Dzho Rozenblum

Name of Interviewee: Joe Rosenblum

Name of Interviewer: Miriam Aviezer

Cassette Number: VT-2484

Date: October 11, ‎1999

Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi

Names:

Miedzyrzec

Majdanek

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Oranienburg

Sachsenhausen

Berlin

Landsberg

Kaufering

Dachau

Q: (Hebrew) October 11, 1999. Interviewing Rosenblum Joe. Miriam Aviezer, interviewer. Rosenblum Joe was born in 1925 in the city Miedzyrzec in Poland. Mr. Rosenblum is a tourist in Israel and lives today in the United States in Florida. (English) Mr. Rosenblum, we would like to take you back to your childhood, to your hometown, and to ask you to describe to us a little bit the background you were brought up – the education and the house and parents. All what we can hear to know you better as a child.

A: I was born in Miedzyrzec in Poland in 1925. We had a family of six children – three boys, three girls, mother and father. My father’s name was Samuel, Shmuel, and my mother’s name was Mindel. We lived all the years in Poland. My father had a factory for producing brushes and my mother used to buy and sell orchards. And as far as the children – I was the oldest from three boys. I went to Talmud Torah for seven years, till the war. My younger brother, two years younger, went to the same school. My sisters went also to Jewish schools, had a Jewish upbringing. My father was a conservative man and we had a nice family, we lived nice. Childhood was nice, very nice.

Q: Do you remember maybe one of the holidays?

A: Yes. In the older days we were always home – about the same thing. We kept up with all the things which was given to us – going to synagogue, “shabbos”, “yontiff” and so on and so on. We had a happy family till…

Q: And your house was placed where usually Jews were living or together with…?

A: Most of the Jewish families were living there, yes, but there was no problem between people at all. We lived all happily. We never had any problems with nobody. We were happy people.

Q: Do you remember, for example, Pesach at home?

A: …naturally. All the holidays were kept up the way they should be, yes. We looked forward and we had a good time. We used to go to the synagogue – the way it should be.

Q: What did you like to do except school and learning?

A: School, yes. We had libraries. We used to go to the libraries, take out books. Particularly my sisters liked books, read books. We had sports clubs. In our city we used to do that. And somehow we used to go to football games and naturally wintertime was not, but we went to movies.

Q: You liked sports?

A: Yes.

Q: Which?

A: Football. That was our main…playing football. And we lived a fine, quiet life.

Q: Were you in some movement, in some youth movement?

A: Yes. I belonged to “Hashomer Hatzair” as a youngster. And my sisters belonged also – a Zionist thing. My sister went, the oldest, to a kibbutz before the war. She was trying to get to Israel, but it was very, very hard.

Q: What do you remember from these activities of “Hashomer Hatzair”?

A: They used to teach and preach that Palestine, at that time, was the home for Jews, but it was hard to get to it, to Palestine.

Q: Because of the certificates?

A: Yes, there was restriction from the English.

Q: Do you remember maybe the “Keren Kayemet” box?

A: Yes. They had boxes in every house. They used to throw in money. We did this very religiously, every week. They used to take it out every couple of months. This was the way it was.

Q: When you see the map of Palestine at that time on that box, how did you imagine Palestine? What was your vision of Palestine at that time?

A: Well, the reason was that our people needed a homeland and anything we could do, with all our might we tried to help to get there and support it. And G-d willing, all of us had hope. Unfortunately, the war came in, in between, but our people deserved do have a homeland, like any other people in the world.

Q: You yourself, did Palestine mean to you something before the war?

A: Yes, a whole lot. The reason for it – my sister used to get a lot of magazines, newspapers, and I got involved in it. Yes, very much. Because as a youngster I was brilliant at school, and by my sister being in it, as a “hechhalutz”, as they say, I had this in mind, when I grew up, to go to Palestine myself. Even I had a good home and everything that I needed, but this is our homeland. It was unfortunate that the war came in between and all the dreams were gone.

Q: Before the war started, did you have some feeling that something is going to happen?

A: Well, yes. We heard Hitler’s speeches. My uncle had a radio. It was hard to get radios for Jewish people, but he was rich and he had a radio and we used to hear his speeches in 1933, ’35 and so on and so on. Yes, we were worried about it. We worried because what he said in his book that he was going to do what he did, we were very upset about it, but we had no place to go at that point. The English didn’t let us in and a lot of countries didn’t let us in.

