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Play Movie5 - Ohdruf to Ebensee
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How did you leave the prisoners and go on to the next camp?
Well we were just a hundred men, I mean, which is nothing. Later they would call in back hospitals, to bring in more relief for them with greater personnel. We just got in the truck and sat there and well, "we're going to another camp". And we went to Hemer, Germany. From there we went to two or three more labor camps. They were all the same; they were all just as bad. All people were dying all over the place and stacked up like cord wood.
Are there specific incidents that you remember about each of those labor camps?
Same experiences, same experiences.
Are there any differences that you can tell between concentration camps and a labor camps?
Labor camps were a little different because they worked them to death and then they threw them in the crematoria, in the labor camps. But in the concentration camps they had the gas chamber. You know these Germans thought they were real smart. They worked this down to the final solution, an expression you've heard many times. But they were so smart that they figured out that with...what was the poison that they used? Zyklon B. That they could kill a Jew for a half a penny. That's what a Jew's life was worth, a half a penny.
I'm sure you've heard the stories, but I'll repeat it. They would take them in to give them showers in a phony shower room, and shut the doors and drop in the pellets from the top. We saw inside some of these gas chambers, how they were gnawing, trying to gnaw their way out and scratch on the walls. Then they would blow out the fumes, take them out, and they had prisoners take the bodies out and put them in the crematoria. I later found out that they would take these Jews who were doing this work and only let them do it for ninety days. Then they would kill them and put a new crew in, to take the bodies out and put them in the furnace.
What were some examples of things that you saw that were evidence about this? Can you talk a little about it, you saw the inside of the walls, what did you see?
Just briefly, and just saw, that I can remember, just the scratch marks on the walls in there, people trying to get out. You transfer that into your head and you picture mothers with children in there and men who were just told they were going to have a shower. Hang your clothes up over here and remember where they were, cause then you'd get them back. In the meantime they would take all the clothes and send them back to Germany for the civilians. I would like to get to this camp Ebensee because we stayed there three to four weeks, and that was the longest part of my experience.
Anything, just in terms of your chronology that connects Ohrdruf to Ebensee that you want to fill in?
After we left Ohrdruf, we went to Hemer. It was the same thing all over again. We'd stay there four or five days, and then go to these labor camps. This was getting into April and to May, now in 1945. We went to Ebensee, camp Ebensee, Stalag Ebensee, that's in Bavaria, and this was a sub camp of Mauthausen. Mauthausen was one of the major concentration camps. But Ebensee, at that time they were trying to turn it into a DP camp, displaced persons. But it was the same thing we saw there.
We went into Ebensee, and first we went into Gmunden, a little town on a lake a mile from the camp. Our commanding officer, Major Harrell, who was from the south. He went into a little resort. It was like a little hotel resort. It was right on this lake, this beautiful lake. He just said we're taking over. As we went into each one of these camps we would go in and tell people to get out of their houses. We were taking over for our billet. The major went in there and we took over this little hotel. I actually slept in a feather bed, and it was a real weird experience. They had a garden outside with tables. They had basement full of pilsner beer. So we just drank as much beer as we could possibly consume in an attempt to escape.
One day I asked this lady if she had a son who was in the Luftwaffe. I said, "Was he a pilot?" "Nein, nein, nein, he was a good boy." I looked in the closet one day and I found his Luftwaffe hat, which I took, and later lost some place.
This hotel was a mile from Ebensee. This Ebensee, they used to march them about a mile to go down into mines to dig for coal, or to manufacture munitions for the German army. They worked them twelve hours a day with one or two, hardly could be called meals. When they couldn't work anymore they'd take them back and kill them. This was still a very hard thing. I mean my feelings hadn't come back to me yet, even having been in six or seven of these camps, and labor camps. It was very hard, very hard to do this.
In this Ebensee I was put in charge of a DP ward. I was supposed to wear a mask. I wore the mask for one day I think. They would bring in the gruel for these people to eat, horrible to look at. They were as bad as the people in all the other camps, with dysentery, typhus, every disease you could think of.
I know I was there during April because it was Passover. The Chaplain in our outfit was a Protestant Chaplain. He called me in one day and he said, "Colvin", he says "the Red Cross sent me a box of matzos and a Haggadah." Haggadah is the book that you read during the passover service. He said, "I think you'll know what to do with this." I took them into the camp the next day and there was a man in there. They were sleeping three or four, the same thing, three or four to a bed with a thin blanket and sleeping on wood, no mattress. With my little Yiddish, I talked to this one man, and he was from Poland. And he said, "I lost my family, I lost my home, and I have no place to go, now that I am free." I don't know if he ever lived, but he said, "the only thing that's kept me alive is the hope of a Jewish homeland in Palestine." We became friends.
I brought him the box of matzos and the Haggadah. In the Jewish prayers, they make a blessing over you. I forget the name of it. He gave me enough blessings to last the rest of my life. They had not seen Hebrew printing for five or six years. Here they were on their death beds, and they had this box of matzos, and they had their own little seder service, such as it could be. In that barracks seems to be the place that I maybe started to wake up after all these months, weeks and months in the camps.
This is hard to talk about. There was a man who could speak English. His name was Niso and he was from Athens, Greece. He was a young lawyer, not much older than we were. In one minute we became the closest friends that any friends could ever be. He said to me, "where are you from?" and I said San Francisco. He said, I have relatives in "Vallejo" which of course is Vallejo. The coincidence of this is that I had roomed in this fraternity a year and a half before with probably his second or third cousin. I knew about this family in Vallejo. I sent word to them, and kind of took over with him, and tried to give him anything special I could.
One day I said "Niso, would you do me a favor? Would you write out a testimonial for me that I can take home?" Because all of these prisoners kept saying, "tell, tell about us, tell at home. Tell them about what happened." That turned into the word zohar, in Hebrew, which is "never again." Tell them. So I asked him for this testimonial, which I have over here. Can I get it please? Yes, that's it.
