1980: I decide to go back to Mauthausen for the first time. It's May and the camp's former inmates, women and men from all over Europe have organized a gathering. We met on the very 35th anniversary of our liberation. In other words, on the 5th of May we met in Mauthausen village to walk towards the concentration camp. We, the 30.000 survivors, kept silent during the walk up to the camp as a sign of memory, love and respect for the 240.000 dead who walked to their Golgatha there. As we got closer to the court yard, I heard a some music coming from inside the camp, from the large square. It was carried by the morning breeze all the way up the newly wooded hills. It seemed vaguely familiar, as if I had heard it somewhere before ... I was right. Only once we were very close by did I realize that I was listening to Maria Farantouri's voice singing "Girls of Auschwitz, Girls of Mauthausen, have you by any chance seen my love?" Quite a bit later, without mentioning who I was, I went to the camp's secretariat and asked what the song we had heard in the morning was ... They told me that it had been the camp's theme song for years. I knew the painstaking work that Theodorakis put into producing the Mauthausen collection and in presenting them in concert. It was well known in many countries. However, my "encounter" with the song in that very place, at that very time was, well ... Ever since then, I dreamt of staging a concert on the premises and managed to convince Theodorakis to share this dream with me. The concert took place in 1988 in Mauthausen, flooded by tens of thousands of pilgrims, pacifists, wonderful people who had come from all over, all over ... Back in 1965, how beautifully and creatively unaware we were. © Kambanellis - translated from the Greek by © Jane Taaffe-Nikolaou |