Q: Did you try? Did you try to do something? Your parents, I mean.

A: My parents, they had only one hope. In the First World War the Germans were good to the Jews, very good, so they couldn’t picture that they were going to do such atrocities. So when it happened, it was too late to go anyplace. All the doors were closed.

Q: Do you remember if there were some Jewish refugees coming to your town, before the war started in your place?

A: Yes. German Jews used to come. I think it was in 1938, ’37, they came to our town, quite a few Jewish people. Their parents were born in Poland, so this was the first they sent in to our city. At that point we helped them, we helped them a lot. We were very nice people. Every one of us made a good living. We had prosperity, so we helped these people. Quite a few came over. They went around peddling a lot of different things.

Q: What did they say?

A: They got the message that Hitler, whatever he promised, was going to do it, and he did it. First they got out the Polish parents with the children to Poland. Our city was a rich city, so they brought in a lot more of these people.

Q: Did you meet with other youngsters and did you discuss the situation?

A: Yes. I lived with that, I went to bed with that, I got up with that, and it’s exactly what happened. We predicted the worst. As a matter of fact, my mother knew right along, right along, constantly that we were in for a bad fight (?), and she was right. But there was very little we could have done. There was no place to go and nobody to cry to or get help. We were just alone in this world.

Q: And when did it start?

A: It started in 1939. I think it was in June, end of June, that Hitler attacked Poland, and from then on was just terrible, terrible. It got worse and worse and worse till they got to the end when they liquidated all the Jews.

Q: Can you describe to us what happened in your town and to your family?

A: In our town, yes. What happened in our town, we were the exceptional people there. Why the exceptional people? We had a lot of factories on the rivers, we had big synagogues, we had thirty thousand Jewish families. Three thousand gentiles. We never had any problem with them because they worked for us and we had prosperity. But when they came in, they automatically started getting deeper and deeper, deeper, deeper. What it means – they started out with one thing and went till they were dead. So at that point all of us were very, very, very, very hurt. G-d knew what was going to happen.

Q: What did happen?

A: We predicted the worst and it happened the worst.

Q: What were the first steps?

A: The first step – they started taking away Jewish good homes, good furniture. The army moved into it. Then they had restrictions – Jews can not go out after six, seven o’clock in the evening. They closed up all the bakery shops. We had twenty-five or thirty bakery shops. We had one baker, so we had to stand in line from early in the morning till about seven o’clock we would get half a loaf or a loaf of bread. With a family of six children, it didn’t go that far. Everybody was trying to survive. That they wouldn’t kill us. That somehow we would survive. But then they started taking us to camps, working camps and byways. Doing a lot of crazy things that ordinarily they didn’t do. Just to make our lives miserable. And they did make us miserable. No matter how strong you were, you broke down. This went on year after year. And my situation was a little bit different. Quite a few people did it. We had to go work for the farmers, for the Polish farmers, so we had a little bit of food to take home for the families. So that was a little bit easier. But they took my father to work, they took my sisters to work in byways.

Q: So you were working with the Polish men?

A: I worked for a farmer in summer. In wintertime I took over for my father because he was already burned out from beatings and working hard and no food, no clothing. So I came home every year to take over from my father.

Q: What does it mean, “Every year”? We are speaking now, this is the year ’39 we are speaking?

A: This started right in ’39. And also, they brought into our city Jewish families from the Third Reich that they annexed. They brought them into our city because we had a lot of room, factories. In wintertime there was no heat, so they brought in, I would say, in our city, maybe fifteen different cities they cleaned out, close to Germany, and they put them in all the factories. And they were starving, no food. In wintertime they froze to death. Piles of people. In wintertime, when I came home, we worked on a railroad by us on a ramp, but we didn’t know what they were doing it for. They had railroads and they were building extensions to the railroads and a place where people can come and go. So in 1942 we found out what it was for.

Q: But from 1939 till ’42, what was happening to the Jews in your town?

A: I’ll get to it slowly. What happened in our town, they made a “Judenstadt”. Do you know what a “Judenstadt” is? In Warsaw was another “Judenstadt”. And they kept on bringing in people from all over, from Belgium, from Holland, from Luxembourg, from all over those people. And then they started building gas chambers. Gas chambers opened up the middle of…

Q: But you are speaking about your town, or about Poland?

