- My name is William Koenig.
- Today is what, the 11th month, the 10 day, 1987.
- It's Phoenix, Arizona.
- I am a survivor of the Holocaust.
- I was born in the city by the name of Lwów.
- In my day, was Poland.
- In 1939, it was Russia.
- And they called it Lvov.
- In '41, the Germans came in and they called it Lemberg.
- What's the date of your birth?
- I was born July 31, 1922.
- We were four children.
- My mother passed away when I was young.
- I was the oldest of four.
- There was two brothers and two sisters.
- My father and my brother got killed during the war.
- Of course, we had a family too beside them,
- which I don't know whether I should talk about or not.
- But everybody had a family.
- They all disappeared.
- Could you give us the names of your brothers,
- your names of your parents, please?
- Well, my mother, like I said, passed away before the war.
- Her name was Brenda--
- Bronia in Polish--
- Koenig, which is the same name.
- Her maiden name was Weichbrot.
- She had three brothers, two of them born in Czechoslovakia
- and one of them in America.
- The one in Czechoslovakia didn't make the war, didn't survive.
- He was killed by the Nazis.
- One of them survived and died after the war.
- The names of your own brothers?
- I only had one brother.
- His name was Moses, which he calls himself Mark--
- Max.
- It all depends how he felt like.
- Sometime, was Mark and sometime, was Max.
- I had two sisters.
- They survived.
- But they have survived as Gentile.
- The reason they had the opportunity is my father
- had some Gentile friends.
- And they give him some birth certificates from dead girls,
- Gentile girls who passed away.
- So one of them was Ukrainian, papers--
- birth certificate from a Ukrainian.
- The younger one was a Ukrainian.
- And the older one was a Polish.
- They both had to leave town, go to different cities.
- And they worked as maids.
- And that's how survived the war both of them.
- Their names?
- Both are alive.
- Their names-- one of them is Sima and the other one
- is Hanka, Henja, really.
- Your grandparents' name?
- From my mother's side, I didn't have no grandparents.
- They passed away before I knew them.
- But for my father's side, I not only had a grandma,
- I had a great-grandma.
- But the great-grandma died just right
- before the Russian came in.
- But my grandma died when the Russian--
- when the war broke out, when the Nazis invaded Russia.
- She died just before that.
- Well, what year?
- And that was in '41.
- That was just before the war started.
- Otherwise, you're still-- we was still under the Russian.
- We still didn't expect a war.
- And that's when my grandma died.
- And they were both born in Russia, my grandparents.
- And what was I going to say?
- I didn't say.
- Were they all Jewish?
- Naturally.
- What was your father's profession?
- My father was-- had a transportation company.
- Actually, by trade, he was a butcher.
- But he didn't like to practice his trade.
- So he had a transportation company.
- And during the time--
- during Poland, before 1939, he even
- had-- not only he had a lot of Belgian horses,
- but like seven or eight pair, and a lot of wagons.
- And he had contract with two factories,
- which they were under Polish baron who used to own it.
- And they used to make leather.
- And my father had to--
- did the transportation, like bringing in coals
- to the factory, bringing in raw skins to the factory, rawhides,
- which they used to come imported from Argentina and Brazil,
- from South America, and then hauled
- the leather to the train station for export,
- whatever they produced.
- They were tanneries.
- And it was-- used to be owned by a Baron.
- My father used to be the only Jew in Poland
- that I ever knew that had a permit of a gun.
- Why?
- Because he was the baron's Jew.
- Can you tell me about your childhood, your school?
- Schooling, I didn't have a chance
- to have too much schooling because being one of the oldest
- and my mother being sick, suffering from cancer--
- at age 14, she died.
- And my schooling was just as far as age 12 or so.
- After that, and being the oldest,
- I had to take over the duty.
- My father was too busy to do anything
- about the house and the family.
- So I had to take over.
- And I was the father.
- And I was the cook.
- And I was everything in the house.
- And an aside, I used to go help my aunts and uncles,
- which they used to have--
- been in meat business.
- I used to help work with them.
- That's how I knew the meat industry.
- And I liked horses very much.
- And prior to the war, just as the onset came,
- were there changes that you could feel in your community?
- No, prior to the war, there was not much changes.
- During the time of the Polish--
- during the Polish-- during the time of the Poland,
- when there was no war, we were a minority.
- Jew was mistreated.
- I knew who I am.
- I know my place.
- And I kept it there.
- I was never afraid of standing up for my rights.
- I fought.
- I used to get many bloody nose.
- But I used to give it to them.
- My father taught me not to be afraid.
- And you--
- I talked back.
- So I used to come home with bloody noses and beat up.
- But I used to fight back.
- And the war broke out.
- And my father was drafted.
- Why, I don't know.
- Of course, maybe, he had the ability.
- He was in the reserves, supposedly,
- yet from the Austrian time.
- I don't know how and why, they just draft him.
- And he wasn't there long because the war was--
- it wasn't-- Poland was already taken apart before the war even
- started because the Russian were--
- they supposed to come in there.
- So the Germans didn't even put up too big of a fight.
- The only fight the Polish Army did,
- we had a big mountain in the city, over the city.
- And the city was in a-- it was a beautiful city, by the way.
- Lwów is a big, known city.
- And they had a cannon on top of the mountain.
- And they just give one shot.
- That's all they used it because a Russian tank came over
- real close and knocked it all off with part of the mountains.
- And that was the end of the Polish war.
- And the Russians took over.
- They came in in '39.
- Me being young, knowing already some--
- I was about 16 by then.
- And I already had a passport.
- So I was already independent.
- The children grew up already.
- My father remarried.
- And I was on my own.
- I got a good position for the Russians.
- And I had it pretty decent.
- I didn't care.
- Communism didn't bother me one way or another.
- My father was bitter because they took everything away
- from him.
- And they nationalized it, made it--
- belong to the government forever.
- And they wanted to make him a manager there,
- was-- because he was good to his employees.
- See, anybody, a small businessman,
- anybody-- small enterprise, if you had one,
- and if you were good to your employees,
- they made you a manager.
- Otherwise, they gave you a position
- to work for the government.
- Well, my father told them to go to the devil.
- He worked on his own again.
- He got himself a horse and wagon again.
- And he did it.
- And he did it.
- And he got himself a man to help.
- And he kept on doing his job.
- There were still private enterprises.
- Because even everything was nationalized,
- they were still doing black marketeering.
- And there was still private enterprises.
- There were still private bakeries.
- They were still selling sugar and coal on the black market.
- And they needed somebody to haul it.
- So that's what he used to do during the Russian time.
- But I was on my own.
- I lived for myself.
- I used to come to visit my younger sisters and brother.
- And they were pretty well-off.
- I mean, they had enough to eat and everything.
- They didn't need my help.
- If they would, I would help them.
- And then the war broke out.
- And I found out, I have no friends.
- I had a pretty good friend of mine,
- a Ukrainian man-- guy-- man, a man my age,
- that what you considered a man.
- When the Russian came in, he became a policeman.
- He joined the police.
- It's nice.
- He was Ukrainian.
- As soon as the Nazis invaded the Russians,
- he was the first one to stay up in a church steeple
- and shoot at the Russian soldiers with the rifle
- that he obtained from them.
- Naturally, he must have had enough ammunition.
- And then he came to hunt after me.
- He knew my hiding places because we were both raised
- and brought up in the same neighborhood.
- And that was a matter of me or him.
- And that was me, not him.
- That's why I'm here.
- But I didn't-- I was the black sheep in the family.
- I didn't get a chance to even get
- to know my way around how the Nazi operate.
- I was the first one in a camp.
- I was round up like the sheeps, they round up all the Jews.
- And I was in the--
- I was the first one in a camp.
- I was in a camp which--
- it was a destruction camp.
- It was-- the name of the camp was Janowska.
- The only place everybody ever heard of it
- is when you go to Yad Vashem, you're going to see the name.
- But because nobody-- you know why you never heard of it?
- Because nobody survived from there.
- The first job what I did being in that camp is to--
- there was a Jewish cemetery not far
- by the outskirts of the city, on the outskirt of the town.
- Was a Jewish cemetery not far by.
- So the first thing what they did is
- took us with wagons, with wheelbarrows,
- with whichever they could.
- We were building little--
- we put little tracks with little railroad cars on it.
- And we load-- we broke down all our monuments.
- And years ago, the cemeteries used
- to have real tall monuments, marble stones.
- Some of them, we had to split in half.
- And we built a highway for the Nazis.
- And imagine me working on my mother's headstone,
- and picking it up, and laying a highway.
- But there's nothing I could do about it.
- Not far away from there was a place
- where they used to make bricks.
- In Polish, we used to call it [POLISH]..
- Over there, they used to--
- anybody who was sick, anybody-- they didn't even
- give them a chance to die, just shoved them in the oven
- and burned them.
