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Oral history interview with Aron Zylberszac

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.1285.44 | RG Number: RG-50.149.0044

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    Oral history interview with Aron Zylberszac
    Transcript
    Mr. Zylberszac, reel one.
    You were born in which year, Mr. Zylberszac?
    In 1927.
    Whereabouts?
    In Lódz.
    What did your father do for a living?
    My father was a butcher, and we had our own butcher shop.
    Did he employ anybody?
    My brothers were working for us, and also family which come
    from the country, my cousins.
    How old were you when you left school?
    I was 12 years old.
    What kind of a school did you go to?
    A public school, which is not the same as here.
    A public school at home is a school which, I should imagine,
    elementary school which you got in England.
    Was it a school for people of all religions?
    Part time I went to a state school of all religions,
    but I also went to a Jewish school.
    What kind of work did you take up on leaving?
    Unfortunately, when I left, I--
    straight away the war was on, and I was working for my father.
    I was working as a transport, with a horse and cart delivering
    provisions for the ghetto.
    Now, could I ask you about relations
    between Jews and non-Jews in Poland before the war started?
    What were they like?
    I was a child at the time, and the only--
    the only contact which I had with the non-Jewish people
    was very little, except in the street.
    And at the part where I lived, in my block of flats
    for instance, the--
    I would say there was around 90% Jewish people,
    and there were 10% non-Jewish people, and with those people
    we had very good relations.
    They worked with the Jewish people together.
    And we lived in a very Jewish part,
    and it was more or less segregated.
    Had we gone out from this part to the non-Jewish areas,
    I think we would have found very much hostility.
    Did you personally come across anti-Semitism before the war?
    It was very visible, yes.
    In what form?
    In physical form.
    I, as a child, would go to school,
    and I would meet up with non-Jewish children.
    They would attack us, physically attack us.
    And we would have to defend ourselves.
    And obviously, those children who
    were unable to defend themselves were usually
    beaten up quite badly.
    But I don't know myself, looking back at it,
    that it couldn't happen in any place with little gang wars
    and things like that.
    I myself wouldn't know that because I
    was too young to understand at the time what was happening,
    whether it was just one little gang beating up another,
    a little fellow which they caught in the street
    or whether it was to do with anti-Semitism.
    What did your parents tell you about all this?
    How did they explain it to you?
    They felt that it was anti-Semitism
    and that the Jewish people were picked on.
    Did they try to give you a reason about why it was so?
    I explained to you, we were a family of butchers.
    And my father always told me since I
    was very young to stand up for myself
    and to try and defend myself as best as I could.
    Did you do that?
    At all times.
    Now, can you remember anything of the war breaking out?
    There was rumors that the war was going to break out,
    and the rumors straight away started off
    that they were going to kill the Jews.
    The Germans were coming to kill the Jews.
    And as a child, this was foremost in my mind.
    And any time this was mentioned, I
    felt like my mind was paralyzed with fear.
    Did you see anything of the fighting?
    No, I didn't see anything of the fighting at all.
    The only thing I saw is when the Germans came in to my town
    where I lived, and they came in actually like giants.
    I imagined it like in the Bible, like the giants,
    the Philistines when they tried to conquer Israel.
    And they came in, and the first thing I knew
    is when they broke down my door and they came into my place
    very early in the morning.
    I was still in bed.
    And they were asking us whether we have ammunition and weapons
    in the house, whether we were hiding anything.
    I remember lying in bed and covering myself up over my head
    with the blankets or whatever we were using at the time.
    Because I was so scared and paralyzed with fear
    from all the rumors which I've heard before they came in,
    I thought they were going to kill us there and then.
    Was anybody harmed by them?
    No, they just went through our rooms where we lived,
    and they practically destroyed everything.
    They took the bayonets and stuck it
    into everything which we possessed,
    and threw everything on the floor
    and were just looking generally for guns and ammunition.
    Once the Germans had taken over and you had these searches,
    did you see them on the streets regularly,
    or were they not prominent?
    The Germans were very prominent straight away.
    Not only the Germans, Poland was--
    in the town where I lived, Lódz, we
    had a very large contingent of German Volksdeutsche.
    They straight away took over the running of the town.
    The knew exactly where everybody was.
    In fact, Poland, Lódz, was divided
    into three groups of people--
    the Poles, the Jews who lived in my town, and the Germans.
    And I think they were divided into a third of the population.
    The Jews had 33%.
    The Germans, I believe had 33%.
    And I reckon the rest of them were Poles.
    So a lot of the administration was done by the Germans
    before the war.
    Of course, when the Germans came in,
    the German, the Volksdeutsche, took
    over the running of the town, and they
    knew exactly which part and what to do and where to go
    and which Jew had what, and they straight
    away started to harass us.
    They took our-- they took my father's business away.
    They didn't let them slaughter the cattle according
    to the Jewish ritual, which was forbidden by the German law
    by the penalty of death.
    And this is how--
    I see how the how it started all off, with a campaign of terror.
    Were relations between the Jews and the Volksdeutsche
    the same as between the Jews and the Poles,
    or were there any differences?
    There was a great amount of differences.
    The Volksdeutsche and the Poles were friends,
    and they had one thing in common--
    to do away with the Jews.
    And this sort of--
    and this sort of--
    In this way, the Poles and the Germans
    were united to do away with the Jews
    and to make more room for themselves
    and to take over the Jewish businesses in the same way
    as they did in Germany, I should think.
    And they were cooperating with the Germans,
    as far as I could see.
    I believe, myself, had not the Poles helped the Germans
    in every way they could, a lot more of our Jewish people
    would have survived.
    In what ways did the Poles help the Germans?
    They would tell them where the Jews were hiding.
    They would tell them who had some money which
    they could extract from them.
    They would tell them who was in charge of the Jewish community
    to give them information.
    They would tell them all the--
    they would give them all the documents,
    which they could have destroyed had they want to,
    where the Jews live and who was Jewish
    and who wasn't, which would have been
    very difficult for the Germans to find out.
    They give them information such that it
    made it very easy for the Germans
    to go around to every Jewish house
    and take every Jew away at random,
    like they did in Germany, which they had
    all the information themselves.
    Had the Poles destroyed that information,
    I believe, myself, that it would have been
    very difficult for the Germans.
    It would have made their task that much more difficult,
    and it would have taken that much longer.
    Polish Jews were distributed all over Poland.
    Every little hamlet, every little village had Jews in it.
    Had not the Poles helped them with documents
    and pointing out which was a Jew and which wasn't, it
    would have been much more difficult for them in this way
    to find all the Jewish people.
    What did the attitude of the Poles in Lódz
    seem to be towards the German occupation?
    Did they collaborate, or did they resist?
    There were some which resisted, obviously,
    like in every other country.
    But to my eyes as a child, I think
    that they did everything they could
    to resist the German occupation in their own way.
    Did you see any signs of collaboration by the Jews--
    by the Poles apart from collaborating against the Jews?
    There was always collaborators, and there was collaborators,
    I would say, amongst the Jewish people as well.
    Everybody wanted to live.
    Everybody, like in every other country,
    wanted to have that little bit of extra food
    or a titbit which the Germans could give.
    Nobody at the time, I would say, believed--
    I don't think anybody in the world
    would have believed that the Germans were such beasts
    and that the atrocities which happened could have happened.
    I don't think the Poles themselves believed it.
    The Poles, as far as I was concerned as a child,
    had too many Jewish people in Poland,
    and they didn't want them there.
    They just wanted the Jews out of Poland.
    They didn't want to kill them, I wouldn't--
    I would say.
    They just wanted them out of Poland.
    They didn't want them there.
    Before the war, had your family thought
    of emigrating from Poland?
    Not really.
    My father was born there.
    He had his business there.
    Like in every other country, he was brought up there.
    He was a good citizen.
    And I would say that he really wanted to live there.
    In fact, when the war broke out and he
    could see what was happening, he still
    didn't believe it that they would harm him.
    Because he was an upright man.
    Everybody knew him.
    We were a good family.
    And even the Polish people recognized that my father
    was a working man.
    He did his work, and he minded his own business.
    He didn't interfere with anybody,
    and I would say that he was a good citizen of Poland.
    Did you consider yourself to be Polish or Jewish or both?
    I considered myself a Polish Jew, being born in Poland.
    I couldn't consider myself otherwise because otherwise
    the Poles would have soon pointed it out
    that I wasn't a Pole, that I was a Jew.
    There was only one way you could consider yourself in Poland
    if you lived as a Jew.
    Of course, there were Polish Jews
    who assimilated like in every other country,
    and they were intermarrying with non-Jewish people,
    and they considered themselves as Poles.
    But it didn't help them much when Hitler came in.
    He pointed out three or four generations back
    that they were Jews and had to go back to their Judaism.
    In fact, I would say that those people suffered more than me.
    I suffered because I was a Jew, and I knew I was a Jew.
    But those people suffered.
    They didn't even know why they were suffering,
    which made it that much more difficult for them to survive.
    You said that your father's business was taken over.
    So how did your family survive afterwards?
    With great difficulties.
    My father used his horse and cart to work for people.
    We had a horse and cart to transport our meat.
    My brothers had butcher shops, and my sister had a butcher
    shop, and my father used to buy in bulk for all the three shops.
    So we had the horse and car to transport from one shop
    to the other the meat.
    And also my father used to go to the country with the horse
    and cart to buy cattle.
    So this horse and cart were used during the war and just
    after my father's business was taken away
    to transport things for other people.
    This is how we made a living.
    In fact, we employed, in the beginning, a non-Jewish man who
    lived with us in the same block of flats
    and worked for my father from time to time.
    And when the ghetto started to be closed,
    he tried to take our horse and cart out of the ghetto
    and keep it.
    And this is a man my father trusted with his life.
    In fact, it wouldn't be for one of my brothers,
    who was at the time with him, that
    in fact would have happened.
    At what stage did the Germans start
    to introduce laws and regulations restricting
    the activities of Jews?
    Oh, that happened as soon as they came in.
    Jews had to wear yellow stars.
    Jews had to wear white bands on their armbands.
    We in the Lódz ghetto had to wear a star, a yellow star
    on the back and on the front.
    Anybody who didn't wear the star was punished very severely.
    In fact, the first thing I saw when the Germans came
    in, and this is, I believe, was the campaign of fear in Lódz,
    on [NON-ENGLISH] Platz, which was called [NON-ENGLISH] Platz,
    they took a certain amount of people of Jews which they called
    at random and hung them up in the street by the neck and let
    them hang there for days and days and days.
    And they made most people go and have a look.
    Did you see it?
    I saw it, yes, as a child at 12 years old.
    It wasn't very far from us where the people were hanging.
    They were hanging there for days.
    And I thought, how could this happen in the world?
    I couldn't believe my own eyes.
    What does about [NON-ENGLISH] Platz mean?
    There was a place during the war that
    is like a marketplace, where the people used
    to come with their ware and displayed
    the ware before the war.
    During the war, they used to use it
    when the ghetto was shut for the transport
    to come in through the ghetto and where all
    the German administration was.
    I think that from the beginning to the end,
    there was a campaign of fear.
    They tried to terrify the people.
    One reason was that the people shouldn't make any uprising.
    The next thing was that the people
    should be so scared of them that they shouldn't do anything.
    As soon as they went-- as soon as a German went near us,
    we were so scared we'd become paralyzed.
    Because they started to hit us.
    He could take you and kill you.
    And there would be no retribution
    to him or to anybody else.
    There was no law and order.
    And as I said to you previously, this
    is something, the fear which we suffered during the war
    and in the last five years which will never
    come out on any tape recordings, on any writings, in any books.
    And nobody could write it down on paper.
    This is how I feel.
    Because most of the time the people
    were so scared of the Germans, not only the children
    but the grown-ups. You could see it in their eyes.
    You could see it everywhere.
    You could see a German come into the street where I lived.
    There was 1,000 people there, and all of them
    wanted to become invisible.
    They never knew which one is going to take out the gun
    and shoot for no reason at all.
    Did you have any unpleasant experiences yourself
    on the streets?
    Well, there was one unpleasant experience in my own house.
    As I explained to you from the beginning,
    we were people, butchers, and we were very strong people,
    and we didn't stand any nonsense from nobody.
    Even before the war, when the Poles started,
    we were a family who liked to defend ourselves.
    When the Germans came in at one time to our house,
    and they tried to interrogate my father because he slaughtered
    a cow according to the Jewish law, one of my cousins
    was there, who was the champion boxer of my town,
    and the Germans hit my father's face,
    and my cousin went for him.
    And he took out the gun, and he was
    going to shoot him there and then,
    and my father intervened and just held my cousin back.
    And I was there in the room, and I definitely
    thought that the German was going to kill my cousin there
    and then.
    Had it not been for my father putting himself in the way,
    he would have definitely shot him.
    So strength had nothing to do with it.
    People who think that they're brave and in a free world
    can't imagine when a man comes in with a gun to your house,
    and he puts it to your head, the bravest man has to give in.
    Otherwise, he gets killed.
    And there is nobody stupid enough to want to get killed.
    And at that time, my cousin could have taken the German--
    he was so strong-- and tore him into two people.
    When was the ghetto set up?
    The ghetto was set up in about 1940 something like that.
    I'm very bad at remembering dates.
    End of '39, beginning of '40, I would say.
    Whereabouts in Lódz was it?
    It was a place called Baluty, Balut.
    It was a place called-- it was a place where it was prominently,
    before the war, Jewish.
    I would say in that part, where they set up
    the ghetto before the war, it was 80% Jewish.
    And to that place they brought all the Jewish people
    from the west end, so to speak, of Lódz.
    And in the end, they brought all the Jewish people from all
    over the areas, the little towns and the villages.
    And they brought them in and made it so much overcrowded
    that there was nowhere to live.
    People lived in the streets.
    And did the non-Jews have to get out of Baluty?
    Yes, the non-Jews were taken out of the place.
    Was there a wall around it or barbed wire or what?
    There was a wall and barbed wire.
    There was barbed wire and a space and barbed wire.
    So if anybody was caught in between,
    automatically he was shot.
    There was no-- there was no question asked.
    He was caught in between the wires, they killed him.
    Of course, if he was caught going across the wall,
    they also shot him.
    A lot of people got shot trying to get food into the ghetto
    because there was great starvation there.
    There was no food at all.
    So there were guard towers as well?
    Guard towers all the way around.
    Dogs?
    Yes.
    The guards had dogs, and there was
    a bridge which we crossed from one side of the ghetto
    to the other.
    The ghetto was divided into two halves.
    And in the middle, the tram used to go through.
    Were you-- were you already living in Baluty,
    or did you have to move in?
    No, I lived all the time in the place.
    I lived in Baluty before the war.
    My part of the town was in the ghetto,
    where I lived before the war.
    So you stayed in the same flat?
    The same flat, yes.
