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Can you describe the transport from Westerbork to
Auschwitz?
When
we got to Auschwitz in the box cars from Holland which lasted about
a week to get there...and by the way, the Germans were so determined
to kill people that while they were fighting a war on the Russian side,
in Eastern Europe, the railroads–planes weren't used in those
days–the railroads had priority, the boxcars going to Auschwitz
had priority on the rail lines to Auschwitz, before the army troops
were supplied on the Eastern Front. You can see how obsessed they were
with killing people.
Can you describe the day you were deported from
Westerbork to Auschwitz?
Yes,
that was a tough one. I was told that since I had turned 15, I would
be taken away from parents, which was for everybody. I went on the
transport, on the boxcars, I was taken away from parents, and I went
in the boxcars. I don't remember exactly, obviously we said goodbye
to each other just in case. I think about it as I get older much more.
I was 15 years old, I was a kid. I think about how my parents must
have felt. I was the first born, I had a sister was three years younger,
I told you earlier. Obviously, families are close. I was always a very
good student, so they never criticized me too much because I liked
to study. I was the first born in that whole family, on both sides
of the brothers and sisters. That must of been horrible for my parents.
They took me away and I went in a boxcar with 80-90 people, I don't
know. We were in there for five days. I don't remember the details, but
I remember the event, obviously. You were not treated as a human being
this was like when they buy cattle on the farm and put them in the
boxcars, the same boxcars, and take them to the auctions.
Can you describe what you remember about the box
car and the transportation before getting to Auschwitz?
Yeah.
I was taken away from my parents, I was about fifteen or thereabouts,
I don't remember the month, it was 1942, towards the end of '42. Fall
weather, I think it was September. In the box car there were about
eighty-some odd people. We were allowed to keep our clothes in the
camp we were in Holland. And I remember that my mother put an extra
coat on me because, going to Poland, it's always cold there, you know,
snow and everything, east of Germany, it was cold. I didn't know, but
that's what people thought about it. So, we were men and women in the
same car and there was no food, but my parents gave me enough food
that I could survive in there. The people died in the boxcars and we
used them, we put them on the perimeter of the boxcars, they were used
as benches because there was no place. There was no way to go to the
bathroom, there was no bathroom. Whatever happened, happened.
Is there any more detail you can tell us about
the boxcars?
We
were not given any food, but my mother – remember we didn't know
where we were going, nobody knew where we were going – being
the way she was, she put in every pocket, I had some food, some bread,
and whatever she had. And then, she put on an extra coat on me on top
of a regular coat. I had two coats because we knew we were going to
the east, meaning Poland, that we know pretty well, and we know that
in Poland it gets very cold. In the boxcars itself we sat. And people
were dying so we put them around on the side and people sat on the
corpses. There was no toilet, pardon the expression, so whatever you
had to do you had to do.
I
remember, vividly, one or two, three people actually, and one of them
was a girl that was my age, we went to school together, and we held
on to each other for some reason. We never dated, you know we were
too young for that and Holland was very conservative anyhow. We sat
there and we held onto each other. She was killed when we got to Auschwitz,
but I remember that because she was a girl I went to school with for a couple
of years. And some of them I knew, some of them I didn't know. But
there was no such thing as toilets or water – people were very
thirsty. And five days later the doors opened and a third of them had
died, suffocated.
Then
we were in Auschwitz, in Birkenau. Then they started screaming, "Out,
out, out," so we went out. And we were standing in line to be
selected. You have heard of Mengele, a famous doctor? And he stood
in front of the line, there were about eight, nine people in each row,
and he said to me, I remember quite well, in German, he said, "How
old?" So, for some reason, God made me say 18. I was only 15 but
I was chubby, with a coat on. I looked kind of not very thin. And,
I said eighteen, and he goes like this [flicks arm to the right]. And,
I see people who went, and the others go like that, with his whip [flicks
arm to the left]. The ones who went there [left] went on trucks. I
figured as I'm standing there, I said, "Why did I lie? Now I have
to walk, and God knows how far. These people are all going on trucks.
I could have been on the trucks if I didn't lie." But the ones
who went on the trucks went to the gas chambers. Out of the four thousand
they took about maybe four or five hundred who had to work. And that
depended on if they needed a work force.
For
instance, when I got there, they hadn't kept anyone alive from Holland
for six months. There was one person who went on the first transport
from Holland to Auschwitz, and he knew me, and I knew him, he was about
a year, year and a half older than me maybe. And when he heard there
was a transport from Holland he came to the barracks where they had
us, holding us, because there wasn't anyone kept alive. Every Tuesday
a train left from Holland to Auschwitz—they were all killed constantly
until they needed some work force. That's why I'm alive and that's
why he was saved on the first [transport]. He was saved, I may have told you in class,
he was a magician, I told that story, so that's how he saved his life.
We
got to Auschwitz. We got out of the box cars and there was a big yard
area and we lined up about seven, eight to ten people lined up. In
front of this group stands the famous Mengele, you have heard about
him, he was the head of Auschwitz, and he had a whip in his hand, I
remember. When he got in front of me he said to me in German, I spoke
German of course, "How old? Wie alt?" And only God
could have made me, I said, "Achtzehn, 18." I had
an extra coat on and I was a little chubby, and he goes like this [gestures
right]. So I go that way. And the people behind me, they went
like that [gestures left]. The people on this side [gestures left] went
on trucks. Where I went we started marching. So I said to myself, "Why
did I lie? I shouldn't have lied. I would have been on trucks, maybe
I got to march for hours and hours." Well, the ones on trucks
went to the gas chambers, and the ones on this side [gestures right] about 5%
of the people, they were kept alive, we went to the barracks.
