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4-To Mauthausen, Melk & Ebensee & Liberation
Can you tell us about your march from Mauthausen to Ebensee?
No, it’s not from Mauthausen to Ebensee, it's from Melk to Ebensee. Remember I was sent first by train to Mauthausen. Then there was the quarantine. Then we were sent by truck and I got the beating outside because of my uniform. And then we were sent by truck to Melk. Melk was a sub-camp of Mauthausen and there they worked in tunnels. I had been beaten so badly that I couldn't remember – had amnesia – until they told us that we were marching down the embankment to the river, got on the barges, and were driven to Linz by boat. We got off the barges there at Linz, and we each were given a loaf of bread. Then we began to march from Linz, all the way to Ebensee.
Can you tell us about the march to Ebensee?
Melk is further towards Vienna than it is the other direction. We marched. By this time I had begun to lose quite a bit of my body fat and flesh. Of course I had the same uniform as everyone else had, I no longer had my tailor made outfits. I had no shoes, I had clogs by now. Basically, our trip to Ebensee was all down hill. That was the nice part of it. When darkness came – and I don't know how many people were in that column, whether it was a thousand or more, I don't know – but we went down hill. And when the night time fell, we were taken off the road and usually we were put on the meadow next to a farmhouse and we slept. The guard then walked around us. All we had was the bread, nothing else. And we continued. This was done for three days and three nights.
When you come down on the level side, you come to a very big lake. On the west end of the lake was Ebensee and on the east end of the lake was Gmunden, which was the bigger town. We came into the lake walk just on the outer edges of Gmunden, and then we walked the whole stretch from Gmunden to Ebensee along the lake. I know there was a lake there because I have been back there so many times. But when I was actually walking, I didn't know what was happening on the left or right side of me. I just kept trudging along. I didn't know how beautiful it was in that area. I mean, that is an incredible resort area. The summer, it’s filled with tourists from all over Europe who come there and rent houses. At that time when I was marching it – and by marching it, I don't mean marching it like a soldier does, I mean like shoveling it, six inch steps – I didn't know the beauty of that area. It probably took us that whole day when we hit the lake to get to Gmunden. That’s how slow we had to walk.
When we came to Ebensee, all of a sudden we had to go uphill because Ebensee, the camp, was on a ledge that overlooked the river down below and the valley. And on the left side of the camp were the tunnels that had been built into the mountains in which they were going to have factories and which at the end of the war, they did indeed had some factories.
A lot of people - when I saw "a lot" I don't know the number - but a number of people were shot who could not keep up with it, who were killed and just left alone along the road. I think we left Melk around the 14th, 15th, or 16th of April, just about this time of year. It took us three days.
I think I was in Ebensee working for about three weeks, in the tunnels again, because it was the same thing, they were having tunnels, just like in Melk. And I was assigned to work in a tunnel in a mezzanine level, which was my lucky break because in order to get up there, you had to go up a stair ladder and anybody from upstairs could see who was coming up. So, we were kind of protected up there. We never got any beatings or we were never driven hard to work. I was up there on that shelf, so we had it reasonable easy.
But the thing that is not very well known about Ebensee is it had been built in 1943 in the winter of November. And it had been built for 6300 prisoners that were going to work in the tunnels in these mountains. By the time that we were liberated, on the sixth of May, eighteen thousand prisoners were living in that same camp. Mind you, they got food rations for six-thousand-three hundred prisoners. When the influx came of the prisoners who came out of Melk, who had been originally in Auschwitz and then had been transferred to all these other camps, we were now sharing the same food with these original 6300. So every time that more prisoners came in, the rations became smaller. By the time that I was liberated – on the Sunday the 6th of May – I was down to about eighty pounds. You could see every bone in my body. I was a walking anatomy lesson. That’s how we marched from Linz, across the Danube, all the way down to Ebensee.
Liberation
Can you describe the events of your liberation and your feelings at the time?
On Friday morning, the word was passed through all the blocks in the camp in Ebensee, we are to precede to the Appelplatz, which is the role call square. We did not have to follow and stand in the counting number, which was by fives or by tens. And the camp commander was going to address us. The camp commander, then in German, told us that the Americans were on their way, and they, the SS, were going to defend themselves to the last man fighting the Americans. They wanted us, the prisoners, to go into one of the tunnels – that I have been talking about – so that we would be out of the line of fire and we would be "protected." When he had finished speaking, those who could understand German had began to shout "Nein, Nein,Wirwerden nicht gehn." Because the underground of the prisoners had been told that that's exactly one of the things that the commander was going to offer us, but what he wasn't telling us was that he had a locomotive that was laden down with TNT that was going to be in front of the tunnel that we were in, they were going to burst it and hopefully all the prisoners with the concussion on the inside would die on the spot.