    Of course, the flat at the time was
    shared with other families which came into our town which
    lived in the West end.
    We lived in one room, which was divided into four.
    We only had barely enough room to sleep.
    And at the time, my father took in another two families,
    relatives of his, and also slept with us on the floor.
    So more or less the whole place looked like a dormitory.
    And at night, you couldn't even go down to the toilet
    because everybody was sleeping on top of each other.
    Were you able to sleep under such conditions?
    Well, needs must, and I was really a small child.
    I don't know how it affected the grown-ups,
    but when I was tired enough, I should
    imagine that I slept all right.
    My most-- the biggest problem wasn't sleep.
    It was food.
    There was no food and just barely enough to exist.
    And thousands and thousands of people, before we even started,
    died of starvation.
    That was another policy of the Germans.
    In order to save themselves the bullets,
    they starved us to death.
    I would say that the campaign of the Germans
    was worked out scientifically from the beginning to end,
    and they were really very good at it.
    I would give them full credit for that.
    The campaign of fear, of starving us,
    of extracting all the energies from our bodies
    before we died from the strong people,
    I think they did an extremely good job of it.
    Can you describe the food that you had?
    It wasn't difficult to describe.
    We had a little piece of bread, which
    was enough for a mouse, I would say,
    and just a plate of soup, which was--
    which was like a root vegetable in water,
    which had no energy giving strength at all.
    And that we had to do a full day's work on.
    Everybody who didn't work in the ghetto, for instance,
    they took away, deported them.
    And after the war, we found out their fate,
    what happened to them.
    You said people are starving to death.
    Did you see dead bodies in the streets?
    Oh, that was a every day occurrence.
    I mean, the people who took away the dead bodies,
    there wasn't enough people working,
    workers there to be able to cope with it.
    In fact, some of my friends--
    I said to you before I was in the transport.
    Some of my friends were doing that job,
    and they were absolutely overworked,
    worked day and night to cope and couldn't cope with it.
    Thousands and thousands of people died in the ghetto
    before we even went into the camps.
    Where were the bodies taken to?
    Do you know?
    To a place called Marysin.
    There was a burial ground.
    Was that inside the ghetto?
    Yes.
    I believe some of my family was buried there as well.
    Even before we went away from the ghetto,
    two of my children-- of my sister's children
    died, and they were buried there.
    You said that people tried to get out to get food.
    Did you ever try to get out yourself?
    I was too scared.
    But I worked in the transport, and I worked with the food.
    When the food came in, I brought it
    in to the people in the ghetto to the main storehouses.
    And now and again I would find a potato in my truck or a radish
    or a cabbage, which helped out with the ration of food
    which I got.
    And in this way, I believe my family
    and I survived that much longer than the rest of the people
    in the ghetto.
    Was there any possibility of growing any food in the ghetto?
    There were people who grew food in the ghetto, who
    had got little bits of ground and grew food, which part of it
    had to be given back to the administration, and part of it
    was kept by the people.
    But you can imagine that there were so many starving people
    there.
    At night, they used to go and pinch the stuff,
    and the people who grew it could get up one morning,
    although they guarded it all night,
    and found that they had nothing from all the work they'd done.
    It was a matter of desperation.
    People would--
    Mr. Zylberszac, reel two.
    Out of desperation, people would grab anything they could find.
    People would dig up coal which was hidden in ground,
    because obviously this was another problem.
    The people in the ghetto had burned
    everything they could lay their hands on to keep warm.
    We had the most severe winter, I would say, ever
    happened in Poland.
    The snow on the ground and the ice was about 2, 3 foot thick.
    In my block of flats, I'm surprised
    that people didn't die of dysentery,
    because all the sewage and everything was all
    frozen up with the ground.
    I would say it was lucky that the ground was frozen.
    Otherwise, more people would die.
    There was no medicines.
    In the district where I lived before the war,
    there was no doctors.
    There was a qualified nurse, an unqualified doctor
    who used to go around treating the people.
    So I don't know how they cope with this part of things,
    because I should think that a lot of people
    must have died of all sorts of different diseases.
    And we burned everything which we could lay our hands on.
    I remember that my father chopped up his chopping block
    from the butcher shop, and his box in which he kept his meat.
    Everything got burned.
    There was nothing left.
    We had some wooden houses where people used
    to live in our blocks of flats.
    Even the houses were torn apart.
    The wood was used for burning and keeping warm and trying
    to keep alive.
    Everybody tried to live another day.
    Everybody was desperate.
    The desperation you could see in people's eyes.
    people who were friends all their life
    didn't even bother to stop and talk to you, to try and preserve
    the energy to live another day.
    And this is how it went on from day to day.
    Which was the worst-- suffering from hunger or from the cold?
    I would say the worst thing we ever
    suffered anywhere, right through during the war, I myself,
    for myself--
    I'm speaking not for others.
    I wasn't a big eater.
    I was only a small child, and I didn't--
    obviously, I was hungry at the time of the ghetto,
    but I wasn't as big an eater as my brothers
    and my father and my sisters.
    I myself suffered more of fear than anything else,
    which everybody else suffered from-- fear and cold.
    Because I was always frozen and cold.
    And up till today, I don't like the cold weather.
    I mean, I just can't stand it anymore.
    Did people actually get frostbite?
    People were frozen to death, not frostbite.
    People-- you could get up in the morning one day and find
    corpses lying frozen to death.
    It was so cold.
    It was unbelievable.
    And there was no heating.
    There's nothing to warm yourself with.
    There were so many difficulties in the ghetto.
    The administration was kept by a man called Rumkowski.
    A lot of people say that he was a nasty man,
    and that obviously he looked after himself and his henchmen.
    But I would say in desperation that he did everything he could
    for the people in what was the things which he could do with.
    He had a policy.
    He believed himself that if he got the people to work,
    the Germans would let them live.
    And this is how he tried to keep the people alive.
    But this wasn't the case.
    The Germans obviously used him as one of their pawns
    like they used everything else psychological to destroy
    the Jewish people.
    He was the kind of boss of the ghetto, wasn't he?
    That's correct.
    And he had his own police force.
    He had his own transport.
    It was like a state within a state.
    But obviously the Germans used him to get at us.
    Like I said to you before, the Germans
    had all the papers, all the names of Jewish people.
    The Jewish administration indirectly
    helped them in a way, which is unbelievable.
    Because if they wanted any Jews, the Jewish administration
    would give them all the documentation, where
    the Jews lived, who didn't work, and the Jews which
    were in prison or did any wrongdoings to the Germans,
    every sort of information which the Jewish administration had
    at the time, the Germans could just walk in and take it,
    and they had all the administration
    which they needed to carry out their beastly, beastly job.
    How much personal contact did you
    have with the administration?
    Well, I worked for the administration.
    I worked for the ghetto verwaltung,
    which isn't the ghetto verwaltung which run the ghetto.
    I work for the transport side of it.
    I brought in the food to the ghetto.
    As I explained to you in the beginning,
    everybody in the ghetto had to work.
    If you didn't work, they deported you.
    And now after the war we found out what the deportation meant.
    They deported you to a place called Chelmno, Kulmhof, which
    they used mobile gas chambers.
    One of my brothers was taken away in this way.
    This is called a Vernichtungslager.
    There were three sort of concentration camps.
    One was of a Vernichtungslager.
    One was an Arbeitslager.
    And there was a second--
    a third camp which was called a concentration camp.
    In the Vernichtungslager, they took you away,
    and they did away with everybody.
    They put you in a mobile gas chamber.
    By the time you reached your destination, you were dead.
    That was called a Vernichtungslager.
    An Arbeitslager was a camp which they took you away.
    They extracted the energy from your body
    until you couldn't work anymore, and then they killed you.
    A concentration camp was a camp which they took you in.
    The old people they gassed, and the children.
    And they did away with their bodies
    by burning them in crematoriums.
    The people who still had a bit of energy left in their bodies,
    they worked it out scientifically
    that three months by the amount of food which they give you, you
    would only last three months.
    After three months, you had another
    what they called selection.
    You were undressed in the nude.
    A German would come along, go through all the people,
    see who had still some energy left in the body.
    He would leave him to work until the energy was exhausted,
    and the rest of them would be taken back
    to the concentration camp, put in the gas chambers,
    as we know today, and then in the crematoriums and burn them,
    and the bodies were just done away with.
    Coming back to the ghetto, under these terrible conditions,
    did people go mad?
    We had, I should imagine, the biggest asylums in the world.
    But of course, the Germans didn't keep them there long.
    The people who were very sick and mentally disarranged,
    they just made a spare row.
    One day, they came along, surrounded the hospital,
    took them away, and that was the end of it.
    So this sort of people we never kept
    in the ghetto, not the very sick and not the mentally.
    Even I believe no reading, hindsight after the war,
    that the first people who the Germans practiced
    with the gas and the crematoriums
    were their own people.
    Germany, they took the German people from the asylums,
    and this is the first time they ever used the gas chambers,
    and did away with their own people before the war,
    or during the war when Hitler came to power.
    Did you get any help from outside the ghetto?
    No, not me personally.
    I believe some people did do some sort of business
    with the Poles.
    They gave them the last bit of money which they possessed,
    and they brought in a little bit of food.
    But I would say that the amount was negligible.
    Was there ever any such thing as resistance organization
    within the ghetto that you heard of?
    Well, we tried to resist as much as we could in our own ways.
    The people who worked tried to sabotage their work.
    But if anything was ever found, the people
    were very severely punished, and the punishment
    was usually death.
    They would take them away, and that would be the end.
    You never see them again.
    What forms of sabotage did you hear of?
    Mostly from the work which they've done for the army
    and for the ammunition and for things
    like, that putting in the wrong thing in the wrong place.
    In this sort of way, but there was never any physical--
    physical--
    Resistance.
    Resistance in the ghetto.
    What kind of work on the ammunition were they doing?
    Do you know?
    They were making the containers for the V1s and the V2s,
    and they were doing uniforms.
    They were making straw shoes for the soldiers.
    So they would put the shoes--
    both feet the same size or one foot longer
    than the other and things like that.
    Not very much they could do, really.
    It was more of a moral resistance than a physical one,
    that everybody felt that he was doing something
    to help for the Germans to lose the war.
    Was there any religious life in the ghetto?
    That's a difficult question.
    Because my own father, till the very end,
    I would say, did not want to eat any meat which wasn't
    slaughtered in the ritual way.
    In the end, of course, you had to give in,
    because it was just a matter either he dies or he eats it.
    And when it is a matter of life or death, by the Jewish law,
    you are supposed to--
    you're supposed to eat.
    It is, in fact, a good deed to do it.
    But the people who were righteous people, very
    religious people, were taken away, really,
    at the beginning of the ghetto.
    When the ghetto was closed, they deported them
    to camps, which we found out after they
    were Vernichtungslagers, and they did straight away away
    with their life.
    They were not strong people, you see.
    They were learned people.
    They used their head instead of their muscles.
    And the Germans didn't really need people who had brains.
    They just wanted energy, like machines,
    to use them for their factories.
    Instead of petrol, they used our bodies.
    And this sort of people, the religious people
    who used their brains, they didn't need them.
    So at the beginning of the war and beginning of the ghetto,
    in my block of flats, they were all taken away,
    and I never saw them again.
    Was there a functioning synagogue?
    The synagogue was blown up straight
    away when the Germans came into Lódz.
    One of the most beautiful synagogues
    you've ever seen in your life.
    As a child, I thought it was really the ultimate,
    and I believe after the war when people
    talk about the great synagogue of Lódz,
    everybody tells me that it was a great synagogue.
    It was beautiful.
    I, myself, have never ever seen one--
    because when you see it with a child's eyes,
    you see it different than with a grown man's eyes.
    But in my eyes, it was one of the most beautiful things
    I've ever seen.
    As soon as the Germans came in, they
    put dynamite in the synagogue and blew it straight up.
    I think that religious worship was forbidden
    by the penalty of death.
    So it was very--
    even if there was any, it was very hidden,
    and people couldn't really go out
    and pray like we do in England or anywhere else
    in the world, which is free worship.
    When were you taken from the ghetto?
    I was taken away in 1944, I think at the end
    of the closing of the ghetto.
    Can you describe what happened in detail?
    I will try.
    It was a very dramatic time.
    It was a very terrible time of my life.
    I lived all the time in the ghetto with my father and mother
    and some of my family, which was already taken away previously,
    like my sisters and nephews and uncles and brothers.
    My father and I and my brother worked for the ghetto transport.
    And we were still physically capable and strong people,
    and they needed a lot of strong people to clear out the ghetto.
    In fact, they needed about 300, 400 strong men
    to clear out all the ghetto and ship
    all the stuff from the Jewish people which
    was left behind to Germany.
    My brother and I and my father were picked for this job.
    But they wanted to take my mother away from us,
    so all three of us decided to go with the transport
    with my mother.
    And we went to a place called Auschwitz.
    We arrived to a place called Birkenau,
    where there was a selection.
    At the time, I didn't know, but now I
    know that one of the selectors was Mengele.
    And I would say that this was the most dramatic time
    of my life, when I was pulled away
    from my mother in this place, and from my father.
    I was at the time already 13, 14 years nearly.
    I was left there with one of my brothers
    who looked after me all the time,
    and through that brother which I survived.
    My mother was taken away from me,
    and my father was taken away from me in this place.
    And I never saw them again.
    One of the Germans in one of the camps afterwards,
    when we described my father, my brother and I,
    kept on humoring us, saying yes, he saw him in this camp,
    and he saw him in this camp.
    Of course, after the war, we found out that it was all lies.
    My father was killed in Birkenau with my mother
    when they arrived there.
    When I arrived in Auschwitz, as I explained to you
    in the beginning of the tape, the whole thing
    was a campaign of fear and terror.
    They took us into some bath.
    They undressed us in the nude, and it was dark.
    Now I believe that the crematoriums
    were too full for us to go into, because we
    were standing outside the crematoriums for hours
    in the nude, waiting.
    I didn't know what we were waiting for at the time.
    I thought in that waiting--
    and the fear was absolutely something
    which can't be described.
    After waiting for about 2 hours in the nude,
    some soldiers came with some sticks and dogs
    and chased us in the nude into an open, burning
    fire in the dark.
    And there was about 200, 300 people.
    And we were all running.
    They were beating us, and the dogs were chasing us.
    And I definitely thought that they
    were going to chase us into that live fire.
    It was an enormous fire burning there.
    As we got to the fire, they diverted us
    into another place, apparently which were showers.
    We took a shower, and they gave us a uniform,
    like a pajama sort of affair.
    It was freezing outside.
    We put on that uniform after the bath.
    And how we survived that, God only knows.
    It must have been meant that I should survive.
    And this is how I was deported from the Lódz ghetto.
    I stayed in Birkenau for about a month.
