Lionel grew up on St. Maarten and some of his relatives are here still, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. He knew Emilio Wilson and others of that generation. When he migrated to Curaçao, Aruba and Venezuela to work in the refineries, he was still quite a young man. By his mid-twenties he began to work as a Merchant Marine, sending money back home all the while.
In June 1940, he was boarding a Greek ship loaded with coal in Cardiff, Wales. Lionel was 28 at the time, and the decision to sign on to this particular ship turned out to be pivotal – it put him on a path to near destruction. The merchant sailors were careful in those war-torn years (1939-1945) to avoid getting in the middle of the conflicts at sea. So when the chance to board a ship headed for Argentina came along, they were happy to sail far away from European waters. But the captain and/or ship owners deceived the crew and instead of heading to South America, they sailed right into the Mediterranean Sea. Greece, it seems, not Argentina, was the destination for their cargo.
The camp Lionel was deported to was called Mauthausen, and it was located in Austria. There were labour camps, death camps, prison camps, but Mauthausen was the only camp that was officially designated as a “Death through Work Camp.” In other words, it was the only one that was designed to work the prisoners to death. The work they were to do was mining a quarry, cutting and carrying large blocks of granite.
The able-bodied were forced to carry stone blocks each weighing 50 kilos (110 pounds) on their backs, up a stairway of 186 steps. This was known as the Stairway of Death and is rather famous in Holocaust history. Many people died there, simply through torture or starvation. Records show that between 100,000 and 195,000 people were put to death at Mauthausen through such cruel labour along with malnourishment. Others perhaps were too weak to work and were exterminated upon arrival. Those records are not as clear.
Why did the Nazis need the Mauthausen stone? Ironically, it comes down to geography and vanity – Hitler’s vanity. Mauthausen, Austria, sits on top of a deposit of very beautiful, light-coloured granite, and Hitler was born in the nearby city of Linz. He wanted to create, at his birthplace, a new capital of Europe – a beautiful city of granite in his own honour after, of course, he conquered the entire continent. Towards this end, Lionel and the other prisoners were forced to work until they died. If they needed added motivation, the captives were forced over the edge of the cliff above the quarry – falling 50 metres to their deaths. Sometimes they jumped of their own accord, unable to carry on. Other times the prison guards coerced them to push each other over the edge. This was known as “parachute jumping” in the Nazi literature; it was a tactic they used to demoralize the prisoners.
Lionel Romney was at Mauthausen Concentration Camp from June 1944 until May 1945 when the camp was liberated by Americans troops. How did he manage to survive those eleven months when so many others did not? That is an open question, but certainly many factors came into play.
He had a lot of languages, and he was a very fast learner. He may have been allowed to survive because he could communicate between the Germans and the other prisoners. English was his first language and of course he had Dutch and Papiamentu. He could understand German and learned to speak it because those languages are so similar, but he also had Spanish, and so in Italy, he could follow that because it’s all so similar. He was assigned to work, not in the quarry itself, but as a lumberjack, and that was a bit of luck, but it might also have been due to his language skills. While he was cold working in the forest, he wasn’t pushed beyond his limits.
There is also a mention in a report that Romney may have received extra food as a lumberjack. This information comes from an American Navy pilot who had been shot down over Austria and interned at Mauthausen, Lt. Jack Taylor. His 30-page testimony is very well known in WWII history, and it’s from that testimony that Lionel Romney’s presence at Mauthausen is documented, although, through Taylor, quite some misinformation about him was entrenched into the record. Taylor recalled meeting Romney, but referred to him as an American, although of course at that time he was Dutch. He also reported that no one knew what became of Romney, which in those days was almost a code phrase for “he probably died.” This same information has been repeated in books and on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. In the book "Hitler’s Black Victims", by Dr. Clarence Lusane (available at the Philipsburg library) there is about a half paragraph about Lionel Romney which ends with: “It is unknown whether Romney survived.”
Romney didn’t die, though; he lived and was liberated in 1945. He went to the Netherlands and then emigrated to the U.S. He had an aunt in New York that helped him get back on his feet and he stayed there for the rest of his life. He met and married Mary’s mother and, in the 80s, he was naturalized, becoming a U.S. citizen. He worked for decades as a maintenance worker for a building in the garment district of New York City. He worked there with a gentleman that had been in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and perhaps there were some conversations there – but the details of that we’ll never know.
Another Spanish-speaking black man who also he was in Mauthausen and also saved his life was Carlos Grey Molay(if he had written a book about this adventure he would have become a millionaire): look https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Greykey
ReplyDeleteThank you for this comment. I am reading about this gentleman and am amazed at what he went through in his life. I may write a story about him if I can locate enough information to feel comfortable with writing his story.
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