Score a goal in hell
Every day dozens of men died in the quarry in the concentration camp. On the impossibility of reconciling stones 50 kilos hunger and cold that devoured. Because sometimes kicking SS rush to throw them made them roll 186 steps and could not get back up. The prisoners got used to the snow red with blood again; the movement of trucks full of corpses, the smell of the crematorium where throwing the bodies of those who no longer fit to work. But the horror stopped for 90 minutes once a week. Every Sunday a group of Spanish captained by a Burgos called Saturnino Navazo played a football match in hell of Mauthausen.
Those meetings between prisoners of different nationalities went largely unnoticed in the story of Nazi barbarism. A book and a documentary recover them now. The first is entitled The last Spaniards of Mauthausen (Ediciones B), Carlos Hernández. The second, Rebels Football, French Gilles Perez and Gilles Rof, with the participation of footballer Eric Cantona, whose mother is the daughter of Spanish exiles.