    Afterwards, I went to Auschwitz, and I worked there
    for about three months, in different camps
    which were part of Auschwitz.
    What was the difference between Birkenau and Auschwitz?
    Auschwitz, I would say, was more of a working lager.
    Birkenau was a Vernichtungslager.
    In Birkenau, they had all the crematoriums and the gas
    chambers.
    And it was everybody's ambition who was in Birkenau
    to get out of there.
    The longer you were in Birkenau, the more chance you had
    of ending up in the gas chambers.
    And it was due to my brother, who was an extremely strong man,
    that I got out of there.
    They picked my brother again to go to a working camp,
    to Auschwitz.
    And he pointed out to the German that he had a brother.
    And he was in two minds whether to take me or not,
    but seeing that my brother was such a strong man,
    he took me as well.
    And this is how I got out of Birkenau.
    Were you made to work in Birkenau?
    In Birkenau, we were not made to work, no.
    They were waiting, really, for the gas
    chambers and the crematoriums to become free to put you in there.
    Now I know that.
    I met one of my sister's children there.
    His name was Isaac, and we asked him to come with us
    and to stay with us.
    And he tried to persuade me to go with him,
    because he was not much older--
    I was not much older than him.
    He said that they were going to give him more bread
    and milk tonight.
    And if I should go there, I would get a piece extra bread
    and some milk.
    And now I found out--
    I found out afterwards that they collected
    all the young children.
    They wanted them all in one place.
    In the night, they came along with trucks and lorries.
    They took all those children in that block that same night,
    and they took them to the crematoriums and gas chambers.
    And all those young children on the age, they burned and gassed.
    What kind of ages?
    I at that time must have been getting on for 14.
    He must have been about 12.
    Anything under 12 at that time went.
    Were there very young children there?
    There was-- some of the children were four or five years old.
    And I believe after that, we never
    saw any children in the camp.
    I never saw my nephew again.
    What were living conditions like in Birkenau?
    Well, undescribable, really.
    I mean, when I describe to you that in the Lódz ghetto
    we slept very uncomfortable, and there were overcrowding.
    I mean, Birkenau, we slept on top of each other.
    There was no possibility even of turning around in the night.
    They were packing in as many people to one of those barracks
    as it was physically possible to do.
    Oh, I forgot to describe to you the arriving to Birkenau.
    I think I better do that because I
    think this should be on record.
    We were put into cattle trucks.
    We were put in, so many people into a cattle truck,
    that when I arrived in Auschwitz with those trucks,
    about a quarter of the people were suffocated, never
    even arrived alive.
    There was no space to breathe.
    There was-- it was unbelievable.
    And when we arrived there, they straightaway
    started to beat us and kick us to get us out of those wagons
    and terrify us again.
    Then they took us into one big barrack.
    There was one Jewish fellow who was obviously collaborating
    with the Germans, asking us whether we brought any valuables
    or whether we had hidden any valuables
    or whether we got any gold teeth or anything that they can
    extract, and they can extract them before and give them
    the valuables to save our lives.
    And if they found any valuables in any way,
    which was impossible even to get through
    because we were undressed in the nude,
    but some people might have swallowed some things
    or some things like that.
    And they tried to get those things from the people.
    And they said if they find anything,
    they're going to X-ray.
    They're going to do this.
    They're going to do that.
    And if they find some valuables, they're
    going to shoot us or kill us there and then.
    I didn't see any people going forward
    to say that they've got the valuables,
    but the speech this man made, if I had anything,
    I would gladly hand it over to him.
    It was so terrifying.
    And there's another thing which I
    think should go down on record which the Germans did,
    which I thought was very clever, now I can think about it.
    They took the German people.
    They put them in charge of the Polish people,
    the kapos, the Lagerführers.
    Then they took the Polish people and put them
    in charge of the German people.
    And I believe this was a campaign of terror,
    one against the other.
    They took the Hungarian Jews, put them
    in charge of the Polish Jews, the Polish
    Jews on the Hungarian Jews and played one up against the other.
    And in Auschwitz, the whole time while I was in Auschwitz,
    being a small child and having lived in Lódz all my life,
    I never saw any other Jews except Polish Jews.
    When I saw those Hungarian Jews who were in charge over me
    in Auschwitz and in Birkenau, I thought they were German.
    They spoke German.
    They behaved like German.
    And I definitely didn't think that there were Jewish people.
    I only found out that there were Jews in another camp.
    When I ended up with them in another camp,
    I found out that they were the same as us.
    They were Jewish people.
    It was a very clever way of putting one against the other.
    And this is the campaign of terror
    went on and on and on that way with all different tricks
    and all different ways.
    they would come along in the Lódz ghetto, for instance.
    They would surround the one street,
    and they would tell the rest of the ghetto that in this street
    live a lot of murderers, undesirable people,
    and we've got to get them out of there.
    Otherwise, the rest of the ghetto will suffer.
    And the Germans would come around, surrounded that street,
    clear out the whole street, and take them away.
    So there should be no resistance, you understand?
    Then they would come along to another street,
    and they would say, ah, this is the street
    where all the murderers lived, and we never
    found out until now.
    We got to-- got to do away with them to save the other people's
    life in the ghetto.
    They would do that.
    Then they would go to another street, another district.
    They would say, here live people who don't want to work.
    They just don't want to work, and we don't want
    people who don't want to work.
    Those people who don't want to work
    make it harder for the people who work.
    And therefore, you don't have enough food.
    They eat the food, and they don't work,
    therefore we got to take them away,
    and then you will have more food.
    This went on from one street to the other
    until they cleared out the whole ghetto.
    Did the tactics of trying to play off
    the Poles against the Hungarians against the Germans
    work in Auschwitz?
    In every camp I've been to.
    Most of the times, I must say, that the kapos which
    I have been to were professional criminals, murderers,
    which had green winkels on.
    The yellow winkels, the homosexuals,
    and the red winkles, which were the communists.
    In most of the camps, they were in charge over us,
    or the black winkels, which were the Gypsies.
    And they were extremely, extremely ruthless
    people who were the kapos.
    They would only put people in charge
    of a camp, such a person who had no remorse to kill anybody
    or to do away with your life.
    They were absolutely like robots, those people.
    A kapo would do the same thing in front
    of a German as the German himself.
    They would beat you to death.
    In Auschwitz, the kapos had what colored badges?
    The same as the criminals.
    They had either red winkels, green winkels, or black winkels.
    It means a corner.
    A winkel means a corner.
    They a corner like a mark on the side,
    which told you what he was, or told the Germans what he was.
    If he was a homosexual, he would have a yellow corner.
    If he was a Gypsy, he would have a black corner.
    If he was a communist, he would have a red corner.
    Only the Jews had the striped uniforms.
    I myself have a number on my arm, which is 9616B.
    Everybody who went out of Auschwitz,
    with the exception of a few select transport,
    were marked by a number on their arms.
    And if--
    Mr. Zylberszac, reel three.
    Select groups of people who came to Auschwitz in one group,
    they never even took the small children away.
    They never selected the women from the men.
    There was one of those transports, which was the metal
    resort, which I know of.
    Some of my friends who came to England
    who were in the transport.
    They took them because they were a very select group
    of people, very specialized people, in work of ammunition.
    And their skill was very much needed.
    Although they gave them a little bit extra food
    and kept them alive, I don't believe that their situation
    was too good either.
    But at least the small children and the older people
    survived with that group.
    Some of them did anyway.
    You mentioned the Gypsies.
    Did you see how they were treated?
    Well, as it happens, I worked in the transport
    in the Lódz ghetto.
    They brought in a group of Gypsies,
    which I transported from one place to the other,
    to one part of the ghetto, which was called Brzezin.
    They put a partition in that part,
    and they put all the Gypsies in that partition.
    I would say that those Gypsies, by the time they--
    there were several thousand of them.
    They treated them absolutely like rubbish.
    Their life was even--
    our lives were nil.
    But I think their lives were less than nil.
    By the time they left there, from that part of the ghetto,
    by the time they cleared them out, about 90% of them
    they killed in the ghetto.
    And about 10%, they took to Auschwitz.
    And I would say they must have killed them there.
    I don't think any of them survived,
    beautiful people with children and women and men.
    I would say they also never done anything to anybody.
    You mean beautiful to look at?
    Beautiful to look at--
    strong people when they came into the ghetto.
    I brought them in with my wagon.
    Oh, I brought some of them in.
    How were they behaving?
    Towards the-- towards the Germans or towards--
    towards-- how do you mean how were they behaving?
    Well, towards the Germans and generally.
    Very humbly and very scared, the same as us.
    They must have had the same treatment of being terrified
    by the Germans, as we did.
    Now I myself saw the taking the children
    and throwing them through the windows
    to load up the lorries when we took them away
    for the transport to Auschwitz.
    They were absolutely treated diabolical.
    You mean, the Germans threw children into the lorries.
    That's right.
    They threw Jewish children also into the lorries,
    from the windows.
    From the ghetto, when we took the children homes out
    of the ghetto, which I transported myself,
    they were throwing the children from the window
    onto the lorries.
    But the time some of the children got to the trains,
    they were half dead.
    And this is what we call a civilized human race today.
    So they had broken limbs?
    Broken limbs, broken arms, all sorts of things.
    Was the food in Auschwitz worse or better than in the ghetto?
    I would say for me it was worse.
    I only got one bowl of soup the whole day in Auschwitz
    and a little, tiny piece of bread,
    which I don't think anybody could survive longer
    than a certain amount of time.
    In the ghetto I had a chance of having a potato or a beetroot
    or a bit of cabbage left on my truck, which I could bring home
    to help the rest of the family.
    Before I started to tell you that my father and I
    and my mother and my brother were left in the ghetto.
    Now, every one of us had to work.
    My father was getting on a bit in age,
    but he was still a strong man.
    My mother was also getting on in age.
    Well, I honestly don't remember how old they were at the time.
    But they looked very old to me, being a child.
    Well, my brother and I took the task upon us
    to work their shifts.
    I worked on the transport.
    My father was supposed to use his horse and cart,
    working for the transport.
    I was looking after horses for the transport
    commission, the German horses.
    So what I used to do, I used to work
    at night looking after the horses, grabbed as much sleep
    as I could, and work during the day on my father's shift.
    So my father shouldn't work so hard
    with the amount of food he got, trying to keep him alive.
    My brother did the same thing for my mother.
    She worked in a feather place.
    So he worked in a laundry at night,
    doing his shift as a night shift doing the laundry.
    And during the day he worked for my mother's shift.
    They didn't care who worked as long
    as somebody did the work for the person who was there.
    Every person had to work to qualify for his food,
    for the ration, for a certain amount of food.
    If you didn't work, you get less food than when you did work.
    So this is how it went.
    And the people who didn't work got nine marks a week.
    I remember there was a song, which they used to sing.
    If you want a part, I can sing it for you.
    Yes, please.
    [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
    Meaning that the 9 mark, which you got,
    you should have really got it not only once a week
    but three times a week to be able to live.
    By the time you saw the postman, your eyes
    were already out of your head.
    And by the time you saw the money, you were half dead.
    There was a singer in the ghetto,
    he used to make up those songs.
    You know, all sorts of songs about the ghetto [NON-ENGLISH]
    and the lageralteste from the ghetto, Rumkowski.
    He wasn't really a lager.
    He was the eldest of the Juden in the ghetto.
    That was his title.
    That means that he was in charge of all the Jews in the ghetto.
    I think you brought this up in connection
    with comparing the food in the ghetto with Auschwitz.
    The food in the ghetto was that much better,
    I would say, than Auschwitz.
    In Auschwitz, they just gave you the minimum of food to survive.
    In fact, I believe that they worked it out
    that the average person could only
    survive three months because after three months,
    they had another selection.
    They undressed you in the nude again,
    and they made you go through another selection.
    And the people who didn't qualify that selection
    were taken back to Auschwitz, gassed,
    and burned in the crematoriums.
    So I figured out that they only worked it out
    that the people could only last three months.
    And by some sort of miracle, people lasted longer.
    So did you personally have that further inspection
    after three months?
    I had several inspections, several inspections.
    Every three months?
    Every three months, near enough every three months.
    In one of the camps it was six months in the beginning,
    but then every three months.
    We went through those elections continuously.
    In fact, I would say, if the war would have lasted another three
    months, most of the people which I was with
    would have all been dead.
    So how long did you say you were in Auschwitz?
    In Auschwitz, I was only about three months.
    I was working in a camp called Czechowice.
    And I was working for a factory called Vacuum and Oil Company.
    It was an English factory, ironically,
    which was taken over by the Germans.
    I believe they were producing oil in it.
    I wouldn't know.
    So you were taken from Auschwitz to Czechowice?
    That's right.
    And I worked-- it was a part, a camp which
    was part of Auschwitz.
    It belonged to IG Farben.
    Did your brother go with you to Czechowice?
    Yes, all the time.
    I was together with my brother right till near enough the end.
    My brother died in my arms on the trains, of dysentery.
    And it was only a matter of three or four
    weeks before the war ended.
    I myself, when they were collecting the dead bodies
    with the carts in Theresienstadt,
    I was so fed up in my life--
    I felt it was finished and there was nothing to live for--
    that I put myself on one of those carts
    with the dead bodies.
    And I went unconscious.
    When they took off the dead bodies, when they arrived
    there, they must have found that I was still alive
    and put me in a hospital.
    And when I woke up, I found myself in a hospital called
    [NON-ENGLISH] in Theresienstadt.
    So when you went to Czechowice, this
    was to do what kind of work, for you personally?
    I was a laborer.
    That's all.
    I wasn't trained to do anything.
    I was all the time a laborer.
    I was clearing out factories.
    I was clearing-- I was digging ditches.
    I was cleaning out tanks, the residue from the oil.
    I was unloading trains, trucks, lorries.
    I was unloading coal, dust, cement,
    which went on your lungs.
    And in order to survive, we pinched an empty bag
    from the cement.
    It was terribly cold at the time in Poland.
    And in order to shield yourself a little bit from the cold,
    we opened up the top of the bag from the cement, put our heads
    through and the rest of the hands through the sides
    in order to keep away some of the cold.
    Because we had no clothes.
    We were wearing, literally, a thin pajama.
    That's all we had in this most severe winter.
    How people survived, you're asking me today.
    I don't know.
    That people didn't die of cold alone was a miracle.
    Everything was a miracle.
    We were standing out there on appell.
    One person went missing.
    He died in the factory for some reason or another,
    never returned.
    They would keep the rest of the group outside in that cold
    for hours, looking for that valuable bit of merchandise
    which disappeared, which they put in the ovens anyway.
    They would keep us out there till some of the people
    dropped on the floor frozen to death, like lumps of ice.
    How we survived, nobody will ever know.
    How was the work supervised?
    By Jewish vorarbeiters and by Jewish foremen.
    One German would guard a whole group.
    Then they would have parties of six, seven, which
    they had their own vorarbeiter.
