We came to Gross-Rosen. I remember at the station, we were met by Jewish prisoners in striped uniforms. They told us, “If you have anything, give it over quick, because you won’t be needing it…” We thought they meant we were going to be gassed, but they must have meant that the Germans would take everything we had, and if we gave these people our things, at least the Germans couldn’t take them. But we thought that was it, we were going to the gas chambers. We were ordered to strip. They put us in a little hall and we sat naked for three days and three nights, because Germans believed that people smuggled in gold and dollars in their bodies. Maybe there were people who did, I don’t know. When someone needed to use the toilet they took him outside in the snow, naked, and he would have to do his business somewhere where they could search. There was a kind of container, and there were Jews who used sieves to find out if there was anything inside. We sat for three days and three nights without food or drink. Cold.
After three days they concluded that everyone had vacated themselves. They put us in cold showers and made us run in the snow for about a mile. We stood in a hut and they threw each of us a pair of pants, a shirt, a strange sort of wool hat, and shoes. Clothes with stripes. In the middle of winter, freezing cold, but those were the clothes they gave us. We slept in a little hall, if you can call it sleep. One man sat up against the wall and the next on his legs and the third on that one’s legs, in rows and rows. If someone needed to go out to relieve himself, in the cold, he had to step on the other people’s feet, because there was nowhere to walk. He had very little chance of reaching the door. On the way people held it in, they didn’t want to go…but by the time they got to the door they didn’t need to go out anymore. Whenever someone made a noise, a kapo would come in and make us exercise — up, down, up down, with murderous beatings. That’s how the nights would go by. We worked in construction. The Germans were still building. Retreating on one end, building on the other. We were there for only two weeks. After that they sent us to Waldenburg.
In Waldenburg we lived in buildings. It wasn’t a large camp. Most of the people worked. There was a chemical plant there, and some people worked in construction at all sorts of places where they walked on foot, over five miles, every day there and back. In Waldenburg we worked at peeling potatoes. Next to the camp there was a bachelors’ residence house. There were Italians and Frenchmen working at the plant because the Germans were all on the front. They were salaried civilians, and so they had this sort of bachelors’ house where they lived, and whoever was able to get in there to work saw it as a boon, because the house matron was a Volksdeutsch, a Polish woman of German origin. Frau Paullina. She was very fair. Really, thanks to her my father was saved because his legs were very swollen, he was barely alive. She wasn’t so strict about work. She was really all right. Once in a while people were beaten, but compared to other camps it was okay. The thing is, they were always preparing for an evacuation. They thought we would have to leave at any moment. [Dad was lucky. All the auxiliary camps of Gross-Rosen were ordered to go on Death Marches. Waldenburg was an auxiliary camp of Gross-Rosen, but there was no Death March, probably by personal order of the camp commandant. People went out on the marches from all the camps in the area, even from relatively comfortable camps like Waldenburg. People who believed they had gotten through it all, that they had been saved, went on the marches days and hours before the war was over. Cut off from the world. Around them was utter German defeat, the Russians were in Berlin, no more orders were coming through, but the lines marched on, a small disconnected world where there were still orders and shooting and an ostensible direction. On an endless course — a line of ants with no nest. Marching. No food, no water, no rest. The lines marched on and on. One step after the other. No questions asked. March on. Nazi Germany had surrendered, orders had stopped coming, and prisoners were being shot on the side of the road. The cruelty did not melt away — on the contrary, it grew harsher, more extreme. In the row of ants, the people with the guns clung to the familiar. Only if they kept on marching would the safe world, the good world, remain. If they stopped even for a moment it would all disappear. A row of ants with no nest, and I see those who falter shot immediately, and the shooters wipe the blood off a rifle butt held too close. I can actually see it. A row of ants with no nest, and Dad, because of an anonymous camp commandant, back on his cot in Waldenburg, while around him prisoners set off to march.] The camp commandant told us there were SS units going from camp to camp and killing whoever remained. I didn’t hear it, but people told me that he said, “If they come here, everyone should run wherever they can.” He was simply…well…he was all right.
The end of the war was getting closer. We saw German civilians gathering around our camp in increasing numbers because they were terribly frightened. They were already throwing food into the camp and trying to tell stories about how they weren’t to blame, they didn’t know and hadn’t known. And then the eighth of May arrived. At two-thirty in the afternoon, the camp commandant closed the gates with a lock, threw the keys in and said, “Jetzt seid Ihr frei”—you’re free now. And he fled. And that was that.
We didn’t know what to do. People were frightened. We knew it was the end, but we didn’t know what to do with our freedom. People didn’t know what to do, they simply didn’t know. They were afraid to go out in case the SS arrived after all. We didn’t know what to do. So for a while we waited inside. After a couple of hours we broke open the gates and started running towards the main road. We got there at about four-thirty in the afternoon. That was when we saw the first Russian units. Russian troops rolled in on tanks. They had no food. They also had apparently not had much to eat. But people went into factories and houses and started eating. That was a disaster, because they got dysentery and food poisoning and had to be hospitalized. A lot of people died after that. Maybe it was my luck again that the Russians broke into a liquor factory — that’s what they were after. I went in there and filled some bottles with all sorts of drinks. And for some reason I didn’t think about food…I don’t know why. I took it all back and brought it to Father. Father drank a little and I drank some, and we didn’t have much strength left. We fell asleep. The next day we woke up and saw people vomiting, they were horribly sick. We realized that the little bit of drink had saved us.
Then we went to the German women. The German men were on the front, and the women wanted the people from the camps to come and protect them. We lived there for about two months. There were no trains, no means of transportation, so we couldn’t get back. And we didn’t know where to go back to. We lived there for about two months without doing anything. After two months we started to walk. We took a little wagon and loaded up a few things we had. At that time personal belongings had no value; when I needed a shirt I took one and threw away the old one. Who needed two shirts? In those circumstances, property had no value. So we took a wagon and loaded it with…I can’t even remember what, and we started to walk. There were some stretches where there were trains and some where there weren’t. When there were trains they were full. It wasn’t well organized like it is today. Everywhere we went, we saw Poles standing around saying, “More Jews have come back.”