Oral history interview with Nat Ross
Transcript
- My name is Jay Ross and I'm filming my father, Nat Ross,
- who is an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor.
- And interviewing Nat Ross is Reverend Bob Ross.
- Nat, first of all, tell us your name as it was.
- My name-- I was born as Nathan Rosenberg,
- born in a small town in Poland.
- It's called Pultusk, near Warsaw,
- roughly about 35 miles away from Warsaw.
- I come from a large family, from brothers and sisters
- nine of us, my parents.
- And my father was a rope maker.
- He also had his rabbinical credential too.
- And we all came from a very religious family.
- What was your father's name?
- My father's name was Jacob and my mother's name was Sarah.
- Did they grow up in Poland?
- They all grew up in Poland, but in different cities.
- My mother-- she rest in peace-- she
- was born in a town that's called Minsk Mazowiecki, near Warsaw.
- And my father comes from Lódz.
- It's another large city in Poland,
- the second largest city.
- Originally, your family was from Germany.
- And the ancestors come from Germany.
- So that's why your name has a Z in it?
- Yeah, Rosenberg, right.
- Tell me a little bit about your childhood before the war.
- Before the war, I used to go to religious school till--
- was happen first from the public school.
- I went to school in the morning till around 1:30
- in the afternoon.
- I used to wear a uniform because all the school
- kids had to wear uniforms.
- And coming home, I used to change my uniform
- into another uniform going to the Hebrew school.
- We were different dressed up in school,
- which I studied till around 6-7 o'clock in the evening.
- Was this every day?
- Almost every day.
- And who taught at the Hebrew school?
- There were rabbis.
- And they taught us Hebrew, the beginning--
- how to read, spell-- and then learning
- to pray, and learn the Chumash and Gemara too,
- if you know what Gemara means.
- Yeah.
- And that's how I--
- that was my education.
- There was another with Polish and Hebrew.
- With-- when you went to school, you went to school
- with the Polish children?
- Yeah.
- That was a public school, which was mixed.
- So it wasn't any segregation at that point?
- There were Jewish schools, of course, Jewish.
- But there were some segregation, definitely.
- It was segregation, but mostly was mixed afterwards, yeah.
- They were mixed.
- Were the neighborhoods mixed also that you lived in?
- The neighborhood was mixed.
- So you lived with Polish people?
- Yeah.
- We-- in my building, there were about four or five families
- of Jewish faith and about eight or 10 families
- of Christian faiths.
- There was a-- Poland was strictly Catholic.
- Right, yeah.
- So it was actually mixed.
- So the segregation-- we didn't come--
- The segregation-- they would rob-- the Christian
- would rather live with their own kind.
- But that's how it happened.
- We were mixed.
- Was there animosity?
- Against the Jewish people?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, definitely.
- They-- of course, that was-- this
- was-- when a Christian child was born,
- they were told him everything.
- If you don't behave, we'll send you to the Jews.
- Well-- they'll take the blood for you for Passover,
- which in the Jewish religion, we don't--
- we're not supposed to touch any blood.
- If you eat something goes blood, you
- have to spit out the food because we are not allowed to.
- But anyway, that's how they--
- the kids were brought up to hate the Jewish people
- and have a grudge against them.
- Were there just slurs, was there violence against the Jews?
- Yeah, well there was a lot of riots in--
- especially in the small towns.
- They did-- they were agitating against the Jewish stores, not
- to buy by Jews.
- This was before the Nazis came?
- Before the war, yeah, before the war.
- It was already started.
- Already started, right.
- So the Nazis came in and they just built upon that.
- Right.
- And when the Nazis came in, they had no trouble
- that the Polish collaborated with the Germans
- against the Jewish people.
- How old were you when the Nazis invaded?
- When the Nazis invaded, I was roughly by 13 years of age.
- Where are you in the order of your family?
- Are you the youngest?
- When the Nazis came in, they killed my parent-- my father.
- Right off?
- Yeah, right off.
- And then we-- then my brother--
- my older brother, who lived in a different town--
- it's called Gostynin--
- he heard that my town was thrown out,
- they threw out all the Jewish people from that town.
