side of the Republic, fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
Mauthausen was established as a "Level III" category, the most rigorous of the Nazi regime's concentration camps. Here one entered, without the hope of leaving. Its main victims were political prisoners, anti-fascist fighters. Prisoners were exterminated through forced labor and all kinds of abuse.
The Ambassador highlighted that the Cuban internationalist fighters also represent the genesis of the internationalist and disinterested spirit that has characterized the Cuban people, for which at the moment more than 20 Cuban medical brigades are supporting different countries to contribute to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
Today, the Mauthausen Memorial is an international place of remembrance and of political and historical education. It is up to progressive, pacifist and antifascist humanity to alert and close ranks against the advance of threats and attacks of xenophobia, racism and genocidal blockades.
In the emotional telematic act, survivors and representatives of victims' associations from some twenty countries, recalled the terror of the past and claimed the need to keep historical memory alive to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated.
(Embacuba Austria)