- So I seen burning before anybody else even knew what burning is.
- And being healthy, being strong, they put me up
- to their kind of work too.
- Then one day, we worked on a--
- they put us out, the Kommando to work on a place
- where we used to do cement cut work.
- We used to build--
- see, European sewages used to be like--
- you practically could drive a truck through it underground.
- They were giant.
- And we used to build those, made it from scratch.
- They were so big, it took about 20 men to roll one of those,
- to roll one up on a truck.
- And that's what we used to work it.
- The call it in German Betonwerk.
- Anyway, but it was so rough, the job
- was so tough, and the beating we used
- to get on the job and off the job, and running home--
- they didn't drive us, they ran us.
- Depends on the Nazis who--
- most of the time, our Nazis were just one German.
- The majority were Ukrainians with the black uniforms who
- chased us, who gave us then.
- Once in a while--
- I spoke the language, naturally, being born and raised there.
- They were supposed to have been people--
- my kind.
- I used to, once in a while, talk to them growing up,
- two of them.
- And once in a while, I got a break.
- They brought me a sandwich, they give me something to eat.
- But this doesn't happen often, not with Ukrainians.
- They got-- they just murders.
- Anyway, being on their job, from the Kommando, let's say,
- we were 30 in one group.
- And if one of them escapes from the job--
- which there were-- you could escape.
- It was easy.
- You hide in one of those things.
- And some of them are even smaller.
- You can crawl in in one of them small--
- the concrete-- cement things, you can crawl in one of those.
- And you hide, you can lay there forever.
- Nobody will find you.
- There's so many of them.
- So if one of them escapes, when we
- came-- when we come to the camp and they count us,
- for every one escaped, 10 getting shot right on the spot.
- They don't even take you out of the line.
- When the count us, we stay in a line in five rows, five rows.
- Between the rows, the Nazi was walking around.
- That wasn't a Nazi, was just a Ukrainian with a gun
- in his hand, shoved the gun to your neck, pulled the trigger,
- push you forward.
- One day, I was standing in the line,
- two guys right in front of me were there beside me, blood
- all over.
- And I said to myself, no, I'm not going to be there.
- I don't care if they kill people after me or not because of me.
- I'm going to escape.
- We wanted to make it different.
- We tried.
- There was 10 of us.
- We brought some insulated pliers from the job and some--
- a lot of bags in order to throw it on the barbed wires.
- And 10 of us made a plan to escape one night.
- What happened-- they cut a hole mixed out.
- We did cut the wires.
- We did break through, made a hole.
- And the wires, we had to cut through, not only one,
- because there were one line.
- And then there was--
- in the middle was empty.
- And then there was another layer of wires.
- And we cut them both through.
- But what happened?
- They got them mixed up.
- One guy, I don't know what he did.
- He touched off a spark.
- And the Gestapos on the towers with machine guns
- throw the light at us.
- And we started running like scared rabbits.
- The plan was off.
- And as I was running, I got shot in my leg in both sides.
- I got shot on the bottom.
- The bullet went right through.
- And I got hit right here in my thigh.
- And I was just out like a light.
- Next day, I don't remember nothing.
- I just fainted away.
- That was the last thing I remember
- is laying in between the two barbed wires inside--
- like on a pile of dead people around me.
- And my mother comes to me.
- And she said, my son, you cannot be here.
- You got to get out.
- Go back to the camp.
- And I don't know how, with all that strength-- see,
- I just crawled close to that main gate.
- The main gate was open.
- The soldier was standing there.
- And he didn't see me.
- And I crawled and went into the barracks back to my barrack,
- where I used to belong.
- And I just slept through the night over there.
- In the morning, I begged two guys to take me along with me.
- And two guys were holding me.
- We marched out to work.
- And I never came back.
- I went to the ghetto.
- There was still a ghetto in the city.
- Yeah.
- Could you backtrack to when you were rounded up in Lwów?
- Did you go to a ghetto first in Lwów?
- No, I never seen a ghetto.
- The only ghetto I seen is when I escaped from the camp.
- And the ghetto was towards the end anyway.
- They didn't keep the ghetto too long.
- I was in the camp for quite a while.
- When I came to-- when I ran away, the camp--
- Was the whole city of Lwów liquidated
- when you were picked up?
- Or were you picked up prior?
- No, I was picked up prior to that.
- Prior.
- And I was there for quite a long time.
- But when I ran away from there, the ghetto
- was being on the verge of being liquidated--
- not completely yet, but like they
- used to do in a lot of ghettos, they
- used to come in and take out a certain amount.
- They wanted, let's say, 20,000 people.
- I'll give you an example.
- I mean, who counted it?
- Who knew?
- They wanted a certain amount of people.
- And that's how they got it.
- So when I ran away from there, being in my town,
- I know, I was all wounded.
- And I was crippled on one leg, still bleeding.
- But I wrapped myself around.
- And I tried.
- When you're young, you don't pay attention to pain.
- And I got in the ghetto.
- They didn't want to let me in.
- I mean, I snuck in through a fence
- because I didn't go through the main gate.
- They would have shot me.
- You would ask me, why would they shot me?
- I had on my head--
- I had shaved off like that like a mohawk.
- That's how they did it from the beginning.
- Gosh.
- Instead of the star?
- Instead of stars, instead of anything,
- they used to shave us right here.
- The star, I got rid of it.
- While I was running, I know where
- I was, I threw that jacket what I had out.
- And I found some--
- a woman who was doing some laundry.
- I just picked up some clothes on the way.
- I mean, it was my city.
- I know where I was going.
- The ghetto was in Lwów?
- In Lwów, yeah, on the outskirts of the city,
- which there wasn't--
- a Jew never used to live even there before.
- They otherwise-- they uprooted the whole Jewish neighborhoods.
- And they just pushed them in in a place
- where a poor section of the city used to be.
- Maybe before the war, some Jews used to live there.
- It's possible.
- But it was a very bad section of the city.
- But anyway, I didn't stay too long in that ghetto.
- When I came to the ghetto, they didn't want
- to let-- they just were afraid.
- Every household I came, I wanted to stay a night.
- I couldn't.
- I had to be on the street.
- And that was cold.
- That was in the wintertime.
- It must have been December or so.
- So anyway, when I was there, I found, my mother had a cousin.
- The guy used to be--
- not a blacksmith, he used to be a tinsmith.
- He used to do things from tin.
- And she was the cousin of my mother's.
- But she seen me.
- She says, I don't care if they're going to burn us down
- or they're going to kill us, if my cousin's son is alive,
- I'm going to take care of him.
- And she took me into the house.
- Little did she know that two days later, the Nazis
- liquidated her.
- They came in.
- And they were going from room to room.
- I was hiding under a little tiny stand.
- They were walking behind me.
- And nobody seen me.
- It's just meant to be.
- I would have been caught-- captured and sent to Treblinka.
- That's where they took them is to Treblinka.
- How do I know?
- When-- after the they took out all people, then
- they didn't bother no more.
- The ghetto was still on.
- But it wasn't too many people in the ghetto left anymore.
- What they were doing is making the ghetto smaller.
- They make the fence closer.
- And the reason I know they took them to Treblinka
- is because one of my cousins--
- well, he was a second cousin to me--
- escaped, ran out from the window.
- They was shooting on him.
- He didn't get a scratch.
- He just rolled off that train, just like a little ball.
- A little guy he was, he just rolled off like a little ball.
- And he came back to the ghetto.
- He wanted to go with me.
- But I couldn't take him along because it would
- have been harder to hide two.
- I escaped through that ghetto through the sewers.
- And from that time on, I was on the run.
- I cannot put my thoughts real together.
- I never had my story right because I
- was in a lot of places afterwards
- and ran away from too-- small little places,
- like camps that were never heard of them.
- They weren't concentration camp.
- They were just places that Volksdeutsche,
- a German descent of Poland had some land,
- and then he got a bunch of slaves.
- He came to a place where you buy Jews.
- And I was in a lot of places like that, working on farms,
- doing cow milking, work in the fields.
- And it got rough, it got tough, I just ran away.
- And I was from one to the other.
- And were conditions a little better on these private farms?
- Yeah, it was better as far as feeding you
- because you had enough bread to eat.
- But you didn't have nothing else.
- The soup-- they feed you the same thing they feed the pigs.
- But there was more better than I had before,
- better than I had in the other camps.
- But what happened-- it got tougher.
- Once he-- the guy started beating on you,
- you would have died from getting beat up.
- So you just had to run away.
- So anyway, I make the story short.
- I wind up in a forest.
- And the forest was Lubelszczyzna.
- It was the biggest forest in Poland.
- Over there, they had--
- it was so thick, that forest, that no human being
- in some places was never there.
- But I was looking for some Jewish people, which
- I was told they are around.
- But I never found them.