- This was the first town where the Germans threw out
- the people.
- You couldn't get even back to the town.
- So we outside of the town.
- And we wandered to Warsaw.
- Wandered to Warsaw.
- And my older brother who lived in Gostynin
- found out that we are in Warsaw, he came, and he picked us up,
- and he took us in to Gostynin, where he lived.
- And when we came there, automatically, right away, they
- were building a ghetto, another one with barbed wire,
- put every Jew in that space.
- Was it in Gostynin?
- Gostynin, it's called-- made ghettos.
- And a short time later, they asked the Jewish leaders,
- the elders, because they need the Jews
- to go on forced labor camp in Germany or some other places.
- And the Jewish leaders, they had to supply Jewish workers.
- So I was one from the family, the first one from the family
- to volunteer-- not volunteer, but from the family,
- I was the first one to go to work in a forced labor camp.
- It's called-- in Polish, it used to-- the town
- was right near the German border, near Schneidemühl.
- The town was called Chodziez in Polish.
- But the German gave it the name Kolmar--
- Kolmar near Schneidemühl, that means close to Schneidemühl.
- Over there, I was in a forced labor camp till 1943.
- From over there came an order, everybody
- has to liquidate those-- all forced labor camp,
- bring them all to Birkenau-Auschwitz.
- And I was on the transport in 1943
- to go to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
- Over there, they put my number on it.
- Is Auschwitz how you got the number?
- The number on Auschwitz, that was my identification.
- I had no papers, no proof of nothing.
- They knew, this is my identification.
- They called you by number and only by number, nothing else.
- You could actually forget about your name
- because that's the only thing you'll know is your number.
- And in Auschwitz, I was roughly by three months.
- And they-- there were selections, of course.
- Every day was a selection of who is fit to work, who is not
- fit-- to go to the gas chamber.
- And that's how I went through for three months,
- until they selected me to go to a different camp,
- near Auschwitz.
- It's called a Jaworzno.
- That camp, they needed worker because it was four coal mines.
- One coal mine used to be called Dachsgrube.
- Grube means a mine.
- And Rudolfgrube is--
- Sachsgrube-- anyway, there were three mines.
- And I was selected to work at night in the coal mine.
- At the night shift, they used to handcuff all of us,
- handcuffs all of us, five in a row,
- the handcuffs five in the row.
- To each other?
- To each other, five in a row.
- And the outside, they used to carry the light lifts going
- to the coal mine.
- And the shift where we went to the shaft, the shift,
- they used to unchain us.
- And that's how we went down to the shaft.
- And we worked in the coal mine for the night.
- I was in Jaworzno working in the coal mine.
- And then I couldn't take it anymore from the gas.
- The gases used to kill me.
- I couldn't take it anymore.
- So one day, I didn't stay on my Appell.
- I didn't stay in the column where to go to the coal mine.
- And I ran away to a different, where
- we used to build a huge electric power plant in the--
- supposed to be the lager's Niederschlesien.
- When I run into a different Kommando, go to work,
- and finally, by luck, I walked out to the Kommando,
- and I walked outside.
- Because in the coal mine was unbearable for me to work.
- The gas would kill me.
- And I went-- the whole story which I'm
- telling you is a short story.
- I'm not giving you the details on everything,
- which we-- in the next tape, I'm going
- to tell you how I went to concentration camp
- in the cattle trains, which I never mentioned,
- and how I went through, and everything.
- This is just a review of the things I went through.
- And over there, I worked on the Ausserkommando
- in that electric power plant.
- And there were-- one day, they discovered,
- there's about a group of Czech and Polish prisoners
- trying to escape.
- They built a tunnel.
- And finally, one-- they discovered
- that they planning to run away.
- From the Kommando we came, they asked an Appell.
- We-- everybody had to come to the Appell.
- We-- they marched back to the camp, Jaworzno.
- And we all had to witness how they executed
- 18 people in one shot, hanged.
- One bullet?
- They were hanged, yeah.
- They along benches.
- Everybody was standing on a bench.
- And that's how they executed all 18 of them.
- And that's teaching a lesson.
- And we all had to watch.
- And the Gestapo was with machine guns all around.