    Then they would have a group of about 20 groups, which
    would have their own kapo, which looked after all of them.
    They were very well organized, I would say, in different groups
    and in different--
    like an army of workers, with captains and generals
    and soldiers and sergeants and everything,
    and corporals as well.
    Was the work supervised in a brutal way or not?
    In a very brutal way, very brutal way.
    They extracted as much energy in a day as they possibly could.
    And some of the camps where I went--
    when I went back because everybody knew
    the final result, everybody wanted to live another day,
    people were carried back, literally, in the evening.
    We usually had about two or three miles walk to work.
    And people were literally carried back, fell into a heap
    in the evening, and in the morning somehow
    they got back again in order not to stop in the hospital.
    If they stopped in the hospital too long,
    there was usually a selection.
    The Germans would come around with trucks,
    pick up everybody from the hospital, take them away,
    and that was the end.
    I mean, there were so many things
    all during the time you were in the camps, which
    you had to guard from.
    I myself had to have a tooth extracted.
    I was a young boy.
    They took me in, held my arms, opened my mouth,
    pulled out my teeth.
    I nearly died of fright alone.
    I thought, God knows what they're
    going to do with two blokes holding me
    down, another one pulling at my mouth, just like savages,
    and pulled out my tooth.
    Because you complained to somebody of toothache?
    I had a toothache, yeah.
    Who did you complain to?
    To one of the people in the camps, to a vorarbeiter.
    How long were you at this factory doing the work?
    I was there, in this place--
    this was part of Auschwitz.
    This is part of my three months which I spent in Auschwitz.
    I would say that the whole time I was there
    in Auschwitz and in Czechowice and in all those camps
    before I went on the death march, which
    they called a death march--
    we marched from Auschwitz to Buchenwald.
    I was there about six months.
    And then the Russians come near, and they
    started to march us on this death march.
    And you've never seen so many people get shot.
    My brother at the time, who I keep
    on repeating myself and telling you, was quite strong still.
    And he carried me, I would say, for about 10 miles
    of that of that march.
    There was no way I could walk anymore.
    I begged him to leave me and let me lie there to--
    everybody who lay down, they just shot him.
    And you could walk on that march, as we were walking,
    there was hundreds and hundreds of people lying there,
    corpses all over.
    You were walking like in a corpse factory.
    We never thought that any of us was going to survive.
    Then I arrived in Buchenwald.
    Before we go on to Buchenwald, could I
    ask you about the march?
    Could you hear the approach of the front when they took you
    from--
    We heard the guns, yes.
    We heard the shooting when I was still in Czechowice.
    In fact everybody was in-- the Germans were, then,
    really in a panic.
    And some of the German kapos and people who were sick,
    they left them in the camp.
    And I saw that my brother, that we
    would play sick and stop there.
    But my brother was very much against it.
    He, I think, who was a bit older than me,
    had more sense than I had.
    Because after the war, I went back there.
    They told me that everybody who was left there got shot.
    They killed the lot of them.
    In fact, after the war, my sister and myself
    and one of my brothers--
    I don't know whether I should start again confusing you.
    In the beginning of the war, they
    said they were going to make Lódz judenrein.
    They were meaning that they were going to clear all the Jews out
    of Lódz, and they were going to--
    they called it Litzmannstadt, which was going to--
    Lódz was going to become the Third Reich.
    The Third Reich, meaning part of Germany.
    So they cleared the whole town out of the Jews.
    My father at the time was slaughtering a cattle
    the ritual way.
    They caught him, and they put him in prison.
    And because my father didn't want
    to divulge the person, the slaughterer who slaughtered
    the cow, because for this, for the slaughterer,
    it would have been certain deaths,
    they kept my father in prison.
    But my brother and I took the cart,
    and one of my sisters, my youngest sister.
    We went to a place called Kielce.
    The actual place we went to was a little village called
    Mniow, where my family had a--
    or my aunt had a very big farm.
    My brother went back with the cart,
    home, to look after my mother.
    My sister, and I stopped in this place.
    I just want to explain to you how
    many miracles we went through.
    My sister stopped in this place.
    And I decided that it wasn't for me.
    I was only very young.
    I was 12 years old at the time.
    I missed my mother terribly.
    And I didn't care at the time what was going to happen to me.
    I wanted to be with my mother and my own family.
    Although the aunt and the uncle were very close to us
    because their children used to stay with us,
    but I, for one reason or another I will never explain,
    decided I wanted to be with my parents.
    I took a little bag with me because we took all the parcels
    out of our home because we brought it to this village.
    My mother didn't have any more any under-gowns, nothing.
    I took the few under-gowns on my back,
    decided to walk to my town.
    Now that wasn't an easy task.
    From my town to the place where I was,
    I would say it must be 100 miles.
    I was 12 years old.
    So I kept on walking and walking.
    And a cousin of mine decided to come with me.
    Eventually we caught lifts, and we went on carts and all sorts
    of--
    we arrived in a place called Koluszki,
    which was the central station where
    the trains changed places.
    And we arrived there at night.
    And there was a sperre on.
    A sperre mean that it was forbidden.
    That closed up the--
    9 o'clock, nobody was supposed to leave the houses.
    Curfew.
    Curfew.
    Now we arrived in the middle of the night, and there were--
    we were supposed to get across a bridge, which the trains were
    going underneath.
    When we got to the bridge, we saw the soldiers
    guarding the bridge.
    When the soldier walked to one side, away from the bridge,
    we ran onto the bridge, ran across the bridge.
    The other-- we didn't realize there
    was another one on the other side-- started to chase us,
    started to shooting-- shoot at us.
    We ran into the first door, which
    we could master to get to.
    We opened the door.
    The woman let us in.
    She didn't realize we were Jews.
    She thought we were Poles.
    So she tried to help us.
    Of course, by the time we started to talk to her,
    she found out we were Jews.
    So she took away all our possessions.
    The few possessions which I had taken for my mother,
    she took them away from me.
    Just stole them?
    Well, I wouldn't say stole them.
    I was glad that she saved us from the Germans, I suppose.
    I was a child.
    It must have been bribery so that she shouldn't give us over
    to the Germans.
    I don't know.
    Anyway, maybe she stole them, as you say.
    I know I woke up in the morning--
    I had them under my head, in the morning they were gone.
    And we started making our way through Brzezin into Lódz.
    When I arrived in Lódz, the ghetto was virtually closed.
    I had to jump over the fence in Marysin,
    where there was the Jewish burial, where
    they buried the Jews.
    I went over the fence and made my way home.
    When my mother saw me, she thought it was a miracle.
    She couldn't believe her own eyes, that I, as a child,
    should make my way for so many miles to arrive home.
    Now what was I getting at?
    I was getting at that my sister, who stopped in that village,
    after the war I wrote to the men of the village,
    to the man who was in charge of the village, which they called
    the [POLISH] in Polish.
    He was like a--
    The mayor.
    The mayor of the village.
    And he wrote back to me a letter saying
    that all the people, all the Jewish people from that village
    were taken out to the woods, and all of them were shot.
    And there wasn't a single survivor.
    So this is another miracle, which we survived--
    or which I survived.
    So we were talking about the approach of the Russians
    to Auschwitz and the starting up of this death march.
    How did the Germans kill the stragglers, the people
    who couldn't keep up?
    They just shot them.
    As soon as anybody laid down, they took their rifle
    and shot them, and shot them dead,
    shot them through the head.
    That was the whole--
    you could walk for miles and miles and miles,
    and this is what happened on every step of the way.
    Every yard of the way, there was corpses lying, dead corpses.
    As soon as you sat down, you couldn't go any more,
    bang, finish.
    You could hear the shots going on and on and on.
    And some people, quite honestly, even if they could walk,
    just sat down.
    They had enough.
    They didn't want to-- they didn't
    want to carry on anymore.
    Were you provided with any food on the way and water?
    There was no water, and there was no food.
    We stopped in one place, in a cattle barn,
    where the farmer provided a few potatoes and jackets for us.
    Was he German or Polish?
    German, a German farmer.
    I think he was made to do that by the German authorities.
    They probably paid him for it.
    I don't know.
    I remember sleeping in that barn for a few hours.
    And then we were put onto trains on the German border.
    And again packed into the trains with such severity--
    in fact, I had some pictures which
    were taken there by some partisans during the war.
    When they opened up the trains, the closed wagons which
    we traveled in, half of them were dead, suffocated,
    when we arrived in Buchenwald.
    And then again we went through the selection, and the bathing,
    and the whole business all over again.
    Were people fighting each other in the wagons?
    Fighting?
    [LAUGHS] Nobody could lift their arms up.
    You can't even imagine.
    They were pressed in like sardines.
    Nobody could fight.
    Nobody could relieve himself.
    You had to relieve yourself as you were standing.
    You couldn't breathe, never mind fight.
    It was-- as I say, you can't put those things down on tape.
    It's things you can't write into books.
    It's things if you don't experience yourself,
    you will never know them.
    It's no good us saying that we're
    going to hand our thoughts and our experiences
    onto the next generation.
    I can't see that possible because the things which
    we went through, like in the trains, the experience
    in the trains, you were standing there like a sardine.
    If you want to relieve yourself, you
    had to relieve yourself in your trousers.
    When they opened up the wagons, you could just
    see people drop down.
    You were lying, actually, next to dead bodies.
    How can you put this down on tape,
    and how can you write about it?
    Who will believe you?
    How long were you in this train?
    We traveled for days in those trains.
    They were shinting us backwards and forwards
    and backwards and forwards.
    We must have been the most valuable possessions
    that the Germans had.
    They didn't let go of us.
    Every time they went back from the front,
    they took us with us.
    They counted us hundreds of times,
    like if you would count money, the most valuable possession.
    They would keep us on those appell places for hours.
    If one of the boys or one of the persons died in a camp
    or disappeared, we would stay there until half of the people
    froze to death before they let us in again.
    And of course, if anybody ran away and they caught him,
    there was only one place they could--
    they would take him.
    They would erect gallows in the middle of the camp
    and hang him.
    There was no court, no appeal, no nothing.
    And this was the campaign of terror, which they continued
    with the hangings and the--
    I myself think that periodically they
    did it on purpose to scare the people in the camp.
    For no reason they would select at random several people
    and hang them and show the rest of the people what
    they could do.
    Mr. Zylberszac, reel four.
    Was Buchenwald the same as Auschwitz,
    or were there any differences?
    Buchenwald was a working lager.
    It wasn't a vernichtungslager.
    I tried to explain to you in the beginning of the tape
    the difference between the three.
    Now, Buchenwald was a working lager.
    They selected people from Buchenwald
    to take to all sorts of different camps to work in.
    Again, I must emphasize to you that they only
    took the able bodies to extract the energy from them.
    I was in Buchenwald for a very, very short time, my brother
    and I. Again, my brother being still physically quite strong
    and big, they selected him.
    In every camp, he was elected the first.
    In actual fact, when a kapo or a vorarbeiter
    would select two or three people to unload a train,
    they would take my brother, himself.
    He was an extremely strong man.
    So when they selected my brother to go to Rehmsdorf
    again from Buchenwald--
    I found Buchenwald quite a good camp for me anyway.
    I came worn out from the experiences of Auschwitz
    and the death march.
    And I would say, in Buchenwald I recuperated.
    Although the food wasn't marvelous,
    we did get enough food.
    We didn't have to work.
    The sleeping accommodation wasn't fantastic,
    but it was better than in other camps which I have been in.
    So it was really like a convalescent home for me.
    What was the sleeping accommodation in Buchenwald?
    We were sleeping in the same--
    Hut?
    In every place we had huts, where we were.
    But the actual accommodation was pritsches,
    which they're called pritsches, which the English word would
    be bunks.
    In Buchenwald we slept, for instance--
    I'll give you the example so you know the difference.
    We slept eight to a bunk in Buchenwald.
    In Auschwitz, it was 16 to a bunk, to the same bunk.
    So there was no possibility in Auschwitz to turn.
    The same bunks we slept in in Rehmsdorf,
    which was a workings lager, we slept there about five, six
    to a bunk.
    So this was the different things which
    happened in different camps.
    In Buchenwald I found that I recuperated quite a lot
    and got some of my strength back.
    I was only there about four or five weeks,
    but in those five weeks, I believe
    I got quite a bit of my strength back.
    I would have never survived had I
    had to go straightaway to another camp
    without stopping the Buchenwald.
    Buchenwald was called a durchgangslager.
    What does it mean?
    A durchgangslager means a transit camp.
    Who seemed to be in charge at Buchenwald?
    Again, the Buchenwald people were there,
    German Jews which were there, I think, since before the war.
    And they were the hardened inmates
    who were in charge and running the camp.
    And I think that those inmates, because they were Germans
    and because they were there through the whole of the war,
    since before the war, had more understanding and more
    compassion than the ones which were terrorized
    and were hardened to try to survive.
    In fact, a lot of the inmates--
    I think I should put it to you that people should understand
    what happened in those camps.
    A man who was in charge of one camp, a kapo, a lageralteste,
    vorarbeiter, it was a vicious circle.
    When he came to another camp, they
    were told that he was a bad guy in this camp
    so he got beaten to death in this camp by the inmates.
    Then the people who were in charge in the other camp
    go to another camp, and the inmates beat them to death
    because they were the bad guys.
    Really and truly, it was--
    the work was done for the Germans
    without having to do it themselves.
    They put somebody in charge.
    They made him do all the terrible things.
    When he came to another camp, the inmates from the other camp
    killed him.
    Now in Buchenwald, a lot of people
    got killed by the people who were
    in charge of the camp in Buchenwald
    from all the other little camps which they came in.
    If he was a vorarbeiter, if he was a kapo,
    if he'd done anybody any harm in the other camps, the German who
    were there from before the war, the old inmates,
    the old haftlings they called them--
    we were also called haftlings, but they were all
    old campaigners, a lot of them.
    And they tried to explain to us the rules of the camps, how
    to behave to each other and not to do the Germans work for them
    because it didn't work because everybody
    wanted to live another day.
    And to be in a situation like this,
    you really have to be in it.
    I say it is easy for a man to be brave
    when he has a full stomach.
    You show me the biggest heroes today, put them all in a cage,
    don't feed them for a week, throw a loaf of bread
    in from the top, and you'll see how they kill each other.
    You can do this experiment yourself.
    Did you see any kapos beaten to death?
    Oh, several times.
    People who came from the Lódz ghetto to Auschwitz,
    the chief of police, the man, the criminal, the most
    notorious criminal, which was called Janek Szmadnik,
    took a belt around his neck.
    And he lifted him up by his head--
    he was an extremely strong man-- and he hung him there and then.
    And this is what went on.
    In one camp you were a criminal, in the other camp
    you were the most up to--
    upstanding man.
    This was the unfortunate thing about the whole thing.
    Even after the war people got killed by other inmates
    because they were doing-- they thought that they
    were doing terrible things.
    Myself, I think I wouldn't blame too much those people.
    I think they were put in an impossible position
    to do an impossible job.
    You mean the kapos?
    Yeah.
    And if they didn't do their job the way
    the Germans wanted it done, they would kill them themselves.
    It's like the Sonderkommando.
    They got a job to stand near the ovens and burn the bodies
    and chase the people into the crematoriums.
