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Play Movie4 - Contact With Prisoners
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Did you ever connect with any of the prisoners?
Yes, I did eventually, I did eventually. We left Ohrdrof after a day or two, or a few days. We went to another camp called Hemer, H-E-M-E-R. That was still in late March or early April of '45. If I describe one camp to you, I saw the same things and had the same feelings in all seven camps that I was in. Whether they were labor camps, some were IG Farben machinery factories.
How did the prisoners react to when you came? How did you deal with them? Did any speak English? Did you talk to them? Did you want to talk to them?
That’s a very hard question to answer because I was so numb. First of all we had a language difference. Later I was able to use a little Yiddish that I had known, I brought that with me, and was able to converse with them. More then anything I guess I was just in a state of stupor. If they told us to give these people food, we gave them food or medicine. We just operated like robots. I'm sure if anybody hit me over the head I wouldn't have felt it. I was an inanimate object, just walking around.
Later as we went into more camps, I started to feel and relate to them more. That’s about all I remember about Ohrdruf. It was this total shock, total shock. A friend of mine took me and he had opened the door to a crematorium. There was still a body in there, half ashes. You look at it and say, "This isn't civilized. Why did they do this? Why were these people killed?" Later on I knew why they were killed because while it's hard not to discuss the overall reason for the war and Hitler’s motivation—he had a slogan, morgan uber alles, tomorrow the world. He would give these three and four hour speeches that we saw in the news. He had the whole community, the whole Germany really hypnotized. How do you make people hate? I guess that is what he made them do. He was probably a genius, a genius who used his proficiencies in a horrible, horrible way and he thought that he could get away with that in this world. Well, he didn't but it cost a lot of people their lives.
I was reading about how the inmates were building a big underground organization that was going to be the headquarters for Adolf Hitler. Did you see any evidence of this?
I didn't know anything about that.
When you saw the prisoners, did you think of them as human when you were serving them and helping them? Were they human to you? Were they people?
That's a hard question to ask. Were they human? Yes, they were human. But they didn't look like other human beings I had ever seen. Somebody whose face is sunken in, whose belly is convex, or concave. Whose arms are like broomsticks. All they wanted was food and water. They were sick. How do you relate to somebody like that? I was just out of college and saw all healthy people all my life. Then to run in and see these skeletons. I didn't know they were human. Especially when you couldn't talk to them.
Treating Prisoners
Will you tell us a little more about what you were doing for them medically. What were some of the things that you were doing for these inmates?
Medically we were supposed to set up emergency medical treatment. And so we'd go into a barracks, and if they had wounds, we'd try to dress them. And the Germans didn't take care of them at all. They'd let them rot. We'd try to give them IV's, plasma. That's a whole story that I will tell you about when we get to Ebensee. But you try to give them plasma to strengthen them. They were all dehydrated. It was a losing battle. It was a losing battle to go in and try and help these people. They were dying in front of you. As you were giving them IV's they were dying. It's hard to explain.
Did you come prepared with the right type of medication and the right type of stuff for the wounds they had?
There was no right medication that we had with us. You can't take a person who is a skeleton. I had two quarters of pre-med without studying anything about medicine. In our company we had about five doctors and one dentist, and twelve medical and surgical technicians out of a hundred men in our company. So I am talking about seventeen men, five of whom had gone to med school. The rest of us who were eighteen, nineteen. It was so overwhelming. You are talking about numbers here. Here's 10,000 prisoners that were just liberated, who are lying there starving and no water and no facilities, sanitary facilities. And here is seventeen men.
I compare that with walking into the camp on the first day and seeing these scenes that are so horrible, that I felt like in retrospect, all my brains were pushed down so I couldn't think. How can seventeen men go in and treat 10,000 prisoners? There is no medication that you could have. All you could do was try to give them a little plasma, and treat local wounds, abscesses. One man had a cancer in his cheek that hadn't been treated for probably weeks or months, and it smelled to Hell. How can you go in and treat these people? If we had to do it today, I'm sure that they wouldn't know what to bring with them as far as medication or treatment.
At this point what did you personally want to do? If it was up to you, would you want to go home at this point when you were leaving?
When we left Ohrdruf we knew we were going to another camp.
So you already knew something?
I just stayed that way for three to four months of not feeling. No feeling. It was horrible, just horrible.
Being in the army, going into the camps, did you feel like you were politically superior or inferior to anyone? Any of the people that were there? Other Germans or...
I never felt anything, so I don't know. I wasn't inferior, I wasn't superior. I was a witness. Thank God I was a witness. Years later I wrote a book. I was going to tell you about it later, but I wrote a book for our grandchildren and our family. I called it Cause and Effect. The cause, the cause is what I saw in three and a half or four months, when I was nineteen years old. And the effect is what I did with my life after the war. That's when I had feelings. I didn't write that until much later. But that's another story about post war. This was like asking a lamp, "How do you feel? What do you feel? Are you politically inferior or superior?" No, you're nothing, you're a lamp. I was just a soldier.