- They were-- they thought, probably,
- we'll have an uprising.
- And they killed 18 of them, hanged up.
- And they warned us in German language
- that everybody would think of it to do, this will be the thing.
- What did they do?
- They tried to escape from the camp.
- They dug a tunnel into the-- to run into the woods.
- In the middle of the building of the tunnel--
- how they found out, I don't know, but they found out.
- And all of them were executed.
- And then it was--
- then being in the end of 1944, when the Russian Army start
- to get closer in, they're trying to liquidate the camps not
- to fall in into the Russian hands.
- And they restarted-- have--
- we called it a death march.
- Anybody who couldn't walk, he fell down,
- right away, they shot him on the spot in the gutter.
- And that's how it was.
- In the middle of walking, at night,
- they took us in into a German farm for the night
- because the Gestapo themselves couldn't walk anymore.
- And I couldn't walk.
- I got my-- my legs got inflammation in my legs.
- I couldn't walk because it was in January of '45,
- was bitter cold.
- And I walked barefoot because with the wooden shoes--
- I was wearing wooden shoes.
- I couldn't walk with the shoes in the snow.
- I walked barefoot.
- And in the German--
- in that German farm, in the morning,
- they made an Appell to come out of-- and walk further,
- the marching.
- And I knew, if I'm going to go out and march, I'll be killed.
- I remained in that farm in--
- under the hay, stack of hay, buried myself deep in,
- and lay there for a day and a night.
- I came-- I woke up in the morning.
- Hey, you have to stop it.
- Jay.
- I woke up in the morning.
- I've seen everybody walked away.
- And we run into that farm.
- There was a Polish maid and a guy who worked in the farm.
- He gave-- there were about 13, 14 of us who
- remained in the thing.
- And they gave us to eat and to drink.
- And then the Gestapo came in again into the farm.
- I don't know how they found out.
- And they took us in into a prisoner of war camp,
- a British prisoner of war camp.
- It used to be called the Abyssinian camp--
- British of war.
- Now, well, they took us in.
- And then whatever the commander, the German commander
- didn't want political prisoners to be
- with the military prisoners in camp.
- Then Gestapo came.
- And they told us to get out of it.
- We went out.
- And they took us to the frontier line,
- where the Germans and Russia were fighting,
- that we should get killed.
- By a miracle, we ran away.
- We all ran away.
- And I ran on the snow.
- And I stepped on barbed wire.
- And I start bleeding.
- It's recording a minute.
- Go-- take a-- tell them off to--
- start bleeding, and stop--
- Jay?
- Then barbed wire-- I was bleeding.
- And I ran into a prisoner of war--
- a German camp, where military soldiers were there.
- And I found a uniform, civilian clothes,
- and a pair of shoes, a brown and a black shoe,
- and I got dressed, and I walked out from that camp.
- Because there were no soldiers over there, they ran away.
- As I came out from that camp, I saw all of my buddies.
- A lot of them got killed from the--
- where we were hiding out in the barn.
- How were they killed?
- Were they shot?
- They were shot to death, yeah.
- And then I didn't know where to go.
- I ran-- I went--
- I walked back into that military prisoner of war camp.
- And there was a British doctor, a captain.
- He took me in, he washed me up, cleaned me up,
- and he gave me a British uniform.
- And I hanged around all the time.
- Since that time, I was together with the British Army,
- the prisoners, together as a prisoner of war camp.
- And then we-- then they closed up the prisoner of war camp.
- And we had to march further, but as a prisoner of war camp
- with the British soldiers.
- And I walked till Braunschweig Hannover.
- Over there, they put us in another camp.
- And the following day, the American Army liberated us.
- And then from the liberation, they--
- the next day, the British came and took it over
- because this was divided in the Potsdam agreement
- for the British.
- Yeah.
- Turn off the lights.
- I'm listening to the whole thing.
- You see, you missed--
- Notice that they were Jewish.
- They're blonde.
- They wouldn't know they were Jewish.
- Were they blonde?
- Two Polish guys ran to the police station
- and they gave him up.
- And they were-- and there was-- they killed them one after
- the--
- one killed, and the other one had to bury,
- and then they killed the other one.
