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Play Movie3-Ohrdruf & Hemer Camps
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What did your supervisors or superiors tell you about what you would be doing in Hemer?
Well, I have to qualify that answer because we didn't know where we were going. Actually our clearing company, medical clearing company, was the second line in a battle order. Kids on the front would get sent back by the aid men and we would take care of them and send them back further. So we didn't know that we were going into concentration camps. No one mentioned that word to us one time, until we were told to climb in the trucks and we were going into action. And the first action was to drive up to a concentration camp, and not one of us knew what was in there or what we were gonna do, and we just kind of had to do things by the seat of our pants.
You walk up to the gate and you see these people dying and dead and crematoria still going. And they said, "We've got to feed them." And they fed them too much and they killed many of them. We've got to take care of them and it was too difficult to even give them IVs because their veins were so thin at that time – these people were down to 80lbs and there was nothing left of them. And if they had wounds we would dress them and occassionally did some minor surgery. But we weren't prepared for this. Up to the time that we drove up to that first camp, I had never in two years in the army heard that word "concentration camp" until we drove up and got off the trucks and walked up to the gate and saw this horrible sight in front of us.
What were the people in the camps doing when you arrived at Hemer?
At Hemer. I can summarize what they were doing by telling you about one man, right in front of me, that crawled into a mud puddle and was drinking the water out of the mud puddle, because they hadn't been given any water. They hadn't been given any food. It was a terrible sight. It was horrible.
Were any of the German SS guards still around at the time?
The guards took off the day before, when the Americans' tanks came in to liberate the camp. And we were right behind the tanks. Some of the guards were killed by the prisoners, and some just took off and some of the officers, the German officers disguised themselves as privates so they wouldn't be caught and court martialed. But there were no officers.
These people were just existing. Nobody was feeding them. There was no medical attention. They were lying around in their bunks, stacked five high, three people in one bunk. A whole barracks full. Dead bodies all over the ground. The first thing we did at Hemer, was to line up those who could walk and get them to undress, and we sprayed them with DDT, which was a powder to kill lice and all of that. And then after we got through with all of them that we could get out of the barracks then they had us spray each other with DDT—which later we found to be a carcinogenic. So that was the first thing we did. We really went in there unprepared for what we had to do.
So before you arrived for all you knew there could have been anything in the camps? You were completely in the dark?
No, we didn't know where we were going until we got out of the truck and walked up to the gate. And that same gate they had to post guards so that these people who could do it wouldn't rush out and go down and kill everybody in the communities around there. They were like animals. I'm sorry to describe them that way, but the Germans made them that way.
Describe that further. I know this is tough, but see if you can imagine being back there, and describing what you saw in terms of that animalistic behavior, from your own eyes.
I don't have to remember, because it's been with me ever since. You never forget the Holocaust. I've said many times, you can leave the concentration camps, but you can't leave the thoughts of it. They remain with you the rest of your life. But when we walked in there it was such horror that it was difficult to comprehend. You saw a pile of naked bodies waiting to go into the crematoria. The Germans did that so that they thought they'd do away with proof of what they had done. The crematoria was still burning. We saw these bodies. Here I am, nineteen years old; I don't know what to think. I didn't cry, and I didn't... it was just revolting. We went in, and our first job after giving the living ones DDT was to bury the poor guys who were on the ground into a mass grave. We started throwing them in, and finally an officer said: "whoa, wait a minute. At least pile them up neatly. Give them some dignity." So we had to do that.
You were describing the mass graves at Hemer. Could you describe them some more?
I'd rather not. I mean, we buried them...
How large were the graves?
Oh, you know, like twenty square feet. Dug down, way down. And after it was full we put lime on the bodies and then covered with dirt.
Interactions with Interviewees
See, I don't think you... there's something going on that I don't think you understand, that these aren't just facts. I'm talking about my whole life, and the impression that the concentration camps had on me. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it. Right now my eyes are full, and I'm not ashamed of that. What this did to me—I can't testify for everybody—what it did for me just to make such a lasting impression of how bad people can be, and what discrimination and persecution can do. You can visualize that people shouldn't persecute, but I'm talking about looking at the other end, of the people who were the victims, who were persecuted, who were starved, who were beaten, and crawled on the ground for water in mud puddles. I mean, you see that, that's pretty hard on a nineteen year-old kid, and I still dream about it.
This is not a school project you're talking about. You're talking about real people being killed by someone else, because they were a certain race or nationality or religion. You talk about things that are going on today like Darfur and what's going on in Bosnia and what continues to go on in the world, and it just has rotted my head so badly that I can't describe it. It's just horrible. Just horrible. And the older I get maybe the softer my brain is and my feelings. But we're talking about killing six million, twelve million, I don't know how many, nobody really knows. There were supposed to be six million Jews, of which there were a million and a half kids, killed. And I keep reading about these selections by Doctor Mengele. That women and children to the right and the healthy ones to the left, and they'd take them in and they'd put them in the shower, and they'd drop pellets in there and kill them. It just doesn't make sense. In the whole scheme of the world. It doesn't make sense to me. And I've never been able to rationalize it.