- I wound up with a group of Polacks,
- antisemites, who they used to call themself akowcy--
- Obrona Krajowa in Polish, you would call it.
- I wound up with them.
- And I had to prove myself that I'm worthy of them.
- And I told them who I am.
- And I was still crippled on my leg.
- The leg was still swollen.
- Medicine they didn't have.
- They were just give me aspirins, that's about all.
- But anyway, the guy who was the leader
- happened to have a Jewish girlfriend in town.
- So he had some sympathy toward Jews.
- But their motto themself was to kill Jews just like the Nazis
- because they were not pro-Jews.
- They were strictly white, Aryan Polacks.
- Were they aware that you were Jewish?
- I told them right away.
- You did?
- Yes, I did.
- And see, that's why I was the black sheep in the family.
- Coming back to the story of my brother--
- he never wanted to go to camp.
- And he never went to camp.
- They killed him on the street.
- Somebody point a finger at him.
- But he could have go to a different town.
- And maybe, he would have survived.
- He got his way with the Germans.
- He was good on languages.
- So was I.
- And he just was like-- to one of the SS men,
- he was just like his little bodyguard.
- He used to shine his shoes.
- He's like his porter.
- But after-- then I found out that the German ran away--
- not ran away, he was sent out somewhere else.
- And he lost his meal ticket.
- So one day, he was walking on the street.
- And somebody pointed a finger, says, here's a Jew walking.
- So Ukrainian police seen him.
- And they killed him.
- Some local person?
- Were the Polish people that you were with,
- were they underground?
- Yes, in the forest.
- In the forest-- against the Germans.
- Naturally, they were against everything.
- They want-- they just want a pure, clean Poland.
- They were against the Russian.
- They were against the German.
- They thought they're going to be supported from England,
- but they never were.
- They had to be supported from the Russians, I mention,
- otherwise, they wouldn't.
- But they supported themself.
- What they used to do is they used to go to farmers
- and take their stock of it, confiscate.
- So that's how they used to live, as far as food.
- And as far as ammunition, we used to go and stick up some
- police stations, and take everything away,
- and just destroy them, kill them-- whoever--
- there was stations 10-12 people in the station.
- The first assignment I got, they gave me
- a wooden piece of pistol, cut out of wood,
- painted with shoe polish.
- And I took a machine gun away from a Ukrainian guy
- in a police station.
- And they got in.
- And they took machine guns, and hand grenades,
- and a whole bunch of it.
- And he killed them all.
- That was-- that's the way I proved them
- that I'm not afraid, that I'm not a Jew with scary things.
- And I'm not worried to be a partisan with the Polacks.
- When that happened, I figured, I'm going to--
- I took his machine gun, I thought,
- this is going to be mine.
- I'm going to use that for protection.
- That wasn't the case.
- They give me an old, sawed-off rifle from the First World War
- and two bullets only.
- I had a chance to fire it only once.
- It was a-- Ukrainians came in.
- And one of them was real close by me
- where I was hiding with a dog, with a German Shepherd
- by his side.
- And I used that rifle once.
- When I shot that rifle, I made three somersaults afterwards.
- But the Ukrainian had a bullet in his chest on the other side.
- It went out, about that thick.
- I mean, he wasn't alive.
- And the dog, I don't know, just got scared and kept on running.
- He was a Ukrainian collaborator with the Germans?
- Well, he was a Ukrainian with a black uniform, with a dead hat.
- He was a Nazi.
- He was a German dead hat, a Ukrainian
- with the black uniform.
- They did all the dirty work for the Nazis.
- When they raided the forest, it used to be one German
- and the rest of them all black uniforms.
- And these were people--
- local people that were--
- The Ukrainians who used to live in Poland,
- who used to-- who thought that they have a country.
- Did they come with the Russian invasion?
- Or were they local people?
- The majority were local people.
- They didn't come with the Russian invasion.
- The Russian Ukrainians, they were a different breed.
- They did different kind of work.
- But that was just the people who joined the Nazis.
- They wanted to destroy the Russians.
- They didn't have no use for the Russians.
- They didn't have no use for the Polish.
- So they thought, the Germans are going to give them a country.
- So they sympathized with the Germans.
- So they did everything the Germans told them to do.
- And they did the most dirty work,
- the most destructions-- the most killing was
- done by the Ukrainians.
- The German, zero comparison to what they did.
- They were just cold-blooded murderers.
- How long were you with these partisans?
- Not too long.
- I got typhus.
- And I wind up the--
- I don't know what happened with me.
- I just know, I've been carried.
- At night, I was laying on top of an oven in the farmer's house.
- And during the day, I wind up laying
- in between hay in the barn.
- And one day, again, Ukrainian came in with a horse
- and buggy to collect some wheat what the farmer was
- supposed to give to the Nazis.
- And he didn't because how could he?
- He was giving it to the partisans.
- He didn't have enough to give.
- So they thought that he's cheating on him
- and he's hiding.
- So they came to the barn.
- And they used two pitchforks.
- And they kept on going between the hay.
- And here I am, already--
- I'm already alive.
- I'm not already-- the typhus is already over with.
- I already felt a little better.
- If they would have given me one more or two more days,
- I would have been back with the partisans.
- And I feel sorry for the farmer, what
- they did to him afterwards.
- Because as bad as I was, as drowsy as I was,
- I remember them saying it, if there's
- going to be a hair missing on the Jew's head, you'll be dead,
- and all your family will be burned up with you together.
- That's what the partisans told him.
- So he was in a bad shape from the partisans
- and from the Nazis.
- So anyway, when they kept on going with that pitchfork
- in the hay, I turned around.
- I says, hold it.
- I'm here.
- Who are you?
- A Jew.
- What are you doing here?
- I says, I just hide.
- Where are you from?
- I told him where I'm from--
- not where I come from originally.
- I remember, there was a ghetto in that city.
- There was a lot of Jews over there.
- I says, from there.
- They wrapped me up in rope and throw me up in the wagon,
- just like a pig, and dragged me into the Gestapo station.
- Came to Gestapo station.
- They put me against the wall and start beating on me.
- And I told them the whole story--
- not exactly everything.
- But I told them where I'm originally from.
- Do I know a guy by the name of Ornstein, Dr. Ornstein?
- Said, sure.
- How do you know him?
- I says, I know him.
- I lived here for a while.
- Why did you run away?
- I says, I didn't want to live in the ghetto.
- I wanted to be free.
- Did the farmer?
- See, I tried to save even the farmer.
- Did the farmer know that you were there?
- I says, no.
- How did you live?
- I says, I know where the farmers keep their breads
- after they're baking.
- And that's what I used to do.
- I used to get some bread and butter from them.
- And that's what I used to live on.
- And that was a fact.
- Until I got there, that's how I used to live,
- until I got from one part of Poland to the other.
- Anyway.
- Anyway, I came-- after they gave me a beating,
- my head was like a balloon.
- They got me against a corner of a wall.
- And a guy by the name of Wegner--
- I never forget him, the Gestapo--
- beating up on me.
- And he asked me again, do you know Dr. Ornstein?
- I said, yes.
- So he calls another ugly-looking guy, like Frankenstein,
- a German.
- And here, I'm trying to find out his character while he--
- they put a rope on my neck.
- And he dragged me like a dog through the town.
- And he was leading me to the little ghetto
- where they had over there.
- He turns around.
- And while I'm going, I'm trying to talk to him in Polish.
- See, I'm trying to find my way around to get to talk with him.
- So he answers me in German.
- He says, you're Polish swine, says,
- you don't speak no Polish.
- I know you're blabbering something, he says, in Polish.
- I don't speak it.
- You understand German.
- He says, why don't you talk to me in German?
- So I try to strike up conversation.
- And I see that the guy isn't as--
- he only has a mean look.
- Even he is a SS, he's not that mean.
- He's a mild person because he didn't treated me that bad.
- Even he put that rope on my neck and he lead me like a dog--
- I had to go behind him, naturally--
- he wasn't rough on me.
- So the reason I want to find out whether he speaks Polish,
- because I had to jump ahead of him
- to tell that guy Dr. Ornstein that he knows me.
- And as he brings me in to this place,
- it was like an office in the front.
- He made-- what happened is they destroyed
- all Jews from this township.
- And then the Dr. Ornstein was a venereal--
- was a specialist on venereal diseases.
- That Wegner, that whole Gestapo guy who was the leader
- of the whole city, who had his jurisdiction--
- the whole town of Hrubieszów, was--
- caught some venereal disease.
- And that Dr. Ornstein helped him.
- Whether he cured him or whatever he did, anyway, he helped him.
- He must have cured him of it.
- So to be good to this Jew who saved him,
- he says, I'm going to make a ghetto.
- And you can-- you'll be in charge of 150 people.
- And I'm going to keep them busy in town,
- send them out to restaurants with German officers.
- Dr. Ornstein?
- Yeah.
