Remembering Mauthausen: A Legacy of Survival and Resistance
Remembering Mauthausen: A Legacy of Survival and Resistance
May 5, 2025 — 80 years since the liberation of Mauthausen David Eugene Perry’s new underway novel “Thorns of the 15 Roses” encompasses its legacy
Eighty years ago this week, on May 5, 1945, American troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen in Austria. Approximately 90,000 people died in this notorious gulag between 1938 and 1945.
Among its prisoners were more than 7,000 anti-Fascist Spanish Republicans who had fled Spain after Nationalist forces claimed victory in the Spanish Civil War, following Hitler ally Francisco Franco’s anti democratic coup. These Spaniards were later deported by Nazi authorities, often after being detained in France. Of those, about 5,000 Spanish prisoners died at Mauthausen, many from exhaustion, starvation, torture, execution, or forced labor under brutal conditions—particularly in the notorious Stairs of Death at the nearby granite quarry.
In the forthcoming novel, Thorns of the 15 Roses, one of those Spanish survivors lives on—fictionally at least—as a centenarian Republican soldier whose quiet dignity and harrowing story anchor a thread of memory running through the novel. His resilience is not just a narrative device, but a tribute to the very real people who suffered unspeakably and yet endured, often forgotten by history and abandoned by the state they had fought to preserve.
Thorns of the 15 Roses is the long-awaited sequel to Perry’s award winning Upon This Rock, the mystery thriller praised for its blend of art, faith, and intrigue. Rock, the best-selling book from Publisher Linden Press / Quilldriver Books, is now in its second printing and in screenplay development.
Set a decade after Rock’s events in Orvieto, Italy, Thorns reunites the couple Adriano and Lee aboard a cruise ship journeying from their home in San Francisco to Adriano’s homeland of Spain. Along the way, their story collides with global conspiracies, echoes from Al-Andalus and the Reconquista, and the lingering wounds of the Spanish Civil War.
Inspired by the people and place of Grazalema, Spain, Thorns also revisits beloved characters like the mysterious Magda—and perhaps even a Pope or two—as Adriano and Lee confront a threat with implications not just for Spain, but for humanity itself.
But it is the centenarian survivor who, in many ways, represents the soul of the novel—a living bridge between the past and the present, a symbol of truth’s tenacity. As Spain and the world grapple anew with questions of memory, revisionism, and reconciliation, the story of Mauthausen’s survivors reminds us: history isn’t past. It lives, it breathes, and it teaches—if we are willing to listen.
Perry and his husband, Alfredo Casuso, will be in the Andalusian town of Grazalema, Spain this summer, finishing the novel.