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5-Showing American Liberators Ebensee

So, I said, "Let me show you the camp." So he talked to the sergeant in the second tank and they went with me and walked through the camp. The first place I took him to was the kitchen and the kitchen was sparkling clean. Absolutely. You could eat off the floor. We walked in there and I showed the thing . Of course by now, I was a big Macher, I was really a very important person with these two Americans there. We walked in and so the cooks then put a little gruel in a plate for each of the two sergeants and a spoon and the first one asked, "What do we do with this?" I said, "you take your spoon, taste it, tell them how good it is and then give it to me." So, they did, and they each gave me their portion and I slurped up two full portions of food, which was a tremendous feat of organisierung as it was called. And then I took them around and I remember this so clearly. We would see an arm lying here, and a leg and a head on the ground. And he said, "What's going on?" And I told him that more than likely these were fellow prisoners who had been very brutal to the others and they had been torn apart body by body, leg by leg, arm by arm, without the benefit of knifes. It just goes to show you how strong people can be even though there bodies are weak when they have the will and they want to work together. And he says, "I have never seen anything like that", he said, "Been in the war since August the year before, I've been into a lot of battles but we have never seen anything like this. Take me back to the tanks. I've had enough."

And so I took him back. The reporter came in, "A jeep is on its way to pick up the prisoner who speaks English." And pretty soon- within an hour after I was liberated, when the tanks had rolled in within one hour I was down in headquarters in the hotel, in Ebensee. And that's my liberation

What they had done then, across the street from the hotel there was an apartment, and the captain – who died last year – he had ordered the people – they had fifteen minutes to grab their things and get the hell out. "You can't do that to us," they said. "Don't tell me what we can do, the war's still going on. Out out out." And so when I came, I was the first prisoner to arrive. After these people had been forced to move out, they took me upstairs and said, "Here's where you're going to live. And any clothes that you find hanging around is yours."

By the time the early evening came about – remember, we're in the mountains, its the Austrian section of the Alps, basically, where you're in, so you're several thousand feet up in the air, so when the sun goes over the mountains, it gets dark very quickly – by that time that early evening rolled about and dusk began to set in, there were two teens, small boys in their early teens, and I remember a person who had reported himself as having been a minister in one of the countries – either Hungary or Romania or something – and by the time we were done there were five people living in that apartment.

Then some soldiers came and each of them carried a ten-in-one ration. A ten-in-one was a cardboard box about this big/long, this wide, about that deep, and they had metal strips around them to hold them in. They were usually carried on top of tanks. And what ten-in-ones meant there were ten rations in a box – either ten rations for one person, or ten people having each one ration. So they brought five of those boxes up, and each of us got a box like that.

Now we went looking for tools to open the damn thing because we couldn't open these things, there was all this food we couldn't get to it. So finally somebody located either a screwdriver or something, and after much prying, we found the trick in how to open these things.

Mind you, these people – myself included – were all hungry and starving. Sure, I had these two things from the kitchen, these two soup tureens or whatever you call them, plates. So we finally open these things, and in there, each of these packages is in wax paper, you have to slice through it again. And there were cans in there of pork and all kinds of, from a prisoner's point of view, delectable items. And this guy wouldn't eat this and this guy wouldn't eat that. All of a sudden they became selective! It was weird, myself included.

Cigarettes, chewing gum. And we began to start trading among each other. Then we realized we had a bath tub there, now the idea was cleaning because we could take all of the garments that were there we could use. And so lots were drawn as to who was first, second, third, fourth and fifth. And by the time that I came around, and I went into the bathtub, that water just turned black, I mean pure black. There was soap and towels were there and cloth. I don't know how many times we had to go into – each of us had to go into the tub in the ensuing days – to clean and scrub out all those pores of dirt. And it was quite an exercise. And we looked like idiots in all these clothes that were way too big for us.

The next day, on Monday, I was called to the headquarters and the captain and the officers talked to me and I said to them, "I look silly in these outfits, I mean there's no garments up there that fit me." And so a call went out on the radio to all the G.I.'s that were there, the smaller guys, "Bring your shirts, underwear, whatever you have, shoes, because we gotta fit these guys into some proper clothes."

By Monday evening I looked like a G.I., except a very skinny G.I. And then I was told to sit in the front garden of the hotel and my job would be to be as an interpreter between German or other languages, and English. That was my liberation.

Are you still in contact with the American soldiers?

Yes. We have become very good friends. In fact, I'm a member of their veterans association now. I pay my annual dues, I go to their reunions. When Pat was alive we used to go every year to their reunions, wherever they were held. We had people come over here to spend time with us, we would go to visit them. It took a long time to find them but we did. And we became very good friends, yes indeed.

Telling His Story

Have you told your story to your family?

Have I told it to them? Ad nauseam. I mean, they finally said, "Dad, enough already. We don't want to hear anymore." It's the grandchildren who want to hear more about it. But my own children, I guess they got it with morning, with breakfast, with dinner. It was always at the table. I never hid it from them and so they knew at a very early age that Dad was peculiar.