- And the doctor, he didn't do nothing.
- His family didn't do nothing.
- There were three brothers and there was a sister.
- They didn't do nothing.
- But he was running the ghetto, the Dr. Ornstein.
- He was sending out people to work to some restaurants
- where Germans used to-- officers used to eat
- and to some farmers, to help some farmers.
- Once in a while, they found some Jews hidden by Polish people.
- They used to send out--
- there after they killed them, they
- sent us out to load them up on a wagon,
- and haul them up, and bury them.
- That's the kind of work we used to do in the city.
- But anyway, this-- I'm jumping the gun.
- If they bringing them in, before they bringing in,
- as soon as they open the door, I jump ahead and I tell them--
- the doctor in Polish, you better tell him that you know me.
- My name is so-and-so.
- You tell him you know me.
- I told him where I'm from.
- So he turns around, he hugs me, he says--
- and he tells me in Polish that he
- had a girlfriend from my city.
- And sure enough, he turns around and tells him in German, sure,
- I know that boy.
- I don't know.
- I was wondering what happened to him.
- He must have disappeared on me.
- Oh, thank you for bringing him in.
- Thank you, thank you.
- Takes the rope off of my neck.
- And this is it.
- And then what happened to your foot?
- He says to me.
- He lays me out in the hospital.
- And he cured my foot.
- He got me straight.
- And then they've been sending me out to work,
- like I said, doing all that kind of things--
- chopping wood for some restaurants.
- One time, they sent me out with another guy.
- And we-- there were two Jewish kids shot, little babies.
- We wrapped them up in blankets.
- They were still hot and bloody--
- and buried them.
- All that kind of work, we used to.
- Finally, that picnic had to go get all of it.
- And nothing lasts forever, the ghetto.
- One day, they came in, says, dress--
- take the best clothes and put it on on you, whatever you can.
- And whatever you can carry in your hand-- in your pockets--
- I mean, in your hand--
- no suitcases, just a bundle, whatever
- you can carry on the one hand, that's all you
- can take with you.
- And you're going.
- But I'm going to make sure, he said,
- that you're going to be-- you're not
- going to go to the chamber-- to the gas chambers.
- You're not going to be destroyed.
- That's what they just told us.
- Because the doctor told us this.
- But that's what he promised them.
- And they put us on--
- not on railroad cars, but still on cattle trains.
- And we went through Majdanek.
- But we bypassed it.
- We've seen it through the windows.
- It was Majdanek.
- We went through a lot of camps.
- And we wind up in Hrubieszów.
- Not Hrubieszów, I'm sorry.
- I'm jumping the gun.
- It's not a camp.
- Like I said, I didn't have my story correct.
- I wind up in Budzyn.
- In Budzyn, the camp had only one Gestapo and all Ukrainians.
- And Budzyn was a camp originally from Polish prisoners.
- So all Polacks that got loose, all Ukrainians they let loose,
- whoever were in the Polish Army from 1939 yet.
- But all Jews, they kept, they still
- had some Polish uniforms on their people.
- You can imagine it's already year 1942, almost '43.
- And they still got Polish uniforms
- left from '39, all Jews.
- There were Jews from Wilno, Grodno, Dubno,
- all territory of Poland used to be.
- Because Poland used to go in deep into Ukrainian part
- during the Polish time.
- Anyway, there were Jews from all over, from Warsaw,
- but none from my town that I could think of.
- Anyway, I didn't ask around too much.
- Excuse me, were these military uniforms?
- Military, from 1939 in the Polish Army.
- These men served in their--
- In the Polish Army against the Germans,
- naturally, protect Poland.
- They were drafted.
- Of course, a Jew was only drafted--
- some of them were in the army.
- See, when you were 21--
- and during the normal days, in Poland, you had 21,
- you had to serve two years regardless, unless you're
- crippled, you don't qualify, regardless
- of what your nationality.
- Even if a Jew became an officer, they put him in the reserve.
- They couldn't be a soldier anymore.
- But anyway, they were drafted or whatever.
- And there were still soldiers there.
- Then they brought in-- we were the first civilians
- they brought into this camp.
- In this camp, what saved us, that Wegner, he was bad.
- But he treated-- he protected that Ornstein.
- See, I fell in in a group that I knew
- I'm going to be protected unless they kill me.
- That Ornstein was protected because we work for a company
- by the name of Henkel.
- That company still exists in Germany.
- If it wouldn't be for the Henkel,
- we would have been destroyed.
- He saved us once, for sure, that I know of, from Budzyn.
- Anyway, over there, they divided us--
- some of them worked in a factory to make an ammunition
- and making parts to tanks and airplanes.
- And me, I don't know.
- Most of the time over there, I was lucky.
- I worked for Ukrainians.
- Because I knew their language, they used to pick me.
- Sometime, I got beat up, kicked.
- I had to protect myself at all time
- because they used to take me on the weekend.
- And they had parties.
- They were drunk.
- And I had to shine their boots, clean their uniforms
- because they were filthy from drinking like pigs,
- getting filthy, rolling all over the mud.
- And then if they didn't like the job, then I was beat up.
- Or if I was lucky, I was rewarded
- with some beer and food.
- Anyway, and then there was one German over there.
- He was Volksdeutsche-- that means
- a Polack from German descent.
- And he had a rank of a Obersturmführer.
- He used to-- there was a big army headquarter, a German Army
- headquarters over there.
- And they used to collect from the farmer's potatoes.
- And he used to sign them how much they brought in.
- And the farmer said, you-- you see,
- you have to check the farmer, what he brings in.
- And he used to give-- and sign him
- that he brought in his amount, what he was supposed
- to bring in, providing that they brought him
- some whiskey, sausage.
- And I used to be the smallest.
- I used to pick that stuff up from the farmers.
- And I used to tell them, well--
- he says, do you think he brought in 500 kilos potatoes?
- I said, sure because the farmer gave me whiskey--
- but not me, I turn it over to him.
- If he wanted to give me something, then he says,
- take it.
- So anyway, I was lucky there too for a while.
- And then-- and nothing lasts long.
- One night, the whole camp is surrounded with Ukrainians
- with machine guns.
- That was a bad night.
- It was raining that night.
- And the big German SS man--
- I don't know who the hell they were.
- Because my barrack, where I was living in,
- was right by the gate, close by the gate.
- Through the cracks of the boards,
- I used to see what was going on outside.
- I knew that the camp is surrounded.
- And I heard them saying, we gotta destroy them.
- We gotta destroy all Jews.
- And all of a sudden, I see a car coming.
- It had lights and pointing straight at me, almost, because
- through the crack, I see it.
- And a guy comes up.
- And he says that he's Henkel.
- And he said, those are my Jews.
- You cannot destroy them.
- I need them.
- They're qualified workers.
- They are support of Germany.
- If it wouldn't be for them, we wouldn't have ammunition
- to fight with.
- We wouldn't have airplanes to fly with.
- You Messerschmitts are built by those Jews.
- And you got to save them.
- They're my Jews.
- And they're your Jews.
- All right.
- He says, we cannot keep them here in this camp.
- We got to destroy this camp.
- That's the order from the führer.
- And anyway, they come in in the morning, as cold as it was
- and nasty.
- They strip us all naked.
- We have to drop all our clothes.
- They chase us for about two miles,
- naked in the snow, sleet, and mud, down
- in the forefront of the German barracks.
- Over there, they had a bathhouse.
- And they give us all showers, warm showers over there.
- Because that was for the German soldiers in their barracks.
- They give us one section.
- And we showered.
- But everything was beating--
- fast, fast, fast, fast.
- On the way out, they give you a hot--
- the first time when I got the concentration camp
- uniform and stripes.
- It was hot because--
- I don't know where they got it from.
- They must have disinfected it.
- And it was still hot from the dryers, what they had,
- the machinery.
- Because they used to use it for the soldiers,
- the same machinery, to dry their clothes.
- Anyway, they gave us that uniform.
- And they put us on trains right away.
- And it didn't take long.
- The train was going.
- It wasn't stopping and going slow, it was just going.
- And we wind up in Mielec.
- In Mielec, they have a factory.
- They built bodies to Messerschmitts.
- Excuse me.
- Could you describe your trip in the cattle car a little bit?
- There's not much to describe.
- There was going fast.
- And they gave us food.
- And I happened to be lucky.
- I wind up in one of the cattle trains,
- in one of them wagons in the train--
- a half a carload was loaded with loaves of bread
- and a half of people.
- It shows you if you got to live.
- Forget about it.
- I did that too.
- It's-- I have to go back now.
- It's-- finish your story now.
- All right, anyway.
- We'll go back to that.
- When we came to Mielec, they had a factory over there.
- And there were already Jews from different camps.
- And we were treated miserable--
- not by the Nazis.
- Because by the Nazis, we were recommended as A class.
- We were all fed well.
- We looked good.
