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Play Movie4-Experiences in the Camps
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How many prisoners do you think were alive in Hemer?
There were supposed to be, well out of all of the camps there were supposed to 100,000 that lived through it. I have some friends who did live through Auschwitz, and other camps. Some of them never want to talk about it, and others can't talk enough about it. Some have never talked to their children about it, and they've made neurotic kids out of them because the parents didn't talk to them when they came back.
I sent out letters to 110 liberators/witnesses that came in 1989 to a ceremony in San Francisco. The list provided by the Jewish Community Resources Council listed more camp experiences next to your name than anyone else and so your story in terms of your experiences, at least those from the west coast. Talk about some of the other camps that you can remember, the labor camps, the concentration camps other than Hemer and Ebensee and Ohrdruf.
The few other camps that I was in were labor camps. What they would do with these people they would take them down on work details every morning. They were making ammunitions and military supplies for the Germans. They would get fed twice a day some gruel with maybe a potato in it, maybe, and ersatz coffee, that's imitation coffee. They would beat them if they didn't work and when they got too exhausted and sick. Sometimes they would throw them into the—the fire—the incinerators before they even died. But these work camps were just to get work done get them down to the point where they couldn't exist and then kill them, and be sure that there bodies were burned up so that there was no evidence of it. These people were... that's where that story of my friend Niso had been in these some of these camps, he died.
Can you recall some of the names of those camps?
No, I can't, I have them in my book under the major that wrote the history of our company. They are in my book so that there're identified.
There is a timeline in there?
Yes.
What was the prisoner's reaction to you coming in?
They didn't make any speeches. They didn't come up to us and thanks us or hugs us or anything. They wanted food and water and medical care. We weren't about to hug them. We were numb, and it didn't take much of that.
Did you have any contact with the German civilians?
Yes, I had a little contact with some and one day I had a couple hours off and I walked around this lake at Altmünster and Gmunden. It was a beautiful lake there—In fact, Hitler's retreat was up in the mountains up there in Berchtesgadens, I think they called it—and we were told that if we talked to any civilians that there would be a 75 dollar fine. So I wanted to talk to them I wanted to find out I walked up to a group of three young women, your age standing in their garden in their home, and started to talk to them and one of them said "Sorry there is no talking to American soldiers. You get a 75 fine, we can't talk to you." That's as close as I came. The other was woman—we took over a hotel, a summer resort hotel for our company and she was still around the hotel and one day I said to her, "Do you have children?" and "Yes, a son." I said, "Where as he during the war?" "Oh he was not a Nazi, not a Nazi." We had the run of the hotel. I open a closet there and I took out his hat—he was an officer in the Luftwaft, an SS officer, air force, and she was telling me he was not a Nazi. There was never a Nazi in any of these places, in the towns around there. We, the army, made them sometimes come into the camps to help bury the prisoners, and there was never a Nazi. They didn't know there was a camp a mile away, which you could have smelled, which you did smell, because the stench from the incinerators would float all over the city and the dust from the bodies that were being burned.
Where the incinerators still burning?
Yeah when we went in, yeah. Within a day they were still, still burning.
Treating Prisoners
Was anyone in the camps hostile to you not coming earlier?
No, no. They didn't talk very much, these people. They had nothing left to talk. They were just dying, and a lot of them died after we got there and a lot didn't get out.
Did you see any violence carried out by the prisoners?
No, but I've heard, I heard stories about it. I can't, I won't say that I didn't see it.
How about violence among the soldiers?
No, we were a medical outfit when we went into... there were no more German guards left just the results of their work.
What did you do to try and treat them was anything you learned in medical training useful?
Well there was a lot of on the job training, but useful in how to treat a sore, a wound or something. Penicillin was just invented—I guess you can say invented, in the end of 1944—and we were given penicillin powder to use on these wounds, and of course shots that you could give. But not much would help. What would you do if you saw whole barracks of people 70, 80 pounds who where already dying?
Where were the German soldiers?
They just fled down the road someplace, went out in the forest.
When they were there where did they stay?
Yeah, they had their own barracks there, which, of course, were nothing like the prisoner's barracks.
Where did you stay?
We would take over small hotel or houses adjoining the camps. I don't think I ever mentioned this incident of when I said about how we had to put guards about the gates so that they wouldn't get out. Well one day a flock—a flock—many of the prisoners with enough strength, broke through the fence and went down this big hill and there was a little farm at the bottom. I was watching them and they went down and there was pig and I just the whole group standing around them around this pig and they tore it apart, just tore it apart; there wasn't an ounce of blood on the ground, there was not a bone or anything; the pig was gone. That's how hungry, how they became animals and I don't use that worked critically.
Did they die after eating it?
I don't know
How did you get them food if they died after giving them too much?
Just gave them a lesser of a quantity and softer foods: soups, and puddings, and things that would digest. It was all hit and miss, you didn't know if that you gave them was right.
Did the medical techniques change as time passed?
Didn't stay there long enough. Several of these camps became displaced person camps. From there they actually had guards on the gates. And they were homeless, stateless people. The Red Cross or the joint distribution committee—the Jewish Organization—was trying to get them out, and give them help, and get them to Palestine, because Israel hadn't been created until 1948. There were a lot of people trying to help them, and not a heck of a lot got better enough to the point of being able to be moved.
And there were some good stories about a woman and her husband who still live in Texas that this guy was a tank corps and he went to the first building and there were women in that building. He said "does anyone here know how to speak English?" and she did. and I heard her speak, years later, and she said that she took him back in the barracks to see the women and he held the door open for her, and it was the first time anyone had held the door open for her in years. Eventually they got married and he nursed her back in hospitals and brought her back to this country. Then she would go out speaking for the United Jewish community and make speeches all over to raise funds for Israel, and for relief. There were stories like that.
Occasionally I've had fantasies that I should have—instead going home—I should have asked to stay there, to work in the camps. This is part of my guilt feelings. Seeing a bunch of bodies laying on the ground you absorb an awful lot of guilt. This is what I'm talking about when I say that the Holocaust was not an incident, it was a life experience, and it was bad. Do you have any further questions?