A: In general. In 1942, middle of the year, was like August, they started taking. Before they did a little bit killing and so forth, but at that time they made up their minds to finish all the Jewish people. So they started bringing people and they threw the people out. The train was only about fourteen, fifteen kilometers to Treblinka. And they started gassing them.

Q: I would like to concentrate on what happened in your home town. What happened there?

A: All over was the same picture. They started liquidating Warsaw, they started liquidating our city. My mother knew a month before. I don’t know how she found out. I cannot figure it out for my life’s sake. She brought in all the good stuff that she had. She had a lot of gold and things and money. She was a business lady. And she brought it over to the farmers where I worked. They were very nice people. As a matter of fact, we had dinner this time and everything. Very nice. She left all the goods a month before. Nobody knew what was going to go on. And this was the summer I still worked for the farmer and I was sorting, my brother, my younger brother, two years younger, came along. He escaped from the ghetto in that place, like in the market. There were maybe twenty thousand people. They started shooting them and somehow he ran away and he came to me to the village - this was about twelve kilometers – and he told me the good news. They took away the whole family to Treblinka.

Q: The whole family. Whom exactly? Your mother?

A: Mother.

Q: What was her name?

A: My two sisters. One sister escaped to Russia. She got married in 1939. My younger brother and my sister’s baby – she was married. And at that point my father, they took him to Treblinka. They couldn’t take him in to gas him because a lot of trains were lined up ahead of him. So he was an army man, he was in the army, so before he got to Treblinka he jumped out of the window and he escaped. He came into the town. The town was ninety percent empty. Somewhere he hid himself. My brother came to the farmer. They fed him for awhile and then he went back to my father and found out my father was alive. This was in 1942.

Then I worked for the farmer. He treated me very nice.

Q: It was probably very hard for you to hear this news.

A: So like I said before, my brother went to my father and he said it was almost ninety percent empty. Next door they had a family, Polish family, and they had a Russian man, soldier, that ran away from the camp and he worked for the neighbour. I used to help him with food. A lot of them came out from the woods. I helped them with food. I felt sorry for those people. I was feeding cattle early in the morning and then going to work in the fields. When I got to the neighbour, I saw horses with a buggy pull out from the driveway and I heard shooting. I was maybe a hundred meters and I saw exactly what happened. I came there. The whole family lay dead – mother, daughter and children, grandfather. So I was afraid for my people because they treated me nice, they were very nice. They made a nice dinner for us. So at that point I decided I could not do it because if they found out that I am a Jew – I didn’t look like a Jew, but I was afraid that if they found me there, they would kill the other family. So I ran into the forest which was very close.

Q: When you say you didn’t look like a Jew, how did a Jew look?

A: Well, I didn’t have any dark hair, I had blue eyes, so it helped me a great deal.

Q: You could be also a German boy.

A: Right. So I went into the forest and I walked around for two days. I had a little bit food. One day I was bitten by the mosquitoes so bad, almost half of me was gone. I started out early in the morning and I talked to the “Riboino shel Oilom”: G-d help me, I had no place to go. If I go in the city, they would kill me there. If I go on the road, they would kill me there. If I stay here, they would kill me there. While I was talking to G-d I saw a rifle sticking out. I thought, “I’m finished.” It happened to be the Russian partisans that I helped them get food. “Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing?” They saw the way I looked already. So I told them what happened and one guy said, “I know this guy. He helped us with food and meat.” I said, “Why don’t you take me with you?” “Sorry,” he said, “I cannot do it. I’ve got to go to the camp where they are and talk to the lieutenant. He will decide if he wants to have you. I’ll tell him exactly what you did for us, which we really appreciate.” About two hours later he came back and he said, “Okay, come with us.” So I was with them off and on for about six months.

Q: With the partisans.

A: With the partisans. But I had to come to see my father, to bring him a little food.

Q: What did you do I these six months?

A: What I did with them, we used to go and take care of business, fighting. I used to go and see my father on the weekends, sometimes for a day or two. I used to go through the river at night and bring a little bit of food for my father and for my brother.

Q: They were hidden, in a hiding place?

A: Yes, yes. So I tried to go back once and I was surrounded and I saw then my friend in the woods – Germans with Polish police. And when I saw that I started running. Before I knew it, I got a bullet in my arm and I got hurt and blood is coming out and I couldn’t run no more. So they picked me up and they took me to the German “gendarmerie”. I cannot believe what happened. I came in there. Two Polish police and the “gendarmerie”, a German, took me in and inside this man who ran the office, looked like Jewish, typical Jewish person – short guy. Came in and he asked the guys if they find any weapon on me. And he said, “No.” I had a little knife and a hankerchief with a few dollars, zlotas. So he said, “What are you doing? Where are you going?” So I told him I worked on a farm.