- We didn't look like concentration camp people
- because we were treated good all over.
- And the people in the camp were jealous of us.
- Look how they look.
- And over there, where they tattooed us right away when we
- came in and put the KL on us.
- As we were doing it-- and now that I give you another
- incident--
- if you just put your hand out and you didn't say nothing,
- he did a beautiful tattoo job, neat, small like mine.
- If you shook your hand slightly, you got that thing down big.
- If you wore a little rougher, you got that down from--
- he put a big K here and a big L here.
- And this hurts.
- One guy was shaking so bad, they put his--
- they lay him down on the floor.
- And they put-- a guy put his foot on his throat.
- And they tattooed him right in his forehead.
- That's the kind of miserable Nazis they had over there.
- Anyway, over there, there was-- that's where
- I broke my back in this camp.
- Why?
- I don't know why, for no reason at all,
- because of the one Nazi worked with.
- Over there, what we were doing is just
- burying the bodies for the Messerschmitts.
- As we got through with the body, like an assembly line, used
- to go-- when we got through with the body,
- we used to push it out.
- And they came in with a--
- from the other side.
- See, they didn't trust us with the motors.
- We only did the bodies.
- The motors were done by Germans, and by some Polacks,
- and maybe Ukrainians that they trust.
- And they brought in--
- otherwise, we pushed it in and the engine was already hanging.
- And that's all as far as we went.
- And then they chased us back, five or six of us pushing it.
- A Messerschmitt body was light.
- Everything was made out of aluminum.
- And it was light.
- Actually, normal two people could push it.
- That's how light it was.
- But there used to be six or eight of us
- usually to make sure that everything
- is going straight and fast.
- And after that, I chased it back.
- One day morning, I come in on a Monday.
- They chased us to work.
- From the camp wasn't far, just like a straight line
- of highway, like to the factory.
- They used to chase us to work in the morning
- after they'd counted us and everything.
- And I come in.
- And we had to finish a job from a night before on the tail end.
- We had to do some extra plates.
- I don't know what they needed extra plates on the tail end.
- My job was crawling in in sight.
- And we were doing riveting.
- And we used to get along nice with that guy.
- I mean, we didn't talk much.
- But we had an understanding-- when the rivet was formed.
- And you see, nowadays, they have rivet guns
- that you don't have to even go in in any place.
- But years ago, they didn't have that.
- You had to form it from the inside.
- And they use a hammer from the outside.
- And I had a piece of steel.
- It was heavy piece of iron in my hand to form the rivet,
- while he was pushing it in.
- And as soon as I give him two knocks, he had to stop.
- I knock and knock, I used my hand.
- I couldn't knock too hard with that piece of iron.
- If I would-- aluminum is very weak.
- You can make a hole with a thumb if you're strong enough.
- He made a hole through and through with that hammer.
- And then they pull me out of the airplane, drag me into camp,
- took me for a saboteur.
- Two German shepherds were holding my leg--
- bite my feet.
- If I move, they bite harder.
- And they give me 125 on my bare back.
- Three days out of my life disappeared.
- I don't know what happened.
- But I licked my wounds.
- And I came out.
- Some people did help me with some food.
- I was laying underneath over there
- in the barrack in the dirt because I was filthy.
- Because when you get a beating like that, you don't--
- your body function, it comes-- you don't even know.
- And I was laying there.
- And finally, I cleaned myself out.
- And I went back to work.
- All right.
- Coming back, while I was in that camp,
- they picked up 10 the healthiest guys
- they could in that camp and Hrubieszów.
- They brought in 30,000 Jews from all over around.
- We didn't know that they were going to bring them.
- I found out after that later.
- They took us.
- And we were digging a hole.
- We were just digging, and digging, and digging.
- And that hole got so tremendously big
- that it took you some time--
- 15 minutes to climb out of it.
- We made-- we created--
- of course, there were engineers who showed us how to do it.
- We were digging out, and having a wheelbarrow, and go around,
- and around, and around, and around,
- and coming up with the dirt.
- That holes was so big, what we almost hit water,
- almost like digging a--
- we made three holes for them like that.
- We didn't know what the hell was for.
- And then, by the way, they kept us, all 10 of us,
- they kept us in a jail, in the city jail.
- Ukrainians were watching us.
- The doors were open.
- We weren't in jail, like--
- but the doors were open from the jail.
- You could go out to the washroom.
- You could go out, take a shower.
- You used the same shower, the same washroom
- what the Ukrainians did.
- You had food galore.
- You had a whiskey.
- You had beer if you wanted, everything.
- We didn't know what the hell for.
- One day, they don't take us on just a pickup
- truck, like they used to, open.
- They put us in a panel.
- And they bring us there.
- And we sit there in the panel.
- They don't let us out.
- Of course, you still had little cracks to see what's going on.
- And we hear people.
- They're bringing in truckloads, and truckloads, and truckloads.
- And they're shooting them and shooting them,
- lay them out, lay them out.
- One was half-full.
- They tell us to come out, cover them, and pour--
- whitewash, they used to use.
- It smells like Lysol, there a certain chemical.
- And we pour this over.
- And then they take us back to the panel truck.
- And they fill in the hole again all the way.
- One incidence, which I'm never going to forget--
- a guy turns around while I'm--
- the hole is already full with people.
- While I'm covering it, one guy turns around to me.
- And he says to me in Yiddish that he's not hurt
- at all, that he's still alive.
- I shouldn't bury him.
- And I don't move.
- I don't move my head at all.
- And I turn around.
- And I says to him, I'm not going to put too much.
- And you drank.
- All I just-- is I hear him saying that he's still alive.
- And he's not even shot.
- So I says, I'm going to cover you mildly.
- And close your eyes while I put a little dirt on you.
- And at night, I says, you're going
- to crawl out and go about your business.
- There is a ghetto, I says.
- They still got 150 men.
- And I gave him--
- I even told him who the guy is.
- Says, the guy is Ornstein, is there.
- And he says-- and that's it.
- So another yokel comes in and starts
- having a conversation with him.
- And a Ukrainian sees that, he jumps right into that hole,
- and takes that shovel from that guy,
- and chops the guy's head off, just in a split of a moment.
- And that's the end of this story.
- I would have saved maybe one life, but what could I do?
- I wasn't saved either.
- You don't know the story yet.
- I'm coming to it.
- We finished all the job.
- There was one hole--
- we had three like this to cover.
- There was-- in each one was 10,000 Jews.
- They had it figured out exactly to the--
- everything was engineered.
- The Germans knew how many people will fit in this hole.
- And every hole had-- there was 10,000 Jews.
- It was three holes like that.
- Believe me, when we got through with some of those holes,
- the Earth was still moving.
- And it was in my eye-- in my head for days, and days,
- and days, and still is.
- And it's never going to get out of my head.
- And a lot of times, I don't want to talk about it.
- There was years I didn't want to talk about it.
- But even the people who were with me in camp,
- I didn't want to talk about it.
- But they weren't with me.
- We had to run away.
- We had to break out.
- On the end, we had to break out from jail.
- We had to kill a couple of Ukrainians in order to get out.
- And we ran.
- But what we did, we knew that we cannot run anywhere else
- because in the forest, we know who it is.
- I knew who it was there.
- And I know he wouldn't accept me anymore--
- and especially when I had nine men with me.
- And domi opus-- some of them are so far fanatic.
- Some of them were even-- one of them
- was even a Hasid who still had his payos
- or rolled around his things.
- And he still had this [NON-ENGLISH] with the tzitzit
- and all that constantly.
- And you wouldn't see him without a cap.
- And I don't know whether he survived.
- I know the Ornsteins did--
- not all of them, but one of them did--
- or two because they were my witness when
- I needed for Wiedergutmachung.
- I sent away a--
- did I call or I sent away a paper?
- You sent away a letter.
- And Ornstein remembered me very well and signed for me.
- So what happened?
- Putting-- going back to the story, what we did
- is we hide in the ghetto after we ran away.
- And Ornstein didn't-- he not supposed to know.
- He didn't know, let's put it that way.
- We made sure he didn't know.
- See, the ghetto was open.
- The ghetto wasn't like a ghetto anywhere else.
- We just had one street.
- And there were houses that when I came,
- they put me up to the two widow ladies
- who they took their husbands away in another clean-up
- when they clean up Hrubieszów city.
- Those 30,000, they got them from all over.
- I don't know where they found them.
- But they felt that this is a place where
- they can bury 30,000 people.
- And that's where they planned it.
- And that's where they did it.
- So honestly, I'm not supposed to know where I was--
- where we were.
- So we went back to our places where we used to live.
- One of them had even a wife, one of the guys--
- that dummy who turned around to talk to the guy.
- And I thought always he's a smart.
- And he was one of the guys.
- You know what he was before the war?
- He had a horse and a buggy.
- And he was-- they used to call him droshky.