    Now, if they didn't do their job,
    they were chased into the crematoriums themselves.
    So I don't know what choice they had.
    I don't know how many people would be brave enough
    to go into the crematoriums themselves
    or chasing their own relatives.
    I myself wouldn't like to be the judge of those things.
    So you were taken from Buchenwald to Rehmsdorf?
    A place called Rehmsdorf, yes--
    the most terrible camp I have ever been to.
    That was definitely the worst camp you could ever go to.
    I was there with about 600 other inmates.
    And I believe at the end of the--
    I think it is now been proved by people
    who have studied the camp and have written books about it,
    that I think about 70 or 80 people survived,
    maybe not even as many as that, from 600.
    Why was it so much worse than Auschwitz?
    The work was extremely hard.
    I worked in a place called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    [NON-ENGLISH] was a place which we were digging under the sand,
    making bunkers for the Germans to hide their equipment
    and hide their ammunition and disguise all these things which
    they possessed.
    It was working in a sand quarry.
    In a what?
    Sand quarry.
    You had to work all the time.
    And with the amount of food you got,
    there was no way anybody was going to survive longer
    than a few months, no way.
    And actually, my brother, that's where his strength
    was sapped out from his body.
    I mean, there was nothing left anymore after that.
    And I myself was already near enough finished.
    Of course, there was dysentery also going around in that camp.
    A lot of people died of dysentery.
    But even the people who didn't die-- when we arrived,
    300 of us, they took 300 away.
    That was three months before, they arrived, the other people.
    They took them away, never been seen again.
    Anybody who got taken away--
    you were scared to get ill.
    You were terrified.
    I mean, it was the most terrible thing in a camp,
    when you got ill.
    What happened when you got ill?
    They took you into the sick house, which
    was called the sick place.
    And you might stay there a week or two weeks,
    and nothing would happen.
    One day you could be taken in there,
    the same day a whole German group
    would come around with trucks around the sick house.
    Everybody in the sick house would go on the trucks, finish.
    You were dead.
    So there were so many things you had to avoid and be scared of
    and dodge.
    I mean, I remember being in Czechowice, in that camp,
    going back to Czechowice.
    We were 300 Polish Jews there, old campaigners so to speak.
    We lived already three, four years with the Germans
    in the war.
    And about 300 German Jews arrived straight
    from Germany, strong men.
    I mean, we already couldn't get out in the morning to wash.
    We did our little best.
    We knew how to scrounge and hide.
    And they got up in the morning before us,
    started to do exercise, washed themselves
    with the cold water of the troughs which
    used to be left where the horses used to be.
    We all had to go out and wash themselves.
    We stayed in a barn there, where they kept horses
    before the war.
    So the troughs were the water was for the horses were still
    there.
    The German Jews used to get up in the morning,
    get out there, wash themselves, clean themselves,
    do the exercise.
    We already knew that every little bit of energy
    in our body we had to save to live another day.
    They didn't realize that.
    After a month, they disappeared like flies.
    I've never seen a group of people
    disappear quicker than those people disappeared.
    When we marched out of that camp,
    I can't think of any who survived from it.
    In fact, from Czechowice, from the camp,
    there were 600 people.
    I know myself that about three survived.
    And one of them is the famous writer,
    who wrote the chronicles of the Jewish--
    of the Lódz ghetto, called Lucjan Dobroszycki.
    He was together, in fact, with me right through the war,
    in the ghetto.
    And he was together with me in Czechowice.
    He was together with me in Buchenwald.
    He was together with me in Rehmsdorf.
    And he was together with me in Theresienstadt.
    We went right through the ghetto.
    I, by accident, met him when he came here after the war
    to publicize his book or--
    and by some unknown miracle, he recognized me.
    I didn't recognize him, I must say, you know.
    But he recognized me, and we spoke.
    We never got a chance to spoke very much because he went back
    to America.
    But one day I still have to talk to him because he--
    I think that he was just a year or two older than me,
    and he might know just a little bit more than I know
    and probably several things which I missed.
    And he probably, with a memory like his, would remember.
    You spoke about the dysentery at Rehmsdorf.
    But had you had dysentery before in the other camps?
    Or was this different?
    Rehmsdorf was some sort of disease, some sort of dysentery
    where people fell like flies.
    There was no water.
    That was, I think, part of it.
    And the water which we got, because there was an oil
    factory, was soaked with oil.
    And the bombing which went on--
    Rehmsdorf, I think is part of Dresden.
    And Dresden was severely bombed all the time.
    And every time we started to work in the factory,
    the planes came over and bombed it again.
    So there was no water.
    And of course, the little drop of water which they had,
    the Germans kept for themselves.
    So the water, which we tried to drink
    was all soaked up with oil and with sewage and everything
    else.
    Everybody in the camp had dysentery.
    And unfortunately, my brother caught it.
    And this is the disease he died from.
    He faded away to nothing.
    A man who was a giant died like a skeleton.
    I had him in my arms when he died.
    And there was nothing I could do.
    Thinking back of it, I sometimes have--
    I sometimes blame myself that he had to do so much for me
    to help me that he didn't survive.
    I think if he would have saved some of the energy
    to use it for himself, maybe he would have had
    a better chance of surviving.
    So when were you move from Rehmsdorf to Theresienstadt,
    right at the end of the war?
    At the end of the war, when the Germans already
    felt that they lost the war.
    In fact, the war was already lost.
    There was terrible panic.
    And again, we went on the trains, which were taking us
    to Theresienstadt.
    But all the trains--
    again, this thing you can't visualize because the Germans
    had to use the trains for moving troops and ammunition
    and all sorts of things.
    And I can't understand for the life of me,
    the most important things to the Germans was to move us.
    Why they didn't leave us where we were
    and move their own soldiers?
    We had priority over everything.
    They took us, the skeletons, the dead bodies on the trains,
    trying to take us to Theresienstadt.
    I don't know at the time where they wanted to take us.
    On the way there, either the Americans or the Russians
    came along, smashed the trains to smithereens.
    We run-- the people who could--
    I would say about 60% of the people
    were killed in the trains.
    By the bombs?
    By the bombs.
    I know that for a fact because I ran away to the woods
    with several other people.
    And when I came back, some old man in the woods caught us.
    He was a man who guards the woods.
    Forester.
    A forester.
    He had his old gun.
    He was about 99 and 1/2.
    There was about 10, 12 of us.
    If we would have blown strong enough,
    we could have blown him over.
    And he said to us, if he doesn't find the rest of the group,
    he will just have to shoot us.
    This is the mentality and this is
    the way they were brainwashed, the Germans,
    that we were some sort of disease
    or some sort of rodent which they had to get rid of.
    He would shoot us if he can't find
    the rest of the transport which we ran away from.
    Another miracle, he walked with us a mile or two,
    and we found the trains which we ran away from.
    And there were thousands of bodies
    sprayed all over the ground there
    because there weren't only people from our camp.
    They attached the trains to several people,
    from Buchenwald, from all sorts of different camps.
    And the left me there to load up the bits of the bodies
    onto the train.
    I loaded up heads and arms and all sorts of limbs
    to the train.
    We loaded up wagon loads of bits from people to take away.
    And then I was marched on to the rest of the group.
    We caught up with them.
    And from there I was taken into Theresienstadt.
    Was Theresienstadt any better?
    Oh, yes.
    When we arrived in Theresienstadt,
    we could already see the people who lived there.
    Theresienstadt, again, was a model camp.
    It was a camp which the Germans kept especially
    for the Red Cross people, to bring them there.
    They kept a few old people, a few children,
    and a few of the dignitaries which were half Jewish,
    people who had some influence in Germany before the war.
    And they kept them there.
    And if they had to take the Red Cross to a camp
    to show them how the inmates live,
    they took them to Theresienstadt.
    And the people there were that much better fed.
    And although they didn't have too much food,
    they had much more food than we did.
    And when we arrived there, it was
    straightaway we had medical attention
    and all sorts of things which we never had before.
    What kind of medical attention?
    Doctors, nursing-- we seemed to be--
    I, myself, I explained to you in the beginning, I was finished.
    I just lay down as dead.
    They took me off the cart, put me into the hospital,
    and treated us straightaway quite well, even
    before the end of the war.
    It was only a matter of a few days.
    But if it wouldn't be for this medical attention, which
    we received straightaway, I think
    quite a few more people would have died, quite honestly.
    But the difference between the Czech people
    and the Polish people was so terrific and so enormous
    that it moved us all to tears.
    When we arrived in Czechoslovakia,
    the Czech people were so overcome.
    They've never seen anything like it in their life.
    Although they didn't have too much food,
    the bit of food which they had, they threw at us bread.
    They threw at us food.
    Whatever they could, they threw it us to--
    of course, if the Germans who marched us saw it,
    they shot them.
    But they didn't care, the Czech people.
    They tried to help at the time as much as they could.
    I have got no words for them which will praise them enough.
    I thought it was--
    after what we went through, the most horrific thing
    which you could ever see.
    Did you see any of them shot for giving food to you?
    Not personally, but I was told by my friends
    that they saw some of them being shot.
    They were shooting at them in our presence,
    but I didn't actually see anybody hit.
    And while I was--
    I think this should also go down on record.
    While I was still in Rehmsdorf, which was part of Dresden,
    they shot down some airplanes there.
    And while the people were still sitting
    in the parachutes, the soldiers, the German soldiers
    were shooting at them and killing them.
    So they were just beasts.
    That's all I can tell you.
    When I looked at a German soldier,
    I didn't look at him as a human being.
    I looked at him like a wild animal,
    like a man who looks at a beast who's
    going to eat you or kill you.
    Whenever they went near you, you wanted to become invisible
    so that they shouldn't be able to tread on you
    and do away with you like you do away with an insect or a bug
    or any creature which is repugnant to you.
    It's unbelievable that a race who were that cultured
    should have stepped to such a low level.
    It proves to me one thing, nobody
    will convince me that any race in any people
    can't step down to the same level.
    I definitely believe that if you're
    given the conditions of certain conditions,
    that any human being can be made to do anything.
    Whilst you're at Theresienstadt, did you
    realize that the war was finishing?
    No.
    No.
    I must say, no.
    You know, it's difficult for people
    to understand that we become morons.
    I became a moron.
    I wouldn't say "we" because I can only speak for myself.
    I knew the war was coming to an end.
    But never in my wildest dreams did
    I ever think that they would let us live.
    In fact, they prepared everything, in Theresienstadt
    even, at the last minute, not to leave any evidence,
    I was told after the war.
    It's only some sort of miracle that the camp commander
    of Theresienstadt wanted to save himself,
    that he went to the Russians, to the commander of the--
    give some message over to the Russian commander what
    was happening, and they came and liberated the camp.
    Otherwise, there would have been no survivors
    in Theresienstadt either.
    Can you remember the Russians coming into the camp?
    Oh, yes.
    I personally can't remember, but I was in hospital at the time.
    But there was terrific joyous occasion for everybody.
    And they-- I think they behave towards us
    in a fantastic manner.
    I have got no words but praise for them.
    Myself, I caught typhoid straight away afterwards.
    Somebody I knew during the war came in also sick to the camp,
    and there was no beds.
    So I let them sleep in my bed.
    And from him I caught the typhoid.
    And we were both taken away to a Russian hospital.
    And the nurses and the medication
    and the treatment and everything they give us
    was the best they could, in my opinion.
    They never spared nothing.
    They showed us only kindness.
    The only problem they had, I should
    imagine, they released a lot of the people
    too early because they had so many sick people,
    which they-- and very small accommodation for them.
    I went down too early from the hospital
    after typhoid and my mind collapsed.
    And I remember telling my friends all sorts of things,
    that I wanted to go home.
    And then I imagined in my mind that my family is at home,
    and they're all waiting for me because my mind didn't
    want to accept, after the war, what happened.
    I was ready with the cases to go on the train
    to go back to Poland.
    Two of my friends, who are now here,
    Meyer Cohen and Charlie Lewkowicz, stopped me,
    took me off the train, and said, you know, don't-- you know,
    tomorrow.
    They humored me, that I'll go another day.
    But then you very well that I wasn't well in mind.
    And thank God through them that I came to England.
    How long was it before you got back to normal?
    It was-- it must have been only a short time.
    And in fact, I remembered all the things I said.
    All my family has died except some cousins who survived.
    And when the Russians let me out,
    it was very difficult at the time,
    if you didn't have anybody you stuck together with.
    I found myself a room, and I locked myself in that room.
    I was physically unable to get out of bed to go and get food.
    And by the time my friends, Chaim Lewkowicz, and Meyer
    Cohen found me, I must have already been, not unconscious,
    but out of my mind.
    And they found me again in the nick of time,
    and they brought some food for me.
    And slowly, slowly I recuperated and come back to my senses.
    Did the experience in the camps leave any long-term effects
    with you?
    Well, it's 40 years after the war.
    I don't know whether you call it long.
    Mr. Zylberszac, reel five.
    When you ask me about the long-term effects,
    I don't know, after 40 years after the war,
    I still wake up in such a sweat that I'm completely
    soaked with perspiration and I'm scared to go back to sleep.
    I wake myself up.
    And I just don't want to go back to sleep,
    because I don't want to get back into the dream which
    I was dreaming about.
    I think it's left us permanently scarred.
    We'll never forget.
    We live in a country here now, obviously
    which is a peaceful country.
    And we, most of us, have become good citizens I believe.
    But this will never leave us.
    So the dreams are of you being back in the camp?
    Permanent, all the time.
    Not so often now, but in the beginning it was terrible.
    But now, now and again, we get together.
    We talk about it.
    You fall asleep, and you talk to yourself.
    You say, you know, I'm living in England.
    This can't happen.
    You know?
    And here, you've got the Germans marching,
    and everything is happening again.
    And you wake up completely wet.
    I have to get out of bed, change my pajamas,
    and change my vest and everything.
    I'm soaked to the skin.
    Even the stuff which I'm covered with is absolutely soaked.
    Did the camps leave any long-term physical effect
    with you?
    Well, it will always be something which
    is very difficult to assess.
    After the war, I spent five years in different sanatoriums.
    I was in Ashford.
    I was in Kennington.
    I was in different--
    I should imagine in every hospital in the country here.
    I was in Leeds and in Leeds infirmary.
    I was in [PLACE NAME] for a long time, for many years.
    We went to Cambridge for X-rays.
    I'm still under the London hospital,
    under Dr. Wheeler, which I have been for 40 years.
    He's still looking after me.
    So when you say long-term effect,
    what is the long-term effect?
    I'm still under medical supervision
    after 40 years after the war.
    I got a list of hospital cards as long as your arm.
    In fact, if you want a recitation,
    I'm sure I can give you one--
    every hospital in the country, different things,
    which mostly it is my chest, obviously, which
    was more affected than everything else.
    And I put it down that we had to shovel
    loose cement, which went into your lungs, into your nostrils.
    And you could hardly breathe.
    Sometimes you felt like you're being suffocated,
    to unload train loads of loose cement.
    What about your attitude towards life?
    Did it change your attitude towards life?
    Well, it's a difficult question, really.
    I don't know what my attitude would
    have been to life had I not gone through that experience.