Q: Did you have a cover story? A story that you were selling, let us say. What did you say?

A: That’s coming. So I said I worked for the farmer, which I did before but not…couldn’t tell him about the partisans. That would have been death in a second. My family is all gone and I started crying. And he asked me, “Mechste leben?”, if I wanted to live. He said, “I’ll give you a little paper and go…”. There was a little brewery. They were making whiskey and beer and all kinds of things, a factory. “Go there.” He called up if they could take a worker there. “You can go for ten days, twenty days.” So I had to go maybe two miles, but I was not afraid. I had a little paper. So when I came there, they put me in with a guy, an old man, to throw in potatoes. There was a machine washing the potatoes. And that man was a big anti-semite by us. He was the only anti-semite that we had in our city. He worked for Jewish people. Elderly man. I told him I said…He was tired of working so hard, so he needed help. That was the reason they sent me there. After two or three days he became nice to me. He told his wife to bring me some food and washed and they shared, brought me some other pants. I was there about two and a half weeks and I found a couple of Jewish boys that were making barrels, that I knew in this city. Making barrels for the Germans to take the whiskey back to Germany. So I worked there for a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, they took them and they took me, took us in to a big warehouse to fill up some food, you know, this corn. So he said he would be back around one o’clock to open up the door. Came two o’clock, three o’clock – nobody came. So I told the guys, I said, “It’s no good.” So they piled up some sack, they reached the roof and we all jumped through in different directions. We were surrounded by “gendarmieria” and by Polish police. They all grabbed us, tied our hands. Seven boys. Every night they were shooting – we would find people like this. They took us to be shot. We were maybe two hundred meters from the place where they were shooting every night. We had a neighbour – he became the president in the ghetto. My father used to help him. He used to get into trouble, so he used to send him bread on Friday night when he used to come home from the trip. He used to cross our street back and forth, so he knew every child of ours. It was raining. We were working – my hands were black. They tied our hands. This was at night, the waiting, raining, cold. We saw that guy going with the Gestapo, he worked with the Gestapo. So he was going in front of us and I said to him – Eliezer was his name – “Eliezer, they are going to shoot us.” And the Gestapo was in front. He says, “We need the people to pack the “lumps”, the rags to send it to Germany”, because a lot of people left the baggage by us, those that reached Berlin. They stopped and looked at him and said, “Ja, ja, ja”, in German. “Yes, take him in to the ghetto.” They took us in to the ghetto and my father walks away in the dark (not clear), raining. Seven boys altogether, seven boys in that group. Let us leave. When I came in the house my father saw my hands were black. First time I saw him crying.

Q: That was the ghetto in your town?

A: Yes. Big ghetto. It was a “Judenstadt” like in Warsaw. So we started working for the Germans. They used to take us out from the ghetto, different things to do. I was going to stay a couple more days with my father, so we worked down there for the Germans, cleaning, chopping wood and so forth. All of a sudden a siren is blowing and the youngsters like me were running from all directions. You could not hide nowheres. There was a post office. We ran into the post office, all of us, girls and boys my age. It was a German running the post office, elderly man, in uniform. He knew what was going on because the siren started blowing. It was very sickening to see the situation. He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a ladder going up in the attic. All of you go up and I’ll get you some food. Pick up the letter in the attic.” So we did that and three times a day he cooked for us food, he brought it up. So when it was all over he called us down and he said, “Run wherever you can, or you will be dead, all of you. I felt sorry for you.”

Q: That was when?

A: 1942.

Q: Which month approximately?

A: Which month? It was…

Q: Summer?

A: It was summer, yes. I would say October. Then it got really chilly and I said to my father, “Let’s go to the woods. We’ll catch up with the partisans.” In the meantime my cousin was left and my uncle was still left in our house and he said, “We’ll build a deeper bunker so we can wait till spring and then we will go to the woods with the partisans.” So all winter they took us wherever they could find to work on the highways, cleaning the snow. So it came spring, May. It was still a little bit chilly by us. We waited to go to the woods. All of a sudden – they called it a “selection”, no – a raid.

Q: “Aktzia”.