- Do you know what that was?
- A carriage.
- See, there were no cabs.
- That was a cabbie.
- That's what he was.
- So he was a down to earth guy.
- I mean, he been around.
- He was a street man.
- He'd been in a city, doing it day and night.
- And he'd been around.
- But he was so stupid to turn around and talk to that guy.
- That's what he was.
- That's the guy.
- And I thought he's the bravest--
- me being even a little younger than him,
- I was looking up to him.
- And then I didn't want no part of him.
- Of course, we didn't last long because in a couple of weeks
- or so, the ghetto was--
- like I was saying before.
- Evacuated?
- Yeah, they told us to get dressed the best we know how.
- And they referred to us because I didn't go out of the house.
- And the Gestapo didn't know where we disappeared.
- He figured, what the hell?
- We only killed two Ukrainians.
- We didn't kill no Germans.
- So they didn't care.
- They didn't look too far.
- They figured, they're going to get the Jew anyway, regardless.
- So they didn't look too far for us.
- And they never imagined that we were going
- to go and be in the ghetto.
- But we didn't-- we weren't sent out to work because as far
- as the doctor goes, we weren't--
- --accurate--
- Yes.
- Then-- I go back to the story.
- Then the last, I think I was is I
- was in Mielec, what I told you.
- I got the beating.
- And after the beating, I went back to work.
- I lick my wounds and all that.
- I got myself cleaned up.
- And I went back to work, being young.
- I had some friends over there from my group only, those 150
- guys, which they came, and they brought me some food.
- And they helped me along while I was
- laying there and recuperating.
- And then I got back to work, and that's all.
- And I was acting normal.
- It was hurting.
- I was scrouched up.
- I was in pain.
- But that don't mean nothing.
- I wasn't the only one who got beaten up.
- And after Hrubieszów, the front got--
- Now the Orenstein teams wind up in Hrubieszów, too?
- Yeah, but I didn't see them over there.
- I lost-- well, because him being a doctor,
- I don't know about the rest of the Orensteins.
- I know the doctor was good in Budzyn
- when we were in Budzyn with him.
- And he was a doctor there.
- I got kicked from a Nazi a while back, and I had a rupture.
- And it was so bad, it was almost hanging onto my knee.
- And I kept on tying it up and holding it back.
- And I didn't want to be operated on it.
- Orenstein backed me.
- And it's a good thing I didn't, because if I would have been
- in the hospital, they would have--
- the Ukrainians would have taken me out, because they were--
- anybody who came to the hospital there, was operated
- or wherever, they took him out and shot him.
- That was the Ukrainians' job, to clean up,
- to keep the hospital clean.
- And Orenstein backed me.
- He says, come and operate.
- It's going to take only five, six days.
- I says, no.
- I says after I survive, after the war is over.
- And if there isn't, let me die just the way I am.
- I says, I can still control it.
- I can-- I'm still strong.
- I can do it.
- And I don't want no operation.
- And you know when I was operated?
- Way after the war.
- I was already married.
- In '46.
- In Germany, in '46.
- In Germany, after the war, I was operated.
- I told her.
- We went to visit a uncle of hers.
- And I seen one guy being operated, a young guy.
- I ask him, would we operate on.
- He told me what, so.
- And we've been in Germany.
- We were in Landsberg.
- In Landsberg I was a policeman.
- See, I'm mixing the stories up.
- That's all right.
- It's OK, I guess.
- Now in Landsberg, this is after liberation.
- After, yeah.
- But anyway, let me go back to the camp.
- I'm going to tell you the story afterwards.
- From Mielec-- where was I from Mielec?
- I'm trying to figure out.
- Yeah.
- They liquidate Mielec.
- They didn't know what to do with us.
- Still, Heinkel was still there, believe it or not.
- Tried to save.
- Still try to save some of us.
- They took us out to Wieliczka.
- Wieliczka was already a concentration camp.
- And they already had [PLACE NAME] on their hands
- too.
- I still belonged-- even Mielec was controlled over
- from Heinkel, that guy.
- Was Heinkel a German?
- Naturally, yeah.
- If you want to know who Heinkel is,
- their company is the first one who discovered rotary engine.
- Just happened recently, the same company.
- And they sold it to Japan.
- And for a while, Mazda had it.
- If you remember, I'm mechanically inclined,
- so I follow those things.
- I'm subscribing to Popular Mechanic, and I--
- So Heinkel was still--
- Heinkel still exists otherwise there.
- They're still in the mechanical business.
- They're still doing the same thing.
- But one thing at least I can say, whether the man is still
- alive or not, but the company still goes on the same name.
- And if it wouldn't be for them, he
- saved quite a few Jews that way.
- But this is my experience.
- So anyway, so we were in Wieliczka.
- In Wieliczka, I only worked a little while.
- They took us down to a mine.
- In Wieliczka was a salt mine, by the way.
- A lot of people worked in the salt mines, and a lot of people
- worked in factories for ammunition,
- and bodies for airplanes, and the same thing.
- And things, motor parts, to put the Messerschmitts together
- everything to do with war material,
- and everything Heinkel had.
- And Heinkel was involved in it.
- And they did have all the flow of people,
- so they kept them to help the products in the salt mines.
- I've been there only a couple of days.
- I was down in the mine maybe once or twice.
- It's scary.
- It's not nice to be in a mine, a salt mine.
- But that's not the end of it.
- I was in mines again.
- After we were in there for a while,
- they still tried to take the same group.
- There was 150.
- I don't know whether we, all 150 of us, were still alive.
- But anyway, there was 150 of us anyway.
- And they shipped us to Flossenburg.
- Now over there, we were running.
- And until I came to Flossenburg, I was half dead.
- Now over there, I experienced really bad.
- They didn't feed us.
- They didn't give us nothing to drink.
- Whatever food we could gather before they took us,
- whatever anybody had with him.
- But the people who somehow were with us,
- they shared with each other whatever they had, even
- if it's only a crumb.
- We divide it and we shared.
- They didn't pack us in like animals, but they drag us.
- There's still cattle trains.
- But they didn't pack us like they were going to kill us.
- See, in some places, what they did
- is that if there wasn't enough room,
- they took the butts of the guns, the rifles,
- and then start beating.
- And actually, when they beat, you jump.
- And we just like animals.
- They jump one on top of each other, they have more room,
- so they push more in.
- But us they didn't force.
- Let's say 150, whatever, we could go in in one car load.
- They pushed-- they didn't push us in.
- We just says, can you push in a little more, they used to ask?
- And we say no, they closed the door and locked.
- But anyway, we came to Flossenburg.
- In Flossenburg they gave us beds.
- Now over there was--
- we were upstairs.
- And downstairs they had a crematorium.
- They were burning them.
- And we seen it.
- We seen little carloads with--
- hands and feet hanging over it, pushing them.
- Where did they brought these bodies from,
- I never could find--
- discover.
- Whether they gassed them over there,
- whether they didn't, or they brought them in already killed,
- I don't know.
- But I know they were burning them there.
- And that's Flossenburg.
- I still have a souvenir left from Flossenburg.
- While I was there, they give us blankets.
- But that's all they give us.
- They stripped us nude, took all our clothes away.
- We thought for sure they're going to-- we going to wind up
- over there, downstairs.
- But we were walking around for about three days.
- And Heinkel saved us again, I presume, with blankets.
- They'd give us blankets.
- So at least we had something to cover.
- It was cold, awful.
- But we had to walk around.
- We didn't work for a couple of days.
- Then they give us some stripe uniforms again,
- with yellow triangles.
- They put us on a train and they shipped us
- to [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
- Leitmeritz.
- That's the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia.
- That's not far away from Theresienstadt.
- We came to Leitmeritz.
- It was an international camp.
- There were French.
- There were Germans, gentile.
- There were gypsies, some of them would still survived.
- Everybody had red triangles.
- The Jews had yellow.
- As soon as I came there, I got acquainted with one Ukrainian
- who was a Russian soldier.
- Now he was a good Ukrainian.
- You don't find too many like that.
- The first thing what he did to me, he says--
- he walks over to me.
- I'm looking for good Jews, he says.
- He came to our group.
- And I says, everybody is a good Jew.
- Did you ever see a bad Jew?
- He turns around to me and talks to me in Yiddish.
- [YIDDISH] he says to me--
- "Just like an ordinary Jew."
- Speaked Jewish better than I did at that time.
- He says to me, you are a [YIDDISH]..
- I'm a Jew more than you are, he says.
- I was born and raised.
- And he tells me that.
- I says, you never ask me where I come from.
- And sure enough, he comes from the same town
- where I come from.
- He was a Russian soldier.
- He wasn't one of those--
- he was raised and brought up by Jewish people.
- He only knew he's a Ukrainian by his religion.
- But he loved Jews, and he lived among the Jews.
- He worked among Jews.
