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6 - Niso's Story

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Ken Colvin reads the following story from Niso's transcript.

He wrote this, and I still have the original, and it says:
"My story, like the story of many other thousands of political prisoners in German concentration camps, is as difficult to be told as to be written. For the things and happenings we have had in these Vernichtung Lager, that is, in these camps of annihilation, are above all imagination. When I was taken by the Germans, I was packed up in a railway wagon of these that are used for horses. We were in it seventy persons, women, children, old and young people, without place to seat and food for five days only. It was in July, the weather was terribly warm, and there were only two little windows that allowed only the warmth to come, but no air. In such conditions, from Greece, we traveled in these closed wagons, fourteen days, through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and naturally lots of Jews."

"When we came out from the railway, only in our wagon, from the sufferings of the travel, only forty-seven out of the seventy were alive. The others were dead during the travel. Coming out of the train there was a selection made by a German SS medical officer. He separated the young and the good for work from others, old or weak."
He first went to Auschwitz, this is where the selection by Dr. Mengele took place. "I was put together with a column of young men, separated from our mothers, sisters, parents and we were closed in a wooden barracks, more than 800. We lived there without working with a food, just enough for not starving, enduring the cold, the beating of the SS, staying out in the rain almost naked, for as clothing we had only a trouser and a jacket. No shirt, no underwear, rotten shoes."

"One day, comes a commission and chooses a party of 1000 men to go for work in a coal mine eighty kilometers from the place. I was also chosen. Then began the most terrible part of my suffering. Fancy a man that does not know what is a mine. And from one day to the other to be send 600 meters under the earth, to dig for coal. The work was terribly hard, much beating, little food, much danger and much mortality."

"I worked in the night shift from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. I made this life four months and I may say it took the life out of me. I became skinny, yellow and always going to be ill. Then I had double pneumonia that sent me nearly to a better world. I wonder also to today how I managed to get out of it. I was in hospital for more than a month,"—this part I couldn't understand, how they put him in a hospital, but he said he was there—"recovering with fever, and wishing more than everything to die for putting me an end to my sufferings. One day, my fever went away. The German doctor did not wait a single day. He sent me out of the hospital barrack immediately, back to work. I was so weak, so skinny, I couldn't even go. The result was that three days later a complication came and I was back in hospital. I remained another fifteen days, but before I was well, there was an evacuation of the camp. The Russians were advancing and we had to move. The travel lasted six days through Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, until Austria." We were in a camp in Austria, at Ebensee."

"It was January 1945, with heavy snow that they had us packed in open railway wagons. One hundred people in each car. It was the most terrible thing a man has seen. I cannot that write; it is too difficult. Just fancy we were sitting on the dead, surrounded by dead comrades. Nobody cared. We were completely like beasts, starving and freezing. In those six days, of the original party that went away of 2500, only 1200 arrived, and in what condition!"

"So I arrived in Ebensee. The other camps were already bad enough, but I had no idea of what the camp of Ebensee was. In the first place we made a period of two weeks of quarantine. When that was over, they sent us to work. To work in Ebensee, means nearly death, for the winter is terrible. It was snowing continually, and we were nearly naked, dressed with a pair of striped trousers and a striped jacket. Somebody had a shirt, but the many had nothing on the body, and to work twelve hours a day in the snow, in the cold, nearly without food."

"The proportion of the dead was terrible and increasing everyday. The crematorium had everyday more work to do, more corpses to burn. I got ill and was recovered in the hospital. This saved my life for it made me pass two of the hardest months of winter indoors. In April, I went back to work. We were all hearing already the progress of the American and Russian armies, and I took the resolution to make all I could to resist until liberation. I was thinking that it would be a pity after all I had endured, to lose my life in the last moment. A week before the Americans entered Ebensee, I was back in the hospital ill. There, it was overcrowded. I had to lay in the earth,"—that means on the ground.—"In a week I was nearly to death point."

"But when the Americans came, it was a nice day. What they did for us you know better than everybody else. But what they did for me was simply astonishing. They made me a live man out of a dead man. But from here on you can go on with this story alone for you were the best eyewitness of it."

This was my friend Niso, and after we were there about three to four weeks, one day I was still in charge of this TB ward and Niso was in it. That was where I learned I could talk to him and I guess I started feeling. One day one of my friends from our outfit came in and he said "Colvin come on get out, we're moving on to another camp." He heard this and he looked right in my eyes and he said "Kenneth, you can't leave me like this." I turned around and I started to cry and I walked out.

Do you one day hope to see him again?

I tried to, I tried to. After the war, after I was married, on our first trip to Israel, we went to Athens after that. I had the phone number of his family from his relatives in Vallejo and I called him up and I explained who I was and that I was looking for Niso. They said to me, his uncle, "Don't you know Niso never came back from the camps? I guess he was in a gas chamber and was killed." I knew he wasn't killed. But he never came back. He died after I left him. That's very hard to remember, very hard. The closest contact. You asked before whether I had contact with any of the prisoners. I finally made contact with that Polish man and Niso. Niso died and the Polish man probably died too.

What was his condition at that time?

Niso was able to stand and walk around and didn't seem as bad as the other prisoners. He probably just had too many things go wrong with him, with TB. There was a man in that barracks that told me he could speak a little English and Yiddish, which I could understand some. He said that the Germans had a cure for typhus. I said, "What is it?" "Well they put them in the crematorium before they died." I don't know what happened to all those people. I guess most of them died.

Did you ever make an effort to find out how Niso died?

No. He died.

What were the prisoners first reaction when you came? Did they all try and crowd you?

We were there a few days after the liberation. We just dealt with the very sick ones. There was no flag waving and no celebrations. All they wanted to do was get food and water and try to keep living.