- Had to bury his brother?
- My-- the other brother had to bury the--
- my brother, and then they killed the other one.
- In the same grave, did they bury them?
- I guess so.
- And who saw the other brother then and if his father saw it?
- Polish gave him up.
- They could have been saved.
- They were on their way going to Sweden,
- through Lithuania, Sweden.
- And they were-- and they looked Christian?
- So they were sort of blonde with light eyes?
- They never-- nobody would have ever said they were Jewish.
- I mean, they never looked Jewish at all.
- Not too sure what Jewish looks like.
- I've seen so many people that--
- Here.
- Can't tell.
- This is the one.
- Real Polish.
- This is the one.
- Doesn't look Jewish, come on.
- The one on the right.
- And a rough kind of side, not like a typical--
- you see, the typical Jewish boy in Poland--
- you mind if I speak?
- The typical Jewish boy in Poland--
- And this is my sister too, was killed.
- --was very different.
- What were you saying, Pam?
- Was the typical Jewish boy in Poland
- is that they were brought up in religion and very timid,
- yeah, where his brothers were different.
- They were rough guys.
- They were rough kind of guys.
- They weren't afraid of anyone.
- It's interesting looking at the picture of your grandfather
- here--
- Yeah, right.
- --and then looking at the family,
- it's a big change somewhere.
- Oh, unbelievable.
- So your father, did he look like this?
- No.
- My father didn't--
- Did he have a beard and everything?
- Oh, a bigger beard than this.
- Oh, really?
- Yeah.
- And he let your--
- his children look pretty--
- They looked like that.
- --Gentile.
- Yeah.
- Well, we did-- we didn't have beards and--
- and the no spot noses.
- More like folk noses.
- Nobody could tell.
- Only those-- those Polish guards,
- they were the ones who rat--
- How did they know?
- Did they know who this was?
- Because they knew.
- They saw them.
- They were guards in that camp.
- Oh.
- When you talked about--
- you use the word volunteer to go to the labor camp,
- to your family.
- How did that occur?
- Who made-- so I guess they came to the house
- and said someone in the family has to go Yeah
- but then how in the family did it work out that you
- I wanted to go because I think that was
- a responsibility for my older brothers to mend the way--
- I had a younger brother, a younger sister.
- I was young myself too.
- So I figured, I'll be the one who can
- manage in one effective family.
- But they kept on-- every week they
- asked for more people and more people.
- And that's how they--
- I was-- from the beginning, we thought
- that this is the only one time, and that's it.
- Did you know that--
- well, did you think that this would be the last time you'd
- see your family, when you left?
- No.
- Was it--
- Did you think this was just temporary, and you'd be back?
- Yeah, we will work, and I'll be able to see them.
- I won't be a free person.
- But I thought--
- But when your father--
- I'll have to work and never got paid.
- And right away on the ground, no freedom of movement.
- What was your question now?
- This I understand.
- When your father got killed and got away,
- there were all of 17 Jews in the town,
- didn't you have suspicion that was
- going to happen to you people?
- Or you wouldn't know?
- Listen, millions of people didn't know.
- We are-- everybody afterwards, the same
- question-- why didn't you run away?
- Nobody knew.
- A matter of fact, a lot of Jews were in Russia.
- They could have been saved.
- They tried to go back to Germany.
- And they got killed in concentration camps.
- They were lying to these people.
- It was like--
- I guess it's unthinkable to think that something like this
- could actually happen.
- Look, in the 15 century, and--
- They were educated Germans, educated.
- How could they do things like this?
- The highest cultivated people in the world.
- And--
- They show--
- --did atrocities like this against women and children,
- taking little children, throw them
- to the wall to get killed, pull away the child from the mother,
- throw them to a wall.
- They showed on TV something that's unbelievable.
- They-- after the war, American soldiers grabbed,
- dragged German women that worked in the camps,
- and also, German people that collaborated with the Nazis,
- and took them to see what the dead bodies in the camps--
- do you remember what happened?
- They were passing out.
- They couldn't take it.
- No, we don't know.
- But we don't know that would happen.
- You did know what was happening.
- You had to know.
- You worked in the camps.
- They were throwing up.