- And Jewish people were his people.
- He adopted himself to Judaism.
- He just didn't convert to anything like that.
- And I happened to be lucky in catching him.
- The first thing he did to me when
- I try telling him where I'm from, where I was born,
- which street and everything, he rips off
- that yellow thing from me.
- I was looking at him.
- What the hell are you doing?
- He says, you don't like it?
- He rips the whole jacket off.
- Takes me in a warehouse and gives me
- a jacket with a red stripe.
- He says, you're going to be in my Kommando.
- You're not a Jew.
- And I've been working in that camp until the end of the war.
- Anyway, being in that camp, I was lucky again.
- They assigned me, myself--
- only me-- to one Nazi.
- To two-- I mean, one Nazi.
- To two Germans.
- But one Nazi was taking me to work myself every night.
- They took me away from his brigade.
- I still belonged to him, because he was still my commander.
- But I took me away after a while.
- Two guys, two Germans, ones that took me--
- there was a evening.
- We worked towards the evening one day.
- He seen me, and he says--
- ask me what's my name.
- I told him, Willy, William Koenig.
- He said, bist du Deutsch?
- I says, no, I'm not Deutsch.
- To him, I turn around and says I speak Yiddish.
- So he tells me [GERMAN].
- I says, because I work in a-- he didn't care much.
- I said, because I work in a Russian Kommando.
- And I don't lie.
- I says, he told me to be Russian.
- [GERMAN] Make no difference whoever you are.
- He says, I want to see what you can do.
- So they take me in and they try me out.
- And I did practically every job they show me.
- Anything they show me, I did it.
- He asked me what we did, to give you an example.
- When we just start to work there,
- there was just a mountain.
- We wind up digging a mine.
- And from the mine we created factories.
- We made big holes.
- And electricity came in, and the railroad.
- Cars came in, railroad tracks and everything.
- Beautiful, painted in white.
- And everything with electricity, fluorescent lights
- and everything.
- And before the war ended, they were producing modest tanks.
- They pushed them out on railroad cars.
- They came up with a-- like a miner
- comes up from a elevator, a elevator, a railroad car.
- They roll it up.
- A whole bunch of mechanics stay there.
- They put in the engines in the tank,
- and the tanks are rolling down the hill
- and going to the front.
- And I worked that with them, two Germans.
- And they were treating me like their own son.
- Every night I had an old Nazi who took me to work.
- I worked nights only, because they worked nights.
- What we did is did a lot of blowing out
- to make big places again, make another working halls.
- We were doing the blowing.
- And the groups came in, the rest of the people
- came in during the day, and cleaning it all out.
- And then we came at night, and we chiseled the ceilings
- and put some whatever support we had to do, because--
- In other words, you were dynamiting.
- Yeah.
- And I was the only Jew, which they knew there was a Jew.
- The Nazi didn't know I was a Jew.
- The German who took me to work didn't know I'm a Jew.
- I carry his rifle.
- He was 80 years old.
- So only the Ukrainian [CROSS TALK] actually--
- No, not this-- only one man.
- Ukrainian.
- Yeah.
- And he said-- but I had a hunch that some
- of those Russian from my brigade knew,
- because Sundays we didn't work.
- Then we were laying around.
- Actually, being Jewish, I wanted to be between--
- see what's going on between my people.
- So a couple of Russians didn't know, because one of them
- turn around, and he said, hey, you're not Ukrainian.
- You're not Polish, either, he said to me.
- I says, what do you think I am?
- Ah, he says, you're Jewish.
- Because you don't see any of us going and talking to the Jews.
- See, they thought they're better, but they're not.
- They weren't better.
- They were running away from camps,
- and they were hanging them just like they did the Jews.
- And they're bringing back, the Russians too.
- These were war criminals.
- No, not war criminals.
- Those Russians were prisoners of war originally, yeah.
- But the rest of the Christians were
- war criminals, like French resistance, were other French.
- I got acquainted over there with a Polish Frenchman who
- spoke Polish.
- But he was born in France.
- His parents were miners.
- And he worked for the resistance.
- And I made a good friends in there, a good friend
- in the camp.
- But with the Germans, I couldn't get too close,
- the one in the camp, because they were running the camp.
- And yet they were still anti-Nazi.
- But they didn't care for any other nationality that well.
- Didn't care for Jews.
- Jews neither.
- Maybe if I would be a German Jew, maybe if I would--
- yeah, if I would unveil my name, somehow,
- when I talk to those two guys, my masters,
- they were old coal miners.
- That's all they knew is mining.
- But over there, they didn't do mining.
- They just did the work, opening big holes for workshops,
- for machinery to take in.
- But their job was mining.
- And they took a liking to me, and they didn't treat me
- like a Jew or anything else.
- They treat me like a human being.
- And they fed me, too.
- Then were you liberated and--
- Well, two days before the liberation,
- they took all the Jews out.
- And I had a fight with that Ukrainian.
- I says, let me go.
- He says, no.
- Over my dead body.
- If I have to nail you to the cross,
- he says, I keep you here.
- If I have to make another Jesus out of you, I keep you here.
- And I didn't want to fight him anymore.
- I says, what's going to happen if--
- I know there's a couple of Russians who says they know it.
- And I'm afraid of them.
- They got loose talk.
- He says, they won't.
- He says, I already had a talk with them.
- He says, I took my group together, he says.
- And I had a talk with them.
- And they know when I say no it's going to be no.
- My life is your life.
- He says, you stay.
- Were the Jews evacuated--
- Two days, yeah, to Theresienstadt, only
- by 9 kilometers away.
- I didn't even know there was a Theresienstadt existed.
- But after the war, I found out.
- That's where I met my wife.
- So how did you wind up in Theresienstadt?
- Well, to go see where my Jews are?
- I was the only Jew.
- After liberation?
- Right.
- The Russians came in, and they moved us
- in in the officer's quarters.
- We moved in.
- We didn't live in camp.
- We lived in officer's quarters.
- They give us 24 hours.
- We could go out and take the city over,
- and do any revenge we want, anything we want.
- After 24 hours, we had to come back to camp.
- We had beds.
- We had beautiful rooms.
- We had washrooms just like the officers we lived.
- Every room had two or three beds.
- So who liberated you?
- The Russians.
- Russians.
- Yes.
- Just like Theresienstadt was liberated by the Russians.
- How did they--
- That Ukrainian, by the way, didn't make it.
- Would you believe it?
- Now see, I listened to him, but he didn't want to listen to me.
- See, he was a Russian soldier.
- He was a officer in the Russian service.
- They were his men, by the way.
- So that's why he could swear for every one of them.
- He says, they will not escape, because the Nazis are going
- to bring him back and hang him.
- He says, and they will not squeal on you.
- They will not say nothing against me,
- because I'm their officer.
- They caught us.
- They caught us all together, he says.
- And we stick the war out together.
- And towards the end, what happened, I begged him not
- to go, and he did.
- The whole camp was already surrounded with the Russian.
- We heard the whole night the artillery,
- that we didn't go out to work for the last two days.
- They kept us in camp.
- Kept us because we were supposed to be Christians.
- The Jews were already out for two days previous.
- And we know.
- We knew that it's just a matter of minutes or something
- like that.
- Or maybe a day or half a day.
- And a lot of the guards who were in the towers,
- we didn't see nobody.
- Escaped.
- They ran--
- They just walked off.
- We got a hold of them, though, afterwards.
- Anybody who didn't leave Czechoslovakia,
- unless they left Czechoslovakia, then we caught them.
- We got him, and we hung him, and we shot him, and we beat him.
- And we made sure he's a SS too.
- We know where to look for and everything.
- We had a court set up with a judge, with a jury.
- Everything was done [INAUDIBLE].
- Hang him or not.
- Kill him or not.
- And that happened, everything, in 24 hours.
- And after that, we had to drop our weapons,
- put everything away, forget about everything.
- We know the Russian rules.
- When they give you an order not to, you don't.
- So anyway, I went to, after the 24 hours,
- I found out there's a Theresienstadt,
- that Jews survived there.
- And I found out the whole story.
- I told her what--
- the whole story of what was supposed to happen to the Jews,
- that the leader, the Gestapo, who ran the whole camp,
- didn't want to be captured by the Russians.
- So he went to the International Red Cross.
- He didn't go.
- He couldn't go.
- He left a message with them because they
- used to come to the camp.
- Because Theresienstadt was supposed
- to be a picturesque place.
- It was a show place for the Nazi, which Hitler showed
- that he treated the Jews right.
- What happened in the back of the camp, nobody inside the camp,
- nobody got in.
- He just only show him the frontage,
- like they show you in Hollywood.
- They were-- Jews were sitting and drinking and whatever.
- It was supposed to have been whiskey or wine.
- If they were happy, they had some little black tea
- there in the glasses.
- Anyway.
- And they had some clothes on like human beings.