    I would say that it made me into a much more--
    a person who thinks quite a lot of what
    is happening in the world.
    I'm not a frivolous person, who takes things lightly.
    I'm much more serious than I would have been.
    What about your attitude towards the Germans as a result?
    Well, let's say we will never forget what happened.
    But you can't hate all your life.
    Hate destroys yourself.
    I found that out in the beginning,
    when I was in hospital and had so much hate in my body.
    It takes a long time to get your hate out of your body,
    like a disease.
    I would say now I can take it or leave it.
    I would like to believe that I don't hate anymore because hate
    destroys the person who hates.
    The person who you hate doesn't know you hate him.
    It's only you, yourself, who hate, who gets the pains
    and the aches and the heartaches.
    Coming to the question of the camps in general,
    do you think that the experience that people had in the camps
    made them more or less religious?
    Some people more religious, some people less religious.
    It's difficult. It's a personal thing between you
    and your mind and your outlook on life.
    Some people felt that, because of the religion
    and because of their belief, that they survived.
    And it made them much more religious.
    Other people thought that there is no God at all,
    if he could stand there and look and see how his people suffer
    and put them through all those tortures.
    Which category did you come into?
    I would say I'm in the middle category.
    It's easier to believe than not to believe.
    I'm a traditional Jew.
    I brought up my children in the same way.
    My father always said, and he taught me,
    and I learned still quite a lot since I was a child that you
    have to know and teach your children to know everything
    you possibly can.
    Whether they're going to keep it,
    whether they're going to believe in it, it's up to their own,
    to their selves.
    But you should teach them, and they should know.
    They should know your religion.
    And they should know of the world everything you possibly
    could teach them.
    And I'm a great believer in that.
    I believe you should teach your children
    what is happening in the world, of your religion,
    or what happened before and your history, like everybody
    else who teaches their children their own history.
    You've described many cruel experiences
    that you had at the hands of the Germans.
    But did any of the Germans ever carry out
    any act of kindness towards you?
    Not to me personally, no.
    I've never wanted to go that close to a German,
    quite honestly, to find out whether he's going to carry out
    any kindness towards me.
    Because if I felt if I ever went that close to a German,
    that my life was very much at risk,
    like a beetle who would go and ask kindness
    from a foot which might step on it.
    That's how I felt towards the Germans all during the war.
    I tried to avoid them as much as I could.
    Wherever I had a chance, I wanted
    to be as far away from them as I possibly could.
    In fact, when I was marching to work,
    I always tried to get in a group,
    to get as far away from the guard who was guarding us
    as we could, my brother and I, because we
    saw that we had that much more chance of surviving.
    Because for some whim in his makeup,
    he could just take the gun and shoot you
    because you weren't marching straight, or looking straight
    where you were marching, or doing
    something which he disliked.
    No, I would say I would like to stay away from the Germans
    as far as I could.
    Speaking generally about the camps,
    can you say something about-- further about how people
    behave towards each other?
    Was everybody just struggling selfishly for himself,
    or did you get people who sacrificed themselves?
    You see, there were several categories
    of people in the camps.
    There was people, educated people.
    I want you to understand that.
    And I want it to be on record the way I saw it.
    Those educated people were not physically made
    to carry out any physical work.
    They were no good to the Germans.
    They didn't need people who were clever.
    They need people who had still some energies in their body
    which they could extract from it.
    But there was a few of those people,
    which they used those clever people to keep their books,
    to keep checks, how many people died
    and how many people are still alive.
    So they kept a few of those people going.
    Now I would say that those people who were that clever
    and were with us in the camps, they
    understood what was happening.
    They had compassion.
    They were the good people.
    You understand what I'm saying?
    Now those good people were no use to the Germans anyway.
    They didn't last very long.
    They didn't have the physical strength to survive.
    In the beginning, when those people were about,
    there was some compassion.
    There was some way which those people would
    try and help or do what they could,
    a good word, a kind thing.
    Not so much-- they couldn't give you their food
    because they didn't have any food themselves.
    I'm going to say a very unkind thing about myself now.
    The people who survived were animals.
    They were taught to live like animals.
    They were taught, if they don't have
    any bread they're not going to survive, like a lion in a cage.
    If he saw a bit of bread, he would grab it.
    He didn't care whose bread it was,
    whether it was his mate's bread or whether it was his bread.
    In the end, there was no compassion.
    Everybody tried to live another day.
    If you had a brother and you were close together before, you
    know, a close family, OK, you would look after each other.
    Once my brother died--
    I'll tell you a little instance.
    In my block of flats where I lived, there were bakers.
    We were butchers.
    There was bakers.
    There was cold merchants.
    I lived in a very big block of flats.
    There were 300 tenants.
    Every tenant had one room.
    It was a poor district.
    Now when my brother died, the baker's son,
    who was a very close friend of mine before the war,
    he survived.
    When my brother died, I still had a little piece of bread.
    It was between me and death, that piece of bread.
    And you better believe it, because if you had no bread,
    there was no way you could survive.
    The German dished out, before we started from that barn
    where we slept, they dished out everybody
    a little piece of bread.
    And everybody cut up a tiny little bit
    and had a little tiny bit with a water or something.
    And every day and every little while,
    you had a tiny little bread.
    Everybody wanted your little bit of bread.
    So what we did, we paired up in pairs.
    In case you fell asleep, the other one
    was guarding the piece of bread.
    Because if you had no bread, you were dead.
    So I trusted this fellow.
    And I said to him, look, there's the two of us now.
    If I fall asleep, you guard the bread.
    If you fall asleep, I will guard the bread.
    At least we will try and keep alive.
    We still got-- you got a little piece,
    and I got a little piece.
    We'll be all right.
    Because when he fell asleep, I guarded his bread.
    When I fell asleep, I woke up in the morning,
    I never saw him till today, that man--
    completely disappeared.
    But for the grace of God that I survived because this man
    was between me and death.
    Now this is what happened in the camps.
    Everybody, even your closest friend tried to survive.
    It was as simple as that.
    We became animals.
    They really and truly, in the end, dehumanized us.
    That's what they wanted to do, and they have
    achieved their achievement.
    They absolutely dehumanized us.
    They made us into animals, to wild beasts.
    You said that you paired together with a mate.
    Did you have a special name for the mates
    with whom you paired with?
    We called him [NON-ENGLISH].
    He was like a partner to you.
    He was your [NON-ENGLISH].
    And if your [NON-ENGLISH] was a crook, you were dead.
    Do you understand?
    Lots of the pairs worked out.
    I would say about 90% of the people who paired up
    worked out.
    It was only 10% who were rotten.
    They weren't rotten.
    They tried to save their own lives.
    Did you, when you were in the camps,
    did you think that you'd survive?
    Never.
    Never one minute did I thought, even at the end
    when the Russians came in, I still
    couldn't believe it in my mind that it is true, that I
    was alive and the war is over.
    It was unbelievable.
    Nobody could believe.
    I mean, we thought we would live like rats
    for the rest of our life and die like a rat.
    That's what we did.
    Everybody-- I would say that the biggest
    thing, because I survived, was because I
    lived from day to day.
    I never worried what is going to happen in two months
    time, in a month's time, or two week's time,
    or in two day's time.
    I only want to survive today.
    I only wanted enough water for today
    and to keep out of the Germans eye today
    that he shouldn't see me and to be in a position
    where I should be unnoticeable, where
    the German authority or the kapos or the lagerfuhrers
    wouldn't get at you and that you had
    a better chance of surviving.
    Once you got a beating, a real beating,
    you might as well just--
    they might as well kill you because you could never
    recuperate and survive from it.
    And I've seen several boys for no reason he brought in.
    He might have--
    I saw-- in Tschechowitz they killed somebody
    in front of the whole, of the whole camp.
    Well, he did a silly thing, I think myself.
    He had no-- he brought some shoes from Auschwitz.
    They left us the shoes.
    Now his soles on the shoes went, you know.
    So they wanted to resole the shoes.
    So what he done, in the factory you called it [INAUDIBLE]..
    They thought it was sabotage.
    He tried to save his shoes.
    He took a belt, which was running on a machine.
    He cut a little bit of the belt off, enough to have two soles,
    and he shortened the belt. And of course,
    if you shorten the belt, it keeps on snapping.
    He worked at the machine.
    The belt kept on snapping.
    And they found out that he took a bit off
    to make a pair of soles on his shoes.
    And they hung him in front of the whole camp.
    How old was he?
    He was about my age.
    At the time he must have been about 17, 16.
    You said earlier on about the Lódz ghetto,
    about the Germans claiming that they
    were clearing a particular street because of murderers.
    But was there much crime in the ghetto?
    I think there was as much crime in the ghetto,
    more so than in normal places.
    We had our thieves.
    Obviously everybody wanted to live.
    And people were pinching food.
    There was no monetary gains.
    Nobody wanted to gain prestige and have diamonds
    or gold or anything else.
    The whole-- everything which was stolen was food--
    bread, potatoes, coal, and things like that.
    Like I mentioned before, people who were growing their food,
    people would go at night and try and pinch it.
    And this is the sort of thievery which went on.
    But otherwise, I don't think there was much crime there.
    But what about murder, did that occur?
    Did you hear of murders?
    Not to my knowledge, I don't think so.
    You didn't have to murder the people.
    They died themselves.
    There was no-- people usually murder each
    other for gain of possessions.
    I mean, there was no gain of possessions.
    And we didn't go as far in the ghetto as eating human flesh.
    The only time where I saw people eating human flesh
    was on the march from Rehmsdorf to Buchenwald,
    which we were together with the Russians.
    And the Russians were cutting off lumps of the dead people
    and frying it and eating it to survive.
    This was from Buchenwald to Rehmsdorf?
    Yeah.
    But I never saw any Jewish people doing that, I must say.
    Doesn't matter how hungry they, they never did that.
    The only time I ever saw it myself--
    it might have been happening, but I didn't see it--
    but I was together at the time with the Russian soldiers,
    prisoners of war.
    And they were treated just as bad as us, maybe worse.
    And they were literally cutting off
    lumps of people, of the dead people,
    and cooking it near that forest which we were bombed.
    And they were eating it.
    Did the camp experience make people speak of Zion
    much more than they had before?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    We all wanted just to have our own country.
    We never wanted things to happen to us,
    what happened during the war.
    We wanted to have a place of our own.
    And we didn't want anybody any more
    to take us to the slaughter like little sheep.
    And there and then, a lot of people
    decided that, whatever happens, they'll never
    let that happen again.
    And I think a lot of people have become very adamant about that.
    And I think this helped to unite the Jewish people to get Israel
    back again at any cost.
    Had your family shown much interest in Zionism
    or any other kind of politics before the war?
    Yes.
    My brother was-- the brother was with me in the camps,
    he was a Zionist.
    He went out on campaigns to collect money
    and to eventually, I suppose, go to Israel.
    But obviously, my father wouldn't hear of it.
    He was born in Poland.
    He had his business there.
    He had everything, his life there.
    He had his whole family there.
    My father used to say, what would the Germans do to me?
    I haven't done them any harm.
    Why should they do me any harm?
    He was a simple person, I suppose, in his own mind.
    He lived under the Germans previously,
    and they were very good to him when they occupied Poland
    before.
    And he couldn't understand in his mind,
    and he couldn't reason why they should all of a sudden
    turn on him when he hasn't done anything to them.
    Of course, this wasn't the case.
    There was a campaign of hate against the Jewish people,
    which was drilled into the Germans
    by Hitler and his henchmen.
    And it can be done to any nation at any time,
    if the government decides to give fire or fuel to the fire,
    propaganda in any direction they decide to do it.
    If tomorrow this government here--
    Mosley gets into--
    Mosley isn't here anymore, but the fascists or Tyndall,
    or whatever his name is, gets into power and tells
    the English people that the biggest
    disease which they suffer from is the Jews, and it's easy.
    Believe me, it's easy.
    And I don't blame anybody.
    If I tell you that tomorrow we will
    take all the Jewish possessions and give it to you if you join
    me, there'll be a lot of people joining you because everybody
    wants something for nothing.
    This is how life is.
    I would just like to add a few things about my family
    before the war, and I'd like just to be on record.
    Before the outbreak of war, I lived in Linowska 8
    in Lódz, in Poland.
    I lived there with my parents and my brothers and sisters.
    One of my brothers, the oldest one, his name was Welwel.
    The youngest one was Isser, and myself.
    I had three sisters.
    One of their names was Zlato.
    The other one, the middle one was Rivka.
    The youngest one was Chana.
    My oldest brother had one son, which his name was Chaim Isaac.
    My older sister had four sons and one daughter.
    It was the first son was named Yossel.
    Then was Welwel.
    Then was Mordecai.
    Then was Menhir.
    My oldest brother had a son called Chaim Isaac.
    My sister, Rivka, had one son and one daughter.
    The son was called Isaac, who I previously
    told you I met in Auschwitz for the last time, which I saw him.
    She had a little daughter called Yercha.
    She was a lovely little girl.
    My brother-in-law's name was Szislawski, Meyer.
    Never saw him after the war.
    My sister, Chana, was unmarried and lived with my parents,
    and so did my brother, Isser.
    I went to school with my brother, Isser, who
    was two years older than me.
    We had our own butcher shop before the war.
    My brother, my oldest brother had his own butcher shop
    before the war, and so did one of my sisters.
    Apart of the aforementioned people, only one of my nieces
    survived, who was in Russia.
    There was rumors that one of my nephews survived.
    His name was Yossel.
    We wrote to the Red Cross, and they wrote us back
    that the last they saw of him was in Sachsenhausen.
    And this is the last we heard of him.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Aron Zylberszac, born in 1927 in Łódź, Poland, describes his family; his education; the relations between Jews and non-Jews; the German occupation of Łódź in 1939; the role of the Volksdeutsch; the collaboration of Poles with Germans; the survival of his family after the confiscation of their business; the public execution of Jews; German behavior towards Jews; the creation of the ghetto in 1940; the overcrowding and starvation in the ghetto; suffering from cold; the ghetto administration; the fate of deportees; cases of madness; the lack of contact with the outside; attempts at sabotage; religious life; the destruction of the synagogue; being sent to Birkenau in 1944; being separated from this parents; Kapos; the treatment of Romanies; the atrocities committed against Jewish children in the Łódź Ghetto; the contrast in food between the ghetto and Birkenau; being sent to Auschwitz; the food and selections; working in a factory; being sent to Buchenwald in January 1945 and the journey there; conditions in the camp; the killing of Kapos from other camps by inmates; being sent to Rehmsdorf (Troglitz) in 1945; working in sand pits; the necessity of conserving energy in the camps; the pollution of the water supply; being sent to Theresienstadt in April 1945; the Allied bombing of the train during the journey to the camp; being liberated; the German use of camp for propaganda; the generosity of Czechs towards inmates; the attitude of Russian liberators; the psychological impact of being released; the long term effects of incarceration; the impact on his religious beliefs; the behavior of German guards; crime in the Łódź Ghetto; cannibalism amongst Russian POWs; and details of his family.
    Interviewee
    Aron Zylberszac
    Date
    interview:  1985 December 23