- And they couldn't stand it, you see.
- There were so many dead bodies lying around.
- It was terrible.
- They said, no, we never knew what was happening.
- You never knew?
- You worked in the camps.
- You saw this.
- You were beating the Jewish people
- Oh, I know.
- Yeah.
- How come you didn't know what happened?
- Yeah, that's the thing.
- I remember the-- one of the cities that was--
- I don't know if it was outside Auschwitz, one of them.
- And they interviewed one of the German women.
- And she said-- which I think was honest-- she said,
- it wasn't that we didn't know.
- It was that we didn't want to know.
- We knew something-- we saw the smoke.
- We saw the cars going in and no cars coming out with people.
- And it was just too many people going in all the time for there
- to be that many people in this camp.
- And she said, we just didn't want to know.
- And it's amazing how--
- Look, nobody knew this-- they will do this kind of atrocity.
- We figured, they will take away the property
- from the Jewish people.
- They won't-- they'll have to go to work, not to do business.
- OK, that's what we knew.
- But to just take and kill people for no reason because of--
- You have to be an animal instinct to do this.
- Oh, it really is.
- It's amazing.
- They keep doing studies on it and they still
- can't understand it.
- And now they had a gathering in Miami two weeks ago.
- They have an estimate of how many?
- 70,000, 7,000?
- 300,000 in the whole world left.
- How many?
- 350,000.
- Who left alive.
- From the Holocaust?
- Yeah, but they're dying fast now.
- In another 10 years, nobody will be a--
- Anybody and anyone, that's what you should think about.
- It could happen to anyway.
- History-- people will deny that it never happened.
- It couldn't.
- It couldn't.
- They made up stories.
- It could happen to anyone.
- Yeah.
- Because people don't want to believe that it could happen.
- And that's why it has-- like the-- every year,
- we have the Holocaust service, the interfaith service.
- Because it happen to Jews then.
- But where is it written that doesn't happen
- to a Catholic or a Protestant?
- Oh, I know.
- This could happen.
- But it doesn't really matter.
- I always love the statement by Mahatma Gandhi
- when India was going through the turmoil.
- And his beautiful statement was-- he said, I am a Hindu,
- I am a Christian, I am a Muslim, I am a Jain.
- He went on, of course, we're all human beings.
- We're not-- we can't--
- we have different-- like I am half-German and half-English,
- as far as I'm told.
- I've never known anything other than America.
- I know nothing about my roots.
- I'm a Christian by birth.
- And pretty much that's who I am.
- But I could have been someone entirely different.
- I could have been a Black person.
- I could have been a Jewish person.
- I could have been Hispanic.
- And we're all the same.
- And until the world stops seeing people
- as a culture, as a race, or something,
- this stuff's going to still go on.
- You see, like watching on HBO the other day,
- the Aryan nation, who hates everybody-- at least they're
- pretty consistent.
- They don't like anybody.
- They hate Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, and everybody.
- But the violence that's in their heart-- and they're
- a growing group.
- And a lot of it's just--
- I noticed that when I look at these people,
- they're very uneducated.
- The other thing is that they've probably never met a non-white.
- When you have an enemy that you don't have a face
- to-- like we talk about the Jews,
- most people that hate the Jews have never met a Jew
- or don't know any Jew.
- Don't know how a Jew looks like, yeah.
- They just see the picture of some guy with a long beard.
- The beard, yeah, they hate, yeah.
- And they-- it's different.
- And that's all it is.
- It's just different.
- If you were a hippie, you look at that,
- and you sort of admire it because it looks like you.
- But if you're not--
- I have a friend of mine who is dead.
- He was in the American Navy.
- And he was in the South.
- And they're talking about the Jews.
- And he actually really was blonde.
- Oh, he didn't look like the Jews we know.
- And they wouldn't believe him.
- They wouldn't believe him.
- They think a Jew has horns or so.
- Is that Jew what she said?
- She said, how could that be?
- You're Jewish?
- They were-- you're not Jewish.
- You have no horns.
- Talk about the part where--
- how did it happen--
- the first day of the war, how did
- it come about in your small town the first day
- when your found there's going to be a war--
- or you didn't know it was going to be-- the Germans
- were coming.