- But they didn't see what was going on in the back,
- that people were dying from hunger in there in the camp,
- in Theresienstadt.
- So he asked the Red Cross to save the camp?
- Is that what--
- Well, he-- no, he didn't ask for that, because he
- didn't want to save himself.
- He says, if you going to liberate me today,
- I tell you a secret, what I supposed to do.
- I have an order.
- He didn't give the order yet.
- He says, but he had directly the order.
- He had to just tell it to his henchmen, what to do--
- to destroy the whole-- it was dynamite.
- See, the camp wasn't dynamite.
- What happened over there in this particular city,
- they had underground prehistorical places.
- What did they used to call it?
- Caves?
- Caves.
- There were caves over there.
- And those caves were mined.
- And the order was chase the Jews down to the cave--
- Dynamite.
- --and light a match.
- Then everything was set up.
- Light a mine.
- I didn't have to light a match.
- Just pull the plunger, connected the few wires.
- So everything was set.
- They would have been just inside.
- That's it.
- So he made a deal?
- So he made a deal with them.
- And the Red Cross found out about it, as they found out.
- They took him under on one of them wagons.
- They took him over here.
- They send him over to the ally's side,
- which he know he's going to be safe over there.
- And the Russians.
- Because the Russians dealt [CROSS TALK]..
- As a trade for saving the camp.
- Yeah, so what they did, they didn't
- know they're going to save the camp yet.
- But they figure that he's the only one who knows about it,
- which he told the truth.
- But what the Red Cross didn't take no chances.
- They went over to the Russian, and the Russian
- to the Russian front.
- And the guy who led this particular district
- happened to be a Jew himself.
- And he turned around and he said,
- there's an order from Stalin, that we
- have to take that city fast.
- And sure enough, they took it.
- They give everybody a drink-- a bottle of whiskey,
- a drink of whiskey.
- A Russian soldier gets a drink, he goes.
- And they took--
- So it was like a surprise.
- And they-- a surprise to the Germans
- when they took over the camp.
- And that's how over 40,000--
- I don't know exactly.
- I think there was more than 40,000 Jews saved.
- What happened to the Ukrainian?
- Oh, the Ukrainian didn't want to stay in camp.
- He wanted to go greet his fellow soldiers.
- So there came a whole-- they went, a whole bunch of them,
- and they broke through the gate.
- It wasn't electrocuted anymore.
- It was already-- because they made sure the lights are out.
- The power is off.
- And one stubborn Nazi was still sitting in a tower,
- and he opened a machine gun, and he laid out
- a whole bunch of Russians.
- Amongst them were other--
- maybe not only Russians.
- There were other ones who wanted to go greet the liberators.
- And he was amongst them, and picked up his hat,
- and he was bleeding from all over,
- just like you make a hole in--
- holes in.
- Because the machine gun, it was just
- spraying on them over them.
- And he was just leaking blood from all over.
- And I couldn't get a word out of him anymore.
- After you were--
- After I was liberated, I met a whole bunch of girls.
- But she sticked with them together.
- And I says, why do you have to be here?
- She says, come to the officer quarters where I live.
- I mean, you don't have to live with the boys together.
- Women are going to be separate and men are going
- to be separate, sure enough.
- So you took care of them.
- I took them all over to their camp, and they settled there.
- But we weren't there too long.
- Maybe a week or so.
- Because the Russians didn't want to keep this up.
- We had too good.
- And they know if we-- they take us to Russia,
- we wouldn't have that great.
- Used to go out to farms.
- She used to go out and bring some food galore--
- fresh chickens, all kind of meat, veal.
- And we had places to cook and eat.
- My God, we lived it up.
- And the Russians didn't want that.
- They want to take us on a train.
- They took us all to a place where they start--
- they wanted to take us back to Russia.
- Now we know better, and I didn't want to go to Russia.
- I've been with the Russians before.
- I mean, I have nothing against the Russian people,
- but I don't like their regime.
- I didn't care for communism.
- Our aim was to, like my wife said, was to go to Israel.
- But that was impossible.
- Did you go back to your hometown?
- No, I never did.
- I was afraid.
- I found out it was taken over by the Russians,
- because Lwów was--
- but see, they changed the map.
- From in '45, the map changed.
- See, what they did is they made Poland a little larger
- the other way, but they cut them short on the Ukrainian side.
- And Lwów was a large city.
- It was almost a million population
- during the Russian time.
- In 1939, in 1940, there was a million population in our city.
- So that's not a small little town.
- And it was a very industrial city.
- I mean, it was everything over there.
- We had from tanneries to steel mills.
- And not far away from us there were even refineries.
- Not only refineries.
- They were producing-- there were--
- had oil, oil fields.
- They had oil.
- Were you hoping for some survivors from your family?
- I was, and thank God I found out that my sisters, two sisters
- survived.
- I didn't find out until I was in Germany already after the war,
- in displaced person camp.
- And I then-- I went to Poland and she came
- to Germany, one of the sisters.
- One of them I didn't find out until I was already
- in the United States.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Did you ever get to meet them?
- Oh, yeah.
- I've even brought them over to the States.
- But her, and her husband, and two children.
- As a matter of fact, they wind up in Brooklyn
- with my only other sister together.
- She wanted to--
- I thought she was going to stay with me in Illinois, where
- I lived, in Skokie.
- But she wanted to go back to her sister.
- So she went back to Brooklyn and she settled over there.
- It's a matter of fact, the two boys
- got circumcised in America.
- They were never born in Poland.
- They weren't circumcised.
- See, she met a guy.
- He's a Jewish guy too.
- But he was during the war in Russia, her husband,
- her younger sister's.
- And they had-- he was a--
- studied law in Russia.
- And he was a lawyer in Poland.
- But what kind of law could he study?
- It's all communist.
- If he defends somebody, he was accused
- of doing the wrong things.
- Anyway, he couldn't stay there, so they had to leave.
- So they came to the States.
- When you first came, you came to New York?
- In New York I was only 24 hours.
- I was aiming to go.
- Then they put us on a train, and we came to Chicago.
- And you spent the rest of your life--
- Most, yeah, all my life, Chicago.
- From the DP camps, did you have difficulty
- migrating to the United States?
- For me, it was so easy.
- It wasn't that easy for a lot of people.
- I don't know.
- The reason it was so easy for me,
- I had been a policeman in the camp, in displaced person camp,
- there is.
- They give me a somewhat a better apartment or whatever.
- I was sharing.
- There was two rooms.
- I had to go through another room in order to get into my room.
- And the two rooms who I went--
- who I used to go walk to to mine-- because we were married,
- we were already as man and wife--
- I had to go through their room.
- There were two girls, single girls, who survive as gentile,
- spoke fluently English.
- They worked for the.
- UNRRA.
- --in the United States.
- Yes, ma'am.
- In Chicago?
- Yes.
- And would you mind stating their name as well as Anna did?
- Yes.
- Brenda Simon is my older daughter,
- who lives in Phoenix here, together with us--
- not together with us.
- Just in this town.
- She's got a husband and two children.
- And they both teach.
- She does-- right now, she's not teaching study.
- She does--
- Subbing.
- She substitutes.
- But she is a licensed teacher.
- As a matter of fact, she got her license in Phoenix too,
- because she had it over there, her certification.
- So he had to go through some examination here.
- But she's certified for Arizona.
- And you have how many grandchildren?
- And I have a younger daughter who lives in California,
- and she is married to a surgeon.
- And they have three children.
- And this one has two.
- So I have four boys and one girl.
- Altogether, five grandchildren.
- And for their sake, we hope--
- or do you think that this--
- an atrocity like this could happen again?
- It happened once and it could happen again.
- And that's for our life.
- But if you go back to the Jewish history,
- that's been happening before.
- But I never believed in my life that something like this
- could happen and they could get away with it.
- But they did.
- And if there wouldn't be by any miracles,
- we wouldn't be here either, because Hitler
- had it all sewed up to kill us all, to destroy us all.
- He couldn't of.
- There will still be some left.
- But maybe not as many.
- But he still killed enough of us.
- Most of us were destroyed.
- Well, Bill, I thank you very much for your time, and we--
- You're Welcome.
- --you have a very--
- you're very courageous man.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank--
There is no transcript available for this track
Overview
- Interviewee
- William Koenig
- Date
-
interview:
1987 November 10
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
3 videocassettes (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. Holocaust survivors--United States.
- Personal Name
- Koenig, William.
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
Phoenix Holocaust Survivors Association
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The interview with William Koenig was conducted on November 10, 1987 by the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association in affiliation with the Cline Library of Northern Arizona University as part of a project to document the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in the Phoenix, AZ area. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the interview in 1989.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:09:41
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512512
Additional Resources
Transcripts (2)
Download & Licensing
- Request Copy
- See Rights and Restrictions
- Terms of Use
- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
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