A: It’s got another name. Polish – “Swiszidenia” (?). Another name. So we built a bunker and then another thing like this every couple of weeks because they brought in Jews and they took them to Treblinka and they made a new road.

Q: I didn’t understand this point very well. It means that you and your father and your brother, you ran away and you hid in a bunker?

A: Yes, but I left out my brother. So my brother worked in a lumberyard maybe two miles away where I was, so I used to take potatoes down there because we washed potatoes. And at night I used to go in the ditch so nobody would see me and my brother got some potatoes. There were thirty-seven boys. I did it maybe five or six times, maybe more and the last time I came I saw that the light was one and with all their hands up, thirty-seven boys, and before I had a chance to see my brother they shot them all and they all fell. I ran back to the place where I worked and from there, I was there maybe an hour, hour and a half, then I said, “No, I’m going to go to the cemetery.” So I went the whole night between the factories and the water to the cemetery. So in the morning they brought out with a wagon all the thirty-seven boys and I wanted to see my brother a last time, so I saw him. And all of a sudden a guy says, “I am alive.”

Q: Another guy?

A: One boy is alive. He got shot. I was hiding behind the stones and I saw my brother, blood. It was very, very bad. So from then on my brother is gone. I’ve still got my father. And we were waiting until it got a little bit warm. May the 1st. There were a lot of Jewish people which they took, Hitler was going to let them leave and they squealed. You know what is squealing is? They told the Germans where we were hiding. And they told us to go out. We didn’t want to go out, so they were shooting in that tunnel. My uncle had his arm half shot off, and we had to go out. We were going to go to Treblinka. Yes, they came halfway, they started the train, my father disappeared again. I was supposed to have jumped, but they started the train, I couldn’t jump out through the window. So he escaped and the train stopped. They had to take us to Lublin, to Majdanek instead of Treblinka because they had a lot of trains lined up, so they took us to Treblinka down there. And Treblinka was very bad, very bad.

Q: You entered Treblinka?

A: No, no. Majdanek. Treblinka was maybe ten kilometers, they took us to Majdanek.

Q: Can you describe Majdanek the way you remember?

A: Majdanek was a terrible place, terrible place, very terrible.

Q: What was the first thing you saw?

A: First thing, I was maybe one barrack or two barracks away from the crematorium, so they took in my uncle, the two cousins, ladies, the two children right there. Half an hour later they were gone.

Q: Could you understand at that point where they were taking them?

A: We saw the crematorium right next door in Majdanek. We saw right away. The gas chamber was going full blast.

So they took us to work every day.

Q: So this very day they made the selection?

A: Same minute. They took us to work.

Q: So somebody goes left, somebody goes right?

A: Right, right.

Q: And you? What happened to you?

A: Me and my cousin they let live. So every day the first two weeks…

Q: Where did they put you?

A: Everyday they took us out for about two, three hours. How far was the wire? Maybe six, seven feet the width. And we had to run and there were a lot of bandits, Germans – they had big sticks with nails in it and we had to run back and forth. I was lucky, I was short, so I didn’t get beat up so much. Most of them got beat up terrible. I got beat up, but not as bad. Every day for a couple of weeks. And now way to run away from there. I tried it a few times. They had dogs. The minute you started moving they’d hold you right by the fence. They did it to me. Lublin. Then they finally gave us a job in a lumberyard, to straighten out lumber - I would say maybe eighteen, twenty boys – and they put everybody in a pile and then came Germans, all kinds of murderers. They had pipes, plumbing pipes, big pipes like this, and they told us to lay down and they put them on the neck and they kept them going like this. The guys were screaming terribly. They choked every one of them. When I saw this I kept on moving, moving, moving farther. I was left two at the end. The siren for the clock was blown and they went for lunch and never came back, so I was safe. Every day we had beatings, every day at Treblinka (?). All of a sudden, they needed people. Where, I didn’t know. So we had about a hundred and twenty thousand boys that came from Warsaw, all that, they came from all over. They started selecting us. From a hundred and twenty thousand to eighty thousand, from eighty thousand to fifty thousand, from fifty to twenty-five thousand, and then a thousand and then four hundred and sixty-five boys and I fell in.

Q: Can you explain the selection? Was there a logic in this selection? Or it was just…?

A: Yes. There was a logic to die.

Q: But when they selected people, was there a criterion?