You know to this day my wife won't let me watch anything on TV about the Holocaust and she'll go up the TV set and turn it off. She says, "Ken you can't watch these things, you have nightmares about them." And I wonder how young people feel hearing me say this. Do you know how bad it was? Do I have to sit here and cry to tell you how bad it was and how it affected me and all of the soldiers that were with me?
I wonder how people who watch these films on the Internet or hit on your website ... are they just going to say "well there's a guy you know he's..." I mean, I know the day I became neurotic in my life and it was the day we walked into Hemer, the first of the 6 camps. That's the day that my brains got mushy and I started to feel about people. Whatever I've done since that experience, to work on all these boards in San Francisco and Israel, nationally, I keep saying "maybe something I'm doing will help somebody, someplace." I just can't walk away from that thing, those concentration camps, and say, "well that was the Holocaust, and now I came back, and I went to work, and I had a family." No, that Holocaust doesn't go away. It's in the in the paper everyday, in on the media everyday, there are more movies about it all the time; Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List—which was kind of a joke to me because it didn't show the concentration camps as bad as they were; it was like a boy scout camp. I can't walk away from the concentration camps and say "That was the Holocaust, Oh well what are we going to study next week," because this is in my guts, it's in my brains.
Interviewers talk about how they see Ken's interview impacting other people, especially when they hear him talk about his direct experience.
Rachael: I feel like I can't know. I think that the Holocaust is something that can't really be fully described—I mean you can try—but that's actually one of the reasons that I'm so interested in your poetry because I feel like that captures the emotions of it in ways that you can't really capture in pure description. Yes I know I've never had an experience anything like yours—and God willing I never will—but I just somehow I think its important to know.
Julianna: You seem to be a lot more passionate about wanting people to know the real truth about it and I think that's something that a lot of other interviews—or something you are going to research— that goes way beyond something that you are just going to find. It seems like the fact that you really want people to know really makes for a good interview and gives us something to take away from this.
I'm not trying to make this a good interview, dear. No, no, this is the real stuff, this is life, and it still goes on today. I just pray to god that somebody who, someday, watches this and has to make some decisions someplace will say the Holocaust still does on, it still goes on.
Erin: I think, for me, just being here and listening to what you are saying is actually changing my future and changing who I am, in a way. I think you can go study the Holocaust and you can listen to what people say, you can live your life not being affected by it and dissociating yourself from it, and just thinking of it as facts. It seems like it was so long ago but really in proportion to how long civilization has existed it wasn't. I think hearing this is changing the decisions I'll make in the future and the way I look at life, even with the insignificant things. It's important to me.
I want to give you an answer about that because for fifty years I have gone into high schools, through the Northern California Holocaust Library. I've talked to juniors and seniors. And I would go in with a survivor and a historian and my job was to give credence to the fact: yes there was a concentration camp, yes she suffered, and now I want to tell you about it. But would I try to turn the gist of my of my lecture to the point of morality and telling the kids this started because of predjudism and discrimination. I would make them stand up and swear that—if they ever hear this again any racist jokes or things, that they will say "Woah, wait a minute. I learned about the Holocaust and we don't talk like that anymore." Because it can be very bad, and I hope it changes you, and all of you because you have got to get the feeling. I could be someplace other than here this morning spending my time talking, but I want people to know how bad it was, it was horrible. And they killed people and they murdered them and it cost them a half a penny, per a person to kill them, by dropping that Zyclone B pellet into these showers, a half a penny to kill a person. I mean what's life all about when things like that go on? Who did they think they were, God?
I think they did think they were God.
They probably did, they probably did. I think we are all smart enough to know the difference between right and wrong. And they were wrong. And we went in to Hemer, and then to more camps, labor camps, and finally into Ebensee. At Ebensee they said "Colvin you're in charge of this TB ward." There are 250 men lying on these wooden bunks and with practically nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and they were all dying. They had typhus and malnutrition and TB. I would stand there, I wouldn't let myself get emotional, but I think I drank it in and I absorbed what was going on there. These people were... and one Polish man told me "I can't go back to Poland. I have no family and no home and nothing left for me." he said, "I might as well die. If I can go to Palestine—that's what has kept me alive." But I'm trying to tell you the overall picture that this isn't a word Holocaust—I don't where they got that word—but it's worse than that, it's just murder of people. That because they were a different religion, or they were political prisoners, or they were gays, or they were gypsies. If they did that in the United States, there wouldn't be anybody left. How the world let them go on...it cost the United States 450,000 men, who were killed—plus all those who were injured—to go over there and fight and liberate the camps. We went in to try and scrape up what was left of them.