- How did--
- They announced in the morning, they announced the morning
- the Germans attacked.
- Their border lines--
- Was there a suspicion a week or two weeks before?
- Yeah, we knew suspicious of a week before.
- Yeah, they're trying to-- you see, the German wanted--
- first of all, they asked for--
- to go to a special line, to go to Danzig.
- So Poland all agreed.
- And then they asked-- no, they wanted the whole
- the seashore so Poland would have any enter to the sea.
- So it started with Danzig.
- Without the sea, Poland where--
- is no country.
- You understand?
- But it started then?
- I mean, that was the gimmick.
- Like he went to Czechoslovakia, he
- want only the Sudetenland, only that part.
- He didn't mean Sudeten, he meant the whole Czechoslovakia.
- That's how it happened.
- The war was planned by him, I mean, World War II.
- He grabbed-- like a matchstick, he
- grabbed Belgium, Holland, Denmark.
- He grabbed all those country like nothing.
- France, a big country like this, in 14 days, are in.
- OK, now, the first day of the war,
- when the first-- the first day you found out,
- it was the morning, how did it happen?
- The morning--
- Were you in school?
- --they came out-- no, the radio came out in the morning--
- no school.
- The German attacked Poland.
- You didn't go to school that day?
- No.
- And there were soldiers sleeping on the streets.
- It wasn't organized like in the United States, with beds.
- They had no room.
- So they were sleeping in the movies, in the theaters.
- Polish soldiers?
- Soldiers, yeah.
- Polish soldiers.
- There were no room for them.
- They were going to fight back.
- They were going to fight.
- They were waiting to--
- Attack, right.
- So what happened?
- Germans came into your town-- just speak up.
- Germans came into your town?
- I don't have to speak up.
- We were-- this is nothing important.
- It is important.
- No, that's not.
- This is-- they have films, history.
- This is nothing important.
- --town that you grew up in, did you take anything with you?
- We couldn't carry.
- How much can you carry?
- Did they let you get it back into your house though?
- They took away everything.
- They confiscate everything.
- The Polish people right away run through the windows.
- When the Germans came in, Jews get out,
- right the Polish people came into
- to steal and grab whatever they could.
- And it was right in front of your face.
- Because we never-- no one ever came back.
- Now, this picture, for example, where did you get this?
- Because this came from somewhere.
- This is a picture of my aunt from Argentina.
- That's her daughter.
- That's his daughter.
- She had it.
- She had it there?
- She had one.
- You didn't carry pictures with you out of Poland?
- No, can't-- had nothing.
- Because I had to run.
- When we went to the gas chamber, some--
- we didn't know if we will get a hot water, cold shower plate.
- We didn't know if we getting a shower, water,
- or we get a shower with the gas.
- So we ran naked, completely naked.
- Now, you knew about the gas chambers?
- Of course we knew.
- We couldn't do nothing.
- We just were very helpless, like flies.
- No, the smoke, you kidding me?
- Yeah.
- How often did you have to go into the showers?
- To the shower, we went every second day.
- But you never knew when it was going to happen?
- No.
- And we were chased with dogs to run fast to the shower.
- And from the shower, chasing the dog.
- So this used to be a military camp
- from horses, Polish horses.
- And they made the concentration camp out of it.
- And it was clay mud.
- So running from the shower, we were more dirtier than before
- because the mud was all over us.
- Were there two different sets of showers, one with gas,
- one with--
- No, the same pipe would go.
- --the same one?
- And they just-- outside, they would switch it?
- That's right, yeah.
- So it was sort of like Russian roulette.
- You never knew.
- Never knew.
- I just told you, you didn't know if you get a gas
- or you get water.
- What was the response in the shower when water came out?
- When the water came out?
- Was there a response that people--
- We knew we getting a shower, water.
- Was there a cheer or just sort of a sigh of relief?
- We lived with fears that our life--
- when you would give up your life, I mean, living.
- When you give up living, you have no more desire whether--
- whatever you get.
- You don't know.
- If a person is in danger, he knows he's going to die,
- so he gives up.
- He gives up his living.
- So there was really no response at all.