The first ones had said, "Nein, Nein, Wirwerden nicht gehn." Now mind you, around the whole Appelplatz there were SS with machine guns, like burp guns. He then called for the translator, the interpreter, to mount the little table that was brought out, and he stood on the table and would talk in the different Slavic languages that were spoken in the camp, which were Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, any Slavic type language, and he would then pronounce it. You could hear all these, "Nyet, Nyet, Nyet, Nyet, Nyet – No, No, No," that sort of thing. And the French by now – somebody had translated for them and they were saying, "Non, Non, Non." And by the time this guy was done translating what the commadant had said, this whole prisoner group in front of him was shouting, "No, no, we will not go!" That was the first time this SS commander – he stood there, and then turned around to his fellow officers, and they were talking – and that's the first time that prisoners had ever told him to go screw himself, in all practical words. And they called in all the SS guards around us and they left the camp. We didn't have to go to work that day.
They just walked out?
Well, they closed the gates behind them. They didn't start shooting. I mean, they were dumbfounded, lets face it. The rations were even less that day than we had before. The next day they were practically non-existent. Saturday morning when I woke up and went to the roll call square and overlooked the river and the valley bellow, on that fence, I saw a number of the flags of the nations that had prisoners in the camp. I could not understand where they had come form overnight. And I asked around, and they said well the SS had disappeared during the night they had left. And all they had left was two guards in front of gate who were at that time, my age, in their 60's or 70's, and they had a little rifle each and let it be known, there was no ammunition in there. They were basically there for decoration. That Saturday more flags arrived to be put on that fence. I said, "Where do they come from?" What they did is they went to the SS barracks and got the sheets and dyed them and made flags out of them. All day Saturday we stood there at the fence overlooking the valley because that was where the only road was. And you could see the traffic going left and right, trucks moving to the east or to the west rather.
We went back to sleep Saturday night, nothing had happened. And on Sunday morning, again the same thing, we went to the fence and looked down and traffic was heavier but not much else.
The road that I mentioned when we climbed when we marched all the way from Linz and I said we were now on the last stretch, we had to climb up the hill, they were all cobble stones. And if you had wooden clogs on cobble stones, and the road is slightly wet, you do a lot of sliding and holding on for dear life.
On that Sunday, in the early afternoon hours, two-thirty, a quarter-to-three, we heard this idiotic noise coming up the road. Grrr, grrr, grrr. These were two tanks clattering with their tracks over these cobble stones up the hill. They came to the main gate and the sergeant in the front tank, standing in his turret, as did the sergeant behind him in the second tank, he looked to his right and took the rifle out of the guys hand and broke it over his gun's turret and hung it over the gate. He could not remember that action, never did. I stood there right next it at the gate and I could see the whole thing and I told him, "do you remember?" And he said, "I have no idea of this whatsoever." "That’s what you did.” And he said, "Amazing."
The gates were open and the tanks rolled in. There were two tanks and a jeep. Everybody tried to climb onto those tanks. And we stank, we hadn't had showers since Melk. That was like the beginning of the year. I think the last time we had a shower was in the quarantine when we were deloused in Mauthausen. Bob Persinger was the sergeant in the first tank and to this day, he says, "I can still smell that stink that you guys emanated from that camp." He said, "Nobody climb up, no, no, no, down, down." And so, he took out a pack of cigarettes, and he took out a cigarette and lit it. I stood next to the tank and in English I shouted up at him, "It's been a long time since I had a Lucky Strike." And he, "Who said that?", and I said, "I did." And he said, "You get up here." So the other fellow prisoners kept hoisting me up because I was pretty damn weak to climb all that. So he sat my down and gave me a cigarette and he lit it and I took a drag and the whole world spun. I mean, I just kept rotating.
And in my little vocabulary that I had in English – which was piss-poor, this small – we talked back and forth. He had gotten on the radio and called headquarters and said, "I found someone who speaks English." And they said, "Don't let him out of your sight, were sending a jeep for him right away."
