The "A Survivor Of The Mauthausen Concentration Camp" Story

Foreword:  Reading a comment posted on this blog about a story I wrote on Thursday, March 5, 2020 titled "The St. Maarten's Holocaust Survivor - Lionel Romney (1912-2004)."  The comment was written by Jose Pedro and read:  Another Spanish speaking black man who also 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.  Every now and then I will do research on what someone has written to me and turn it into a story to share, and in this case I was very interested in what Mr. Pedro had written to me.  Did quite a bit of research and the following tells the story of Carlos Gray Molay, aka Carlos Greykey.

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about one Mr. Carlos Greykey who was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1913.  His parents were originally from Fernando Poo, Equatorial Guinea, a Spanish colony at that time.  To support Carlos and his brothers and sisters, his mother cleaned houses in the affluent district of Barcelona.  I found no mention of his father in any account about Carlos.  Carlos went to the local University where he studied medicine before joining the military coup d'état in 1936.  Carlos joined the troops fighting the putschists (a German word meaning push, used to mean an attempt to overthrow a government by force) and eventually sought refuge in France where he continued the fight against the European fascist regimes by participating in the French war effort against Nazi Germany.  The French finally surrendered to the German Nazi forces and Carlos suffered the same fate as several thousand Spaniards and was taken prisoner and taken to a detention camp.  

Carlos Greykey dressed in his
bellhop outfit in Mautheusen.

Eventually he was transferred in 1941 to Mauthausen concentration camp.  He arrived at the camp on June 21, 1941.  He was quickly spotted among the rest of the Spanish prisoners because of the color of his skin.  Black people were considered inferior therefore, dangerous objectives of the Nazi regime and dangerous corrupters of Arian blood.  But, Carlos answered the official's questions in German which was the main reason he wasn't sent immediately to the gas chamber.  Germans weren't used to seeing people of color.  They dressed him in a red suit and made him a bellhop who served at the table of one of the leaders of the Spanish underground communist organizations in Mauthausen.  He was made fun of, but at least it saved his life.  Carlos Greykey was assigned prisoner number 5124 and was identified with a triangle with the letter "S" (Spanish) reserved for political prisoners and activists.  Carlos spoke Spanish, Catalan, German, English and French which probably saved his life more than once.  He was the server of the field commander, Franz Ziereis and was in charge of the lodge and cloakroom of the SS officer's club.  He also waited on Heinrich Himmler at the camp in 1941.  He was introduced to Himmler as "a black Spanish living in Spain."  He survived thanks to the protection of is compatriots who hid him and camouflaged him until the liberation of Fields.  After liberation he managed to head to France where he remained the rest of his life and where he was naturalized French years later.  It is believed that he settled in Seine where he married and had two sons and a daughter.  According to his daughter, her father was a dancer in a cabaret and later became an electrician.  From 1977 until his death, he was a member of the National Alliance for Democratic Restoration, a group opposing the dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea.  He died in France in 1982.  Mauthausen was one of the worst of the Nazi concentration camps, which eventually was liberated by the American 11th Armored division on May 5, 1945. To have been a black man and have survived this camp is more than remarkable!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.