You mentioned you had a tattoo. Would you
mind showing us that?
You
didn't have a name any longer you got a number and that was you were
registered under that number not under any names.
Question: What is the number?
145382. I should remember that without looking.
How did they do it?
Tattoo, with black ink or something like that.
Did everyone have a number?
Only
the ones who were kept alive and only Auschwitz had numbers where they
tattooed numbers in. In Dachau I had a number, but it wasn't tattooed.
It was only done in Auschwitz.
How do you feel now when you see it everyday?
I
see it every morning in the shower, right? Or when I go to bed at night.
To be very blunt about it, it bothers me more now than it has bothered
me in all these other years, in recent years, as I get older because
you think more about things. I see it more, I see it more now. I don't
have any short sleeves. People ask me, because I always have long sleeve
shirts, sports shirts too. I see it more now than I used to in the
last 5-6 years. Men and women, it was not only men. By the way, men
and women, not together, there was a men's camp and women's camp.
When you first went to Auschwitz, what thoughts
preoccupied your mind other than what you were experiencing?
I
was scared to death and hungry, always hungry. It's hard to explain
how we felt because we didn't have time to think. We got up at four
in the morning and we had to work. I was mostly on the road gangs doing
street repairs and whatever they called it. Not street repairs like
here,
but moving stones around, moving dirt around. It's hard to explain
how you felt, you were so scared. But I always felt, number one, I
tried not to be visible too much, I never stood outside of a group
of people, I would always stay on the inside. My friend told me that.
And
also I wanted to get through, I wanted to stay alive. And there was
a lot of suicides, a lot. I never felt that because I wanted to see
my parents again and my sister again. And I wanted to tell the story.
That came later. It just was this innate feeling that I had to make
it. Now, did I say it in so many words then? No, nobody did because
the transport that I was on, nobody's alive, nobody came...at the tail
end in '45 there was no one left of those people. The women and children
were killed immediately. And the old people. They only kept the men
who could work.
That
was Auschwitz. Now when I got to Auschwitz, rather Birkenau, which
is next door, we had no idea in Holland what would happen on this trip.
All we were told, we were going to the east to Poland to be kept there
during the war and then they would bring us back, that's all that they
told us. None of us knew there were gas chambers. We knew there were
camps, we had heard of Dachau, but not of gas chambers. But then in
Birkenau where we worked, I worked in road gangs, I was on a road gang
a week after I got there, and in front of the gas chambers to do some
digging in the roads, I don't know, rocks, moving rocks. And my friend
who had come in there with me, he tapped me on shoulders, and said, "look
over there!" And I saw my parents and my sister marching by, but
they were marching into the gas chambers and I was working in front
of the building. And I stopped working, I fainted almost, and I was
beaten up, I still have scars on my back. Now then we knew that the
gas chambers were working 24 hours a day. It went on for years and
years until about the end of '44.
The
food intake was about 200 calories. You got a piece of bread in the
evening. The next morning you got some what they called "tea" with
some warm water, whatever color. At lunch you got a bowl of soup and
every four people had a bowl, so you never had your own. So four people
ate out of the bowl. That was our food. At night the bread you had
to eat immediately because if you didn't, either you couldn't keep
it all night because the rats would eat it if you had it under your
hat, or they would steal it from you, people were so hungry.
And
not all people were gassed, a lot of them died. There was typhoid there.
Somewhere my friend who, the one I mentioned earlier, he was there
six months before. He was on the first transport which had left Holland.
Then for six months every week a transport came in - they left on Tuesdays
in the camp I was in and they got there by about seven or eight days
later. Every transport between when he got there and when I got there,
they were killed, there was no one selected. When they selected it
was because they had some empty barracks because of those killed. Every
Sunday we didn't march to work first, we first stood in line to be
selected if you couldn't work. If they saw something anything on you
that you were suppose to...that you couldn't work, they would say...you
went to barracks number thirteen. Barracks number thirteen meant you
are going to the gas chambers. Unless you worked there you weren't
kept alive.
The
beatings were horrible with the dogs, they all had dogs, those Germans,
the SS men, the dogs and the beatings. I remember the camp commander–that
I remember vividly–had a motorcycle and he used to go on the
main street of the camp in Birkenau. He had a pistol in his hand and
anything he saw moving, human beings, he shot, he used you for target
practice. Life was absolutely, totally worthless to these people. That
I remember.
Then,
I mentioned earlier, we got out when I ended up in Warsaw. But Birkenau
is something that no one can explain to you. We slept on wooden planks
and you had about four guys with a blanket, if you had a blanket. We
all got, of course, uniforms, the striped uniforms you may have seen.
We had a number on ours, arms which I have. You were shaved, your hair
was shaved. They even checked if you had gold in your mouth, fillings,
you were destined to be killed because the gold was taken out and saved
for the German banks or whatever. Luckily at that time I didn't have,
now I have a couple of fillings at my age, but in those days I had
all of my teeth. But if you had gold in your mouth you were gone because
they took all that gold out, they killed you.
The
people who worked in the gas chambers, these were prisoners like me,
except I never worked there inside. They lived for 90 days. Every 90
days they were taken away and killed, they were shot they weren't gassed.
They got better food than we did, that we know. But every 90 days they
were killed because they want to make sure if they ever were surprised
by being liberated, they didn't want any witnesses. So every 90 days
the people who worked in the gas chambers were shot to destroy evidence.
As you well know when the Russians came, who liberated Birkenau and
Auschwitz, the gas chambers were all bombed, they were all blown up.
There was none intact because they tried to destroy the evidence.
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