| Abstract | Carlos Rodriguez del Risco survived the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen and published a series of articles recounting his experience in the Spanish Falangist newspaper Arriba in 1946. Part conversion narrative and part serialized adventure novel, "Yo he estado en Mauthausen" presents the idiosyncratic vantage point of a pro-Franco concentration camp survivor who is also the first Spanish witness of the Holocaust to publish an account inside dictatorship Spain. This article examines the contradictions and complications inherent in Rodriguez del Risco's testimonial text as a work of political propaganda and a groundbreaking historiographic account. Rodriguez del Risco would never again surface publicly; he, like his series of articles, would live out the rest of his life in obscurity. Yet "Yo he estado en Mauthausen" is the first text to tell a story of life and death from the little-seen perspective of a Spanish prisoner inside a Nazi concentration camp.
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