Have you been back to the camps?

When my wife started to write the book, and I realized that she was serious about this—initially she wanted to write a story for the children, and then when we got into it, with a lot of screaming and a lot of fighting between her and me, to the tune where the kids told me last year after Pat had died, that they thought we were going to get divorced over all this because we were screaming. They said "You were driving us out of the house on your weekend sessions."

When I realized that she was serious about writing a book—now when she told me this was going to be more like a book than a story—I said, "Well if that's what you're going to do, I got to take you back to Auschwitz for you to see and walk through Auschwitz so you can see it with your own eyes." So I took her there in '75. And she had been back with me to Melk, to Mauthausen, to Ebensee.

Every year we go to Ebensee. We still stay in the same hotel that used to be the headquarters. It was the same family who ran that hotel way back when —we're now dealing with their second generation—and we've become very good friends with the wife and the husband and with her children. It's a weird situation how things have changed over the years. But we go back there and I get my same room every time. And we invited her to come over and visit us, and so two years ago she came with her mother and spent a week with us here. The next time I went, two years ago, in 2001—I went by myself, Pat wasn't with me, she no longer had the strength to travel —and I had my own room back and when I came to pay, she said, "Are you out of your mind? You think I should stay at your house and you're not charging me and I should charge you while you're staying as my guest? No way." And all the meals I took there, everything was free. We write emails to each other steadily, and Christmas cards and things like that. She tells me about her children, what they're doing. We are very good friends now. It's weird, but that's the way it was.

How did your wife encourage you to tell your story?

Pat had been encouraging me to talk to anyone who would want to listen, and nobody wanted to listen because everybody was busy reconstituting their lives. Don't forget, many people don't seem to understand this, or are willing to understand this. 1944 was over. And people came back out of the army and they were discharged either in '45 or '46. And then they had to make up these years that they lost, many of them had been drafted in 1941 or '42, after Pearl Harbor, so they had been in there from '42 to '46, they had lost four years of their lives. So many of them had to go home, reconstitute their lives, go to school, whether it was high school or college, and decide what they're going to do with their lives. Then they had to find, marry, get a girl, build a family. If they were into business they went and started a business. If they were professional people, they had to continue with their education in order to... By the time that you were done with all that, and the kids had married, 30-40 years had gone by.

When you figure from 1946-47 and by the time that they had gone through the education, the process of building a career, 20 years, all the sudden they were in their 40's. By the time their daughters had married they were in the 60's. Before the time when you talked about there, your portion of what your experience was, during the war they would say, "Max, we don't want to hear about it, we have our own problems." It was not until in the '80's when the first movie came out on TV—which none of you will remember because you weren't born yet. In fact, I would imagine in some cases your parents hadn't even met each other yet.

The first movie came out about the prison camps, the concentration camps. Pat and I looked at it and I sat there laughing. She said, "What are you laughing for?" I said "Pat, if it had been like that, I could have spent my whole life there." Because they were all with haircuts, they had lockers, they had footlockers, they could meet their wives. I mean, it was absurd. That's when the opening shot was leveled by which people now wanted to listen to concentration camp survivors. That's when the Holocaust Center in San Francisco was founded, in 1979. All of a sudden, this was now possible.

Jumping back a little, you said in the last interview that there was so much happening when you were first arrested that it was hard to have emotions. When did everything truly hit you about what was going on?

I think I said earlier, when I came to Buna, when I suddenly burst out crying. That's when it first dawned on me what really... it was weird. Even when I was talking to you all about the ride in the train, in the boxcar - the copulations and the things like that which to me was difficult to understand. But when I came to Buna and when I really burst out crying - I mean when it really dawned on me what I was in for - that's when I first realized what life was going to be like.

When emotions took over and then after the guy had talked to me and had calmed me down and told me that if I wanted to survive I had to abide by these rules - the emotions went out of the window. And pure day-to-day living began. I've always – and I continue to make the same claim, I've always made the same claim and I continue to - that in a concentration camp the easiest thing to do is kill yourself. You gotta make up your mind, you want to die, all you got to do is run for those electric wires and they will start shooting at you and you're dead. Your whole troubles are over with. The most difficult thing today, and then, is to stay alive, to live, because it will bring you problems. But you don't know what the problems are going to be, but you want to wake up the next day and see what life is going to be like, what it has in store for you.

That same thing is in the camps except in a much more difficult way. Self-survival in a camp becomes the overriding factor. And the lucky breaks that I've told you about. The operation. Being sent from Buna to Auschwitz was a very lucky break with the damn finger. That they read my registration card and saw I was a carpenter was a very lucky break. Meeting Lex was a very lucky break. Luck has a lot to do with survival. Don't forget that. Don't ever forget that. But also, when you have the lucky breaks, take advantage. Use them.