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 sound cassettes (90 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    Restrictions on use. Permission to copy and/or use recordings in any production must be granted by the Imperial War Museums.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Zylberszac, Aron, 1927-

    Administrative Notes

    Holder of Originals
    Imperial War Museum
    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The interview was conducted by the Imperial War Museum as part of their retrospective oral history interview program. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired a copy of the interview with Aron Zylberszac from the Imperial War Museum in February 1995.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:17:31
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    Oral history interview with David Cordley Bradford

    Oral History

    David Cordley Bradford describes being a civilian third-year medical student treating inmates of Bergen-Belsen in 1945; joining the Red Cross relief team; arriving at Bergen-Belsen; the layout of the camp; the removal and disposal of dead bodies; the use of Bengal famine mixture; attempts to treat inmates; medical facilities; diseases suffered by inmates; his attitude towards the condition of inmates; the risks of infection to medical students; the sight of rooms full of inmates’ belongings; the three kinds of diet for inmates; the reaction of inmates to VE day; the psychological condition of inmates; the condition of block leaders; the lack of help from inmates; the state of the camp on arrival; the lavatory facilities; attempts to keep inmates warm; visiting Brunswick (Braunschweig, Germany); the degree of medical knowledge required for the job; and arranging for his return to England.

    Oral history interview with Leslie William Clarke

    Oral History

    Leslie William Clarke describes being a medical student at Barts and volunteering to treat refugees in Europe; treating inmates of Bergen-Belsen in 1945; the arrangements to go to the camp; his prior knowledge of concentration camps; the journey to Bergen-Belsen; the accommodations in a former German Army camp; the meeting before entering the camp; the camp layout; the role of the British troops in the camp; the use of Hungarian troops; Hut 240; the state of the inmates; the lack of reaction from the inmates in May 1945; the reaction of German nurses to the conditions; types of food given to the inmates and the death rate; the confiscation of inmates' property by Germans; the issue of clothing to inmates; the nature of the crematorium; the unpopularity of block leaders; the story of Germans making inmates wait in the snow; the medical work they carried out; the state of camp sanitation; the weather conditions; his reaction to working in the camp; his daily routine; the mental conditions of inmates; the guards’ duties throwing corpses into mass graves; the ceremonial burning of the last hut; and visiting the devastated Brunswick (Braunschweig, Germany).

    Oral history interview with Norman Maynard Clark

    Oral History

    Norman Maynard Clark describes being a correspondent with the News Chronicle in North Africa from 1941 to 1943; being sent to North Africa in November 1941; being transferred to the front-line at Agedabia, Libya; his escape from the Afrika Korps attack at Benghazi, Libya in January 1942; his arrest by Brigadier John Crystall for mixing with New Zealand other ranks in a Cairo bar on December 24, 1941; his period of inactivity on the Gazala Line from January 1942 to May 1942; why German attack at Bir Hakheim should not have been a surprise; the nature of fighting at The Cauldron; his opinion of Free French stand at Bir Hakheim; his impressions of General Claude Auchinleck; the cooperation he received from army; the preparations for the Battle of El Alamein in 1942; patrolling with the South African armored car squadron in the Qattara Depression; the South African 1st Division; his reaction to the sight of destroyed German tanks at Alam Halfa in September 1942; a briefing received from General Harold Alexander; going west with Axis forces in November 1942; his attitude to life in the desert and the morale of 8th Army; meeting General Montgomery; being a correspondent with the News Chronicle in Italy in 1944; conditions at Monte Cassino in January 1944; covering the Anzio landings in January 1944; first German prisoners at Anzio and the nature of the fighting; Churchill’s attempt to blame war correspondents for rumors of withdrawal at Anzio in February 1944; the attempt of Wynford Vaughan Thomas to record nightingale at Anzio; being a correspondent with the News Chronicle in northwest Europe from 1944 to 1945; landing in Saint-Lô, France with Cornelius Ryan; being the first to enter Mont St Michel; encountering drunken Ernest Hemingway; covering the pursuit of Germans to Le Mans and Falaise Gap; General George Patton’s explanation for why Falaise Gap was not closed and Patton’s opinion of the French forces’ contribution to the pursuit of Germans; entering Paris, France August 1944; the war correspondent’s base at Hotel Scribes; the treatment of collaborators in Paris; Vichy Milice opening fire at Hotel Crion in August 1944; being with American forces on German territory in September 1944; the degree of threat from German forces during the Battle of Bulge in December 1944; the capture of a German senior officer in his staff car in spring 1945; the liberation Ohrdref, Buchenwald, and Edenwald concentration camps; the initial problems upon contact with Russians in May 1945 in Bohemia; meeting with Norman Baillie Stewart in his cell in Altausee, Austria in May 1945; how war correspondents operate; his narrow escape from being killed by a German soldier in Trier, Germany in 1945; his visit to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, Germany in June 1945; being a correspondent at the Nuremberg War Trials in Nuremberg, Germany from 1945 to 1946; the key role of Maxwell Fyfe as cross examiner; the quality of judges; the impressions made by Albert Speer; the organization of executions; the suicide of Hermann Goering; and the demeanor of Rudolf Hess.

    Oral history interview with Arthur Thompson Cook

    Oral History

    Arthur Thompson Cook describes being a second-year clinical student at St. Thomas's Hospital and being sent to assist at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945; the students having some clinical experience; the condition of his allocated hut; the removal of dead bodies; setting up a clean hut for likely survivors; cleaning the inmates; the physical condition of inmates; prevalent diseases; difficulties with feeding inmates; an inmate who acted as an interpreter; relations between Russian and Polish inmates; risks of infection to medical students; burning of huts; details about the camp; seeing piles of inmates’ property; conditions when his time at the camp was over; sight-seeing in Germany after working in the camp; and his attitude towards Germans.

    Oral history interview with John Roger Bertram Dixey

    Oral History

    John Roger Bertram Dixey describes being a final-year medical student at Barts Hospital in the spring of 1945; volunteering to assist refugees; being sent to treat liberated inmates in Bergen-Belsen; the accommodations in the SS barracks; the medical administration of the camp; first seeing the camp; contact with British troops; conditions in the huts and the disposal of bodies; the physical condition of inmates; the behavior of inmates; the use of DDT; the failure of the Bengal mixture; nationalities and ages of inmates; skin diseases; the use of Hungarian POWs; the inmates’ clothing; the changes to the camp during Dixey's period there; the reaction of local Germans; the ceremony when the camp was burned down; the facilities at the local German hospital; the effect on inmates of their experiences; the death rate; and the retaliation against guards by inmates, but not seeing any physical retaliation.

    Oral history interview with Premysl Josef Dobias

    Oral History

    Premysl Josef Dobias describes living in Sudentenland, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) from 1919 to 1938; his family and their religious and political backgrounds; his education; the relations between Germans and Czechs; living standards and freedom; relations with Communists; his personal politics; the attitude of Czechoslovakian fascists; the relations with Jews; Francophile attitudes; relations with neighboring countries; visiting Berlin, Germany before the Munich crisis and the Czechoslovakian reaction to the Munich crisis in 1938; his involvement with the Czechoslovakian Resistance from 1939 to 1941; contact with senior British civil servant Charles Fish, who was sympathetic to Czechoslovakia; the beginnings of the resistance to Germans; the sight of Germans moving into the country in March 1939; German restrictions against Jews; the degree of collaboration with Germans; the start of the war and the organization of a resistance group; narrowly escaping from the Gestapo and being arrested in January 1941; being interrogated in Prague, Czech Republic; being transferred to Theresienstadt; being an inmate of Mauthausen from May 1941 to May 1945; the train journey from Linz to the camp; the characters of his fellow prisoners; beatings by the SS; arriving in the camp; being assigned to work in the granite quarry; the hospitalizations for foot infections; receiving aid from a Polish officer; witnessing the murder of inmates; how he became a Blockschreiber (in barrack number 3) and his job counting prisoners during the appels and keeping tally of the dead; the injection of gasoline into inmates’ hearts; the danger of knowing too much; aid given to him by fellow Czechs after witnessing the injection of inmates; being transferred to the main camp and his role as interpreter; the arrival of women prisoners in the spring of 1945; aid given to an English female inmate; the contact with British agents; the murder of Jewish inmates by throwing them down into the quarry in 1942; meaning of term “Muselmann”; the mutual aid amongst inmates; the Jehovah's Witnesses in the camp; the resistance organized by inmates; the story of a Czech inmate who was able to crack safes; an attempted mass escape by Soviet POWs; the degree of contact with surrounding population; the liberation of Mauthausen by US troops in May 1945; revenge taken on Kapos and the US soldiers’ stopping lynchings; the forcible repatriation of Russian prisoners; returning to Czechoslovakia and resuming his education; giving evidence at post war investigations of German war crimes; the nature of the medical experimentation on inmates at Mauthausen; the effects of being imprisoned; and the German government’s compensation for former inmates.

    Oral history interview with Andrew Ernest Dossetor

    Oral History

    Andrew Ernest Dossetor describes volunteering as a final-year medical student to treat liberated inmates of Bergen-Belsen in 1945; reasons for spread of typhus from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen; the overcrowding in the camp; witnessing how the female inmates humanized after a few days; the disposal of dead; the evacuation of huts; Dossetor's recovery from typhus; the especially bad conditions of female inmates; the medical students' accommodations; reprisals against guards; the fate of inmates’ valuables; camp collaborators; relations between inmates; the psychological disorientation of inmates; the attitude of inmates upon the arrival of liberators; the attitude of inmates to death; the disposal of the dead; the background and age of inmates; the medical problems experienced; the attitude of liberators to inmates; the smell of the camp; the status of medical students in the camps; and his attitudes towards war.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Fennell

    Oral History

    Stanley Anthony Fennell describes being a sapper with the Royal Engineers in Great Britain and North Africa in 1943; being called up for military service in 1942; his transfer to the Royal Engineers in Great Britain in 1943; his opinion of German engineering skills; clearing minefields in North Africa in 1943; the youthfulness of some troops; the use of earth moving equipment; his operations as a sapper with the 23rd Field Company, Royal Engineers in Italy from 1943 to 1944; the effect of Salerno experience on Anzio landings; the conditions in Naples and the behavior of Italian civilians; the change in US attitudes towards the British; night fighting techniques; the vulnerability of Sherman tanks; the German assault on Anzio beachhead and the air war over Anzio; action at Caracetto; the bravery of stretcher-bearers; the ill treatment of German POWs; the reticent attitude of regular soldiers; being captured by Germans in Anzio, Italy in 1944 and his experiences as a POW; being sent to Rome and the hostility of Italian civilians towards POWs; being sent to a transit camp at Nola, Italy then PG 82 Camp in Laterina, Italy; being sent to Stalag VII A, Moosburg, and Stalag VIII B, Lamsdorf in Germany; experiencing problems after eating Red Cross parcel food; seeing Dachau concentration camp; physical state of German guards; an example of Nazi repression and the power of the Nazi party; US Air Force raids on an oil refinery; the hostility of Poles towards British; air raids; the reception of news of D-Day; bomb disposal work carried out by Jewish camp inmates; the POW protest at Nazi salute requirement; Company Sergeant Major Charles Coward’s work for POWs; reactions of POW to war news; seeing Auschwitz concentration camp inmates and Germans shooting stragglers; marching west from Stalag VIII B in 1945; the reception for British POWs by Czechs on arrival in Czechoslovakia; receiving medical treatment for his foot injury; signs of the approaching end of war; the contrasts between of RAF and US Air Force bombing techniques; survival during the march; escaping the march and hiding in a barn; being discovered by a German and receiving sustenance; a German deserter; receiving aid from a German family; being liberated by the US Army and returning to Britain in 1945; American troops behavior towards German POWs; the journey home; the reception by the Women’s Voluntary Service; the psychological impact on Germans of POWs receipt of parcels from home; and the lessons learned from the war.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Finigan

    Oral History

    Thomas Finigan, born in Portsmouth, England, describes his background; his father being in the military; attending school in Egypt between 1925 and 1939; being an apprentice tradesman with the Royal Engineers in Great Britain from 1939 to 1943; joining the Royal Engineers in July 1939; training as a carpenter; the manufacturing of duckboards; the Hawkins grenade; the reasons for the issuing of pickhelves instead of rifles; his opinion of trade training; the reasons for turning down of his application to join airborne forces; being a sapper in the 85 Field Coy, Royal Engineers beginning in 1943; the equipment he carried and the sleeping arrangements; an accident with a Bangalore Torpedo at Studland Bay; the minefield casualties amongst the unit; the confidence prior to D-Day landings; the transit camp at Chandler's Ford; studying maps of beaches; the uselessness of metal detectors on D-Day; security arrangements at Chandler's Ford, changing money, and watching newly released films; the fatalism of unit’s NCO; their embarkation at Southampton on June 1, 1944 and returning to port on the 5th; his memories of D-Day: crossing the channel, the collision between his landing craft and another going into the beach, hitching lift on an armored car blown up by an anti-tank gun, the role of the “Byng” force and its fate, and clearing the beaches of mines; the casualties to German S Mines and the origins of mines they disabled; the German use of booby traps; laying of tracks for vehicles; the use of rafts and storm boats; the smell of dead men and animals in Falaise Gap in August 1944; the handling of German POWs; the evacuation of British troops with minor medical complaints; the surrender of German cyclists to unit on banks of the River Seine in August 1944; the system of handing over bridges to military police; the lack of contact with French civilians; the congestion on the roads in Netherlands during Operation Market Garden; the relations between officers and other ranks in the Guards Armoured Division; the construction of artillery range; crossing the Rhine in March 1945 and capturing a Hitler Youth member; visiting Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp; fraternizing with German children; being a sapper with the 8 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers in Palestine from 1946 to 1947; his duties; the wounding and capture of Zionist minelayers; operations as a warrant officer with 34 Field Squadron, 37 Army Engineer Regt, Royal Engineers in Cyprus (1955-1958); discovering that the next door neighbor’s son was an EOKA leader; patrolling married quarters; fatal casualties to the regimental cricket team from a nail bomb; fatalities during an attempt to burn out EOKA in hiding; the reaction of civilians to chopping down trees as a consequence of the nail bomb incident; the attitude of troops towards EOKA; the EOKA use of nail bombs on window sills; and his deployment to Kuwait to counter the Iraqi threat in 1958.