- It was just--
- No.
- --you were living almost like a [CROSS TALK]
- --we lived like dumb, like deaf/dumb.
- No, he doesn't mean that.
- It's probably something else.
- I know.
- We understand what he said.
- I mean, we didn't-- we knew our lives meant nothing to them.
- They were indifferent, in other words.
- When you are in a dangerous spot, you don't care.
- Yeah.
- Did you ever have any relationship
- with German soldiers?
- Were there are some that were nice to you?
- The Gestapo, no.
- We were guarded the Gestapo.
- That's what you dealt with, was the Gestapo.
- And they pretty much treated you--
- They looked at us more than--
- at least you are a dog, you're bad, you love him.
- The cattle cars that you would take, what were--
- how big were they, would you say, in your area?
- The cattle car?
- The cattle car, how big it is doesn't count
- how many people they pushed in.
- Oh, I know, but even the size of this room?
- They pushed in, there was no room to turn around.
- They plugged in and no air, nothing at all.
- Could you see the size of it?
- Was it as long as this room?
- This room, a little bigger.
- A little bit bigger, but thinner?
- Thinner, yeah.
- And it was just as many people as they could stuff into it?
- Stuff in.
- Where were you when you were in the cattle car?
- Were you near the door?
- Or were you in the inside?
- Me, I was--
- I tell you, I don't know.
- I can't-- they pushed around and this-- the mind wasn't there.
- You couldn't see anything.
- No, the mind wasn't there.
- They were pushed around.
- After they open the door when we arrived in Auschwitz,
- they chased us out, and they were
- standing with their whips, whipping everybody.
- How long you were in the car?
- In the car, from the forced labor camp?
- We were a day and a half.
- It was going slow, slow, and slow.
- And that's without stopping, just
- going for a day and a half?
- It stopped and go.
- But we were locked in, and Gestapo
- were guarding in outside.
- Didn't open.
- They didn't open the doors?
- No, no.
- And there was no way that someone could jump out?
- To jump out?
- The only jump up is when they open the door.
- A door would be open, maybe a lot of people
- would commit suicide, jump out, or get killed, or all be alive.
- No.
- Did you get to know-- did you get
- to be friends with other Jews that were in the concentration
- camp?
- Are there any people that you remember especially
- that you were close to?
- Or in the forced labor camp or whatever--
- From out-- after the war?
- No, in the camp.
- No, while you were there.
- Did you have friends there?
- Everybody were-- everybody for themselves.
- Yeah, but you had friends in the camp, two of them in Rosenberg.
- It means in the camp, we fire--
- made friends.
- They all were friends, all we had to be together.
- But you didn't really make friends.
- Friends?
- There was no such a friendship, if you socialize.
- This was no social.
- I mean-- your mind has to be clear to be friendly.
- Listen, I'll meet you tomorrow.
- I'll see you.
- Let's go together for dinner.
- I mean, this is a-- this was a different kind of a life.
- That was some unbelievable.
- I know what he's trying to tell you.
- There ought-- let's say, there was someone in the camp
- that you maybe felt close to?
- Close to?
- To talk to or--
- No, you can't be close.
- Or someone you shared a bunk with?
- No, the only thing you would share--
- my brother, Moishe, he was sick.
- He swelled up from hunger.
- They took him to--
- the hell-- they called it a hospital.
- And I had the extra soup or a piece of bread.
- And I tried to bring him into the hospital
- through the window.
- Did you get it through?
- Yeah, I gave it to him.
- So you were there--
- In the camp.
- --you were there with your brother in the camp?
- I came three days before he came.
- They liquidated all forced labor camps.
- So in other words, well, they liquidated mine three days
- before his.
- Then we wind up meeting in Auschwitz.
- So in other words, he left to forced labor camp too.
- Yeah.
- So your mother was left alone with the two kids.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Nat Ross
- Date
-
interview:
1995 October
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives. Antisemitism in education--Poland. Education. Jewish ghettos. Forced labor. Deportation. Death marches. Hangings.
- Personal Name
- Ross, Nat.
- Corporate Name
- Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the interview from Nat & Jay Ross in 1995.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:13:28
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512176
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