    Oral history interview with Karoline Fischl

    Oral History

    Karoline Luise 'Lily' Fischl described growing up in Vienna, Austria, from 1898 to 1922; her family and education; living in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) from 1922 to 1942; getting married; the divisions within the Czech population; experiencing antisemitism; the Czech census on nationality in 1933; the evacuation of her children on a Kindertransport to Great Britain in 1939; the fate of her husband; the effect of Munich Crisis, 1938; attempting to flee from Czechoslovakia in March 1939; the commandeering of her family home by Germans in 1939; receiving help from a German SS man; the introduction of anti-Jewish restrictions; the attitude of Czechs to the German occupation; restrictions on Jewish civilians; her employment making paper flowers and degree of knowledge of the war’s progress; being sent to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1942 and remaining there until 1944; the train journey to Theresienstadt; her initial work in a sawmill then in the arts and crafts department of the camp; camp currency; a visit to the camp by the Red Cross; art work; the death of her husband; details about the camp; the insufficiency of rations; her attitude towards incarceration; the illness of her nephew; procuring blackout candles; cultural life in the camp; punishment for smoking; the disappearance of inmates; being selected for transport to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in October 1944; the selection procedure on arrival; lying about her age; the daily routine; being sent to Oederan Concentration Camp in 1944; conditions and the kindness of guards during the train journey; the accommodations; contracting pneumonia; her work aiding a doctor in the sick bay; making Christmas decorations; the speculation of sexuality of a female warden; receiving news of the progress of war; food rations and deterioration of diet; allied air raids; sabotage of work; aid received from a male overseer; the train journey to Theresienstadt, in the spring of 1945 and the bombing of the railway lines by Allies; the initial problem gaining entry into the camp; the quarantine period; her reunion with her mother; liberation by Russians and the spread of typhoid in camp; her responsibility for eighty women; the disposal of the dead; gradual dispersal of inmates; effects of typhoid epidemic; returning to Prague; the long term effects of imprisonment; relations between inmates; the disappearance of her nephew; arrangements for transportation out of Thereienstadt; medical problems; inmate rumors; loss of Star of David from clothes; behavior of German guards; camp language; liberation of camp; treatment of Germans after liberation; impact of imprisonment on her attitudes; and the visit by the Red Cross to camp during first period of imprisonment.

    Oral history interview with Henry Fulda

    Oral History

    Henry Fulda (born in 1922) describes growing up in Munich, Germany; his family and education; life as a schoolchild from 1933 to 1938; his memories of the Nazis coming to power in 1933; seeing VIPs arriving at Hotel Regina for the Munich Conference in 1938; encountering antisemitism at school; a raid on his family home on Kristallnacht; his father’s removal to Dachau Concentration Camp; the Jewish community in Munich; his membership in Deutsch Judische Jugendbund youth club; the attitude of liberal Munich Jews towards Zionism; family discussions about leaving Germany and the possibility of migrating to Great Britain came up; the condition of his father after his release from Dachau; emigration from Germany to Great Britain via the Netherlands in January 1939; the last minute problem with money allowance on the Dutch border; being a refugee in Britain from 1939 to 1940; his opinion of the Quakers who organized Letchworth House; his initial impressions of Britain; learning English; his employment in the Guildford area; his reaction to the outbreak of the war; the setting up of tribunals to screen refugees and his brief appearance before the tribunal in Guildford; the lack of anti-German feeling in the summer of 1940; relations between refugees and police in Guildford area; being an internee in Lingfield Internment Camp in July 1940; his transfer to the camp and his insistence that he shouldn’t be separated from father; the treatment of refugees by guards from the Irish Guards; his attitude towards internment; an internee who was an Aberdeen fisherman; being transferred via Kempton Park and Liverpool to the Promenade Camp, Douglas, Isle of Man, from July to November 1940; accommodations in the camp and the living conditions; the relaxed guarding of the camp; the social and educational activities in camp; relations with local civilians; his attitude towards internment; his refusal to join the Royal Pioneer Corps; his release and return to Guildford via Charing Cross Station in November 1940; his recollections of his period as a schoolchild in Germany from 1933 to 1938, including the support for Jews from the German anti-Nazi movement in Munich and the protection given by Munich Police from the Gestapo in 1938; the story of a teacher who defended him from antisemitic taunts; and the Munich comedian Weiss Ferdl, who stood up to the Nazis regime and his fate.

    Oral history interview with Gerald Gardiner

    Oral History

    Gerald Austin Gardiner (born in 1900 near Canterbury, England) describes growing up in Britain; his Protestant family background; his education at Harrow School during the first World War; his enlistment in the Coldstream Guards; being a student at Oxford University after World War I; meeting Dick Sheppard's family and becoming pacifist; volunteering for ambulance work in 1939; being a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit from 1943 to 1945; joining the unit and training in Britain; going to northwest Europe; personnel and officer status in the group; the situation in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on his arrival in 1945; the work his unit did in northwest Europe and some of its members being captured by Germans; his replacement by Michael Rowntree; the behavior of Russians; contacting the Friends organization in Germany; visiting Italy and France; and his post-war activities.

    Oral history interview with Josef Garlinski

    Oral History

    Josef Garlinski, born in Kiev, Poland (now Ukraine), in 1913, describes growing up in Poland; his family circumstances and education; the languages he spoke; conditions during the Russian Revolution; attending university in Warsaw, Poland, and studying law; his memories of the start of the war on September 1, 1939 at which time he was stationed in Warsaw with the Polish Army; the operations with the 1st Lancers, Polish Army; the morale in his regiment; the use of horses; German blitzkrieg tactics; the failure of Britain and France to act; being wounded near Zamosc, Poland, on September 22, 1939; being captured by German troops; the German fifth column; attitudes of other nationalities including Jews to the German invasion; being hospitalized in a German field hospital from September - October 1939; escaping from the hospital and going to Warsaw; his marriage to a British woman; his counter-intelligence work with Polish Home Army in Warsaw; the nature of counter-intelligence work; the use of an agent within the Gestapo headquarters as well as forged documents; trust within the resistance; women's endurance under interrogation; methods of cutting contact with arrested resistance members; the problems of political rivalries; narrow escapes from German round ups; being arrested by the Gestapo in April 20, 1943; the destruction of documents in Gestapo headquarters; his interrogation; his contact with a women agent in prison; reasons for hiding identity; the sight of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the death penalty for sheltering Jews; his prior knowledge of Auschwitz; being sent to Auschwitz in 1943 and his initial impressions of the camp; his selection for the penal company; the meaning of the allocation of a red circle within the penal company; receiving food parcels; the reasons for his transfer to Neuengamme; conditions in the camp and the control by Communist trustees; the nature of resistance in the camps; the exploitation by the SS and the SS policy of divide and rule; respect for Jehovah's Witnesses; the liberation of Neuengamme in May 1945; and the effect of the camp experience on him.

    Oral history interview with Joukje Grandia-Smits

    Oral History

    Joukje Grandia-Smits (nom de guerre Clara), born Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1917, describes her family; her employment as a teacher; the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940; reactions to the bombing of Rotterdam; the German’s initial attempt to conciliate the Dutch population; the persecution of Dutch Jews; German recruitment of Dutch labor and her evasion of the labor conscription; methods of defeating the German ration card system; the residence permit system; forging and stealing identity cards; resistance activities in the Netherlands from 1941 to 1944; the role of women in the resistance; her role and handling firearms; tensions between different types of resisters; the motivation of traitors and the pro-German sections of Dutch population; the concealment of men who had gone underground; the influence of the terrain on Dutch resistance; the attitude of Dutch Jews to German persecution; an incident in which a Jew in hiding insisted on seeing his wife; the assistance given to a shot-down Allied aircrew; the failure of Germans to conciliate Dutch civilians; her arrest and interrogation by Germans in June 1944 after being betrayed by a Dutch collaborator; eating an incriminating book; the rivalries in German security services; the nature of the interrogation and being accused of espionage; being sent to Ravensbrück in 1944; the train journey to the camp; the use of colored triangles for inmates; the refusal of former resistance prisoners to work for Germans; the heavy work women were made to do; the guard dogs used by Germans and winning over a guard dog; being selected for factory work at Dachau; the prisoners’ sabotage activities; march out of the camp and being liberated by US troops; returning to the Netherlands; the strike among Dachau prisoners over food; the go-slow tactics and sabotage employed by concentration camp workers; the German divide and rule tactics; precautions against informers; conditions at Ravensbrück; degree of knowledge of German civilians of concentration camp conditions; conditions on the journey to Dachau; the attitude of German civilians to camp inmates; attitude to Jehovah's Witnesses; and the use of acorns for dysentery.

    Oral history interview with Odette Hallowes

    Oral History

    Odette Hallowes (born in 1912 in France) describes her enlistment and training with the Special Operations Executive in Great Britain; being married to an English man and offering to help the War Office; her motivation for enlistment and her attitudes towards Germans; her impressions of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster; details about the training she received; her acceptance of the risks of service and feeling prepared for what was to come; wearing the same suit during all of her imprisonment; going to France in 1943 as an agent with Special Operations Executive; the journey to France on a fishing boat; going to Cannes, France; the Réseau in Cannes; being an inmate of Fresnes Prison, Paris, France, in 1943; resisting Gestapo questions; attitude towards torture and her methods for getting through it; her religious beliefs; her torturer who was a Frenchman; reasons for attitude of defiance in captivity; using the name Churchill in the prison and attributing her survival to it; further details of her defiant attitude in captivity; her contact with other F Section prisoners and befriending another female prisoner; the importance of secrecy for her while she was imprisoned; her attitude towards the Germans at that time; her views on those who gave up information to the enemy; the difficulty of being separated from her children; controlling a female SS guard who wrote to her after the war; her conversations with other imprisoned British female agents; her arrival in Ravensbrück; being put in an isolated cell next to the punishment cell; conditions in the camp; being moved to a cell next to the crematorium; witnessing the cannibalism of a woman who was shot; punishment in the camp; going to several different camps north of Ravensbrück after Hitler’s death; her physical condition upon release from the camp; her feelings when she returned to England and experience of wartime service; her reflections on her captivity from 1943 to 1945; her attitude to her biography and film; being awarded the George Cross; and further details on Fresnes Prison.

    Oral history interview with Mayer Hersh

    Oral History

    Mayer Hersh, born in Sieradz, Poland, in 1926, describes his family; education; the orthodox beliefs of his family; his family’s lack of political interest; their loyalty towards Poland; antisemitism in Poland; aspects of being a schoolchild in Sieradz from 1939 to 1940; the reaction to the German invasion in September 1939; leaving their home town; the shooting of Polish civilians by the German Army; living conditions during the occupation; the restrictions on Jews; the execution of a friend by Germans in Otoczna concentration camp in 1940; rumors that Jewish civilians would be transferred to a labor camp; being taken from his family home in March 1940; being an inmate of Otoczna concentration camp from 1940 to 1942; the effects of the lack of food; being beaten by a camp guard; the rations they received; their daily routine and work building a railway line; the suicides of inmates; the possibility of escape; the brutality of Hitler Youth towards his brother in another camp; the attitude of the Polish population towards Jews; the character of Kapos; being an inmate in Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 to 1944; the selection process under the supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele; roll calls; the construction of a camp compound; selection of inmates for gas chambers; the orchestra playing at the camp gates; the uprising by Sonderkommando in the gas chambers in 1944; the presence of gypsies in the camp and their elimination by the Germans in 1944; resistance in the camp; personal morale; a story of support received from an older inmate during a march in 1945; being an inmate in Stutthof concentration camp in 1944; the presence of his sister in the camp; being moved to an airfield near Stuttgart, Germany, in December 1944; his work duties and contact with German civilians; being an inmate in Gotha then Theresienstadt in 1945; the march to the camp; conditions in the camp and the typhoid epidemic; the death of his friend; liberation of the camp in May 1945; contracting typhoid; his immigration to Great Britain in 1945; arriving in Windermere, England; his attitude towards the work of Jewish organizations; the German medical experimentation on twins in Auschwitz; inmate relations; the discomfort of train journeys; the psychological and physical impact of imprisonment; his attitude towards Germans; the punishment work on Sundays in Auschwitz; medical problems in the camps; an inmate with a sense of humor and rumors about the war’s progress; the degree of religious life in the camps; the impact of his experience on his religious beliefs; and his survival.

    Oral history interview with Jerzy Herszberg

    Oral History

    Jerzy Herszberg describes his background in Poznan, Poland, in the 1930s; Polish antisemitism; his family circumstances; their level of knowledge about Hitler; the arrival of Jewish refugees in Poznan; being in the Łódź Ghetto from 1940 to 1944; conditions in the ghetto; the death of his mother; his job as a messenger;