A: Well, the criterion was sometimes…they didn’t need any people. They took younger ones, old ones to the crematorium. When they needed people to work, then they saved us. They did it to build Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were only there maybe ten or fifteen barracks. They were going to build thousands of buildings, roads and everything. They needed us to Auschwitz-Birkenau, so they kept on selecting, selecting. I still fell in to four hundred and sixty-five boys, one of the finest (finalists?). We thought that we were going to go to the moon. They took us to the train. The train was that thick of dust, black. We wind up almost two days later at Auchwitz-Birkenau, early in the morning, it was still dark, so we asked where were we. Auschwitz-Birkenau. So they washed us up and they kept us on quarantine, a barrack, for almost four weeks. They used to take us out, show us where we were going to work. There was nothing but fields for miles and miles, clean. “Here you’re going to work and here you’re going to die.” That’s it. And the beating was terrible, terrible.

Q: You were living in a barrack?

A: In a barrack, yes. One day, after the quarantine, they took us out and we started bringing in lumber and all kinds of stuff.

Q: When you say quarantine, you mean the place where they were keeping you to clean you or to see if you have some sickness?

A: No. They had to wait till they started up another project, so in the meantime they kept us. They called it a quarantine, we were not doing too much, waiting until they started building. So we started building. Those which were before had better jobs than that. We had to bring the prefabricated walls and roofs from the train to the job. It was maybe a mile and a half. So they used to have thirty-five, forty boys carrying. So when they carried, it was very heavy. Long walls, big walls. So they got so tired and they beat them while they were carrying the walls, some of them gave up and most of them got suffocated right on the spot. I tried everything to save myself, so I used to go at the end. If the boy started losing the wall, I jumped away. This went on for a couple of months like this. They were dying by the hundreds a day. Finally they built up Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Q: And when you saw all this happening around you, your fellow friends dying and so on, what did it do to you? How did you behave? Did you behave with pity or with a sense…?

A: Sense to die.

Q: Or to survive?

A: Not surviving. Not there.

Q: Did you want to survive?

A: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Now the “real McCoy” is coming. My legs swelled up, me and my cousin. Couldn’t go to work. If you can’t go to work every morning they pick you up, they clean out fifty, thirty, forty. A couple of hours later you’re through the chimney. I wanted to live. A lot of them went to the electric wires. A lot of them. I used to talk to them, that as a Jew or a gentile you cannot commit suicide. Some of them I convinced that they had time to die. So couldn’t go to work, so find a way to get around. I used to go in the garbage cans and look for food, but prior to that I found a way. When we marched out we had a Jewish French orchestra playing so we could go straight so they could count us, like soldiers. Over there they had a wheelbarrow and a broom and shovel, so when they marched out and they picked up all the people who could not go to work, take them to the crematorium, the same people later, whenever they marched out, they went and got that shovel and went back to work. So there was a guy, Frank. I told him, I said, “Frank, we cannot go to work tomorrow. We’re going to be gassed.” He said, “Joe, what do you have in mind?” When people come home from work, I said, “You see this wheelbarrow and shovel and the broom? We’ll try to go through. Maybe they’ll think that we belong to that job.” First time it worked. Then we went back. When they went through we went after them in the same spot. So we did it three or four days, but we couldn’t get no food no more, food, water, soup. At night, they gave us a piece of bread because in the barrack…So while I was doing that I had no food, so we used to go in the garbage cans. You know, the big dumpsters there. A lot of Polish people from all over. They used to get food from home, packages. We didn’t have no home, so we didn’t get no packages. They wouldn’t ship us anyways. So they used to throw out mildewed food. We used to go in the garbage can and pick it up. One day, I saw a green piece of paper sticking. It was a fifty-dollar bill. So with that fifty dollars I was trying to buy a job. (?) I was afraid because they would take it from me and beat me up too. So I went to that barrack where all the good jobs were, better jobs. Prior to that, one day I went with another group to work in a hospital and I saw there was a little potential to get a piece of bread because they were dying and if we gave them a little bit of water, those people – in the hospital, this was in the hospital. Mengele. So I came in there and this guy was standing and he said, “Who are you?” I said, “I am here. I want to see what goes on.” He said, “Where are you from?” I said, “From Poland.” “Poland”. He said, “I am from Slovakia” They took out my family and they took them to Poland and I cannot pronounce the city.” So I said Lodz, Krakow, you know. “No, no, no.” So when I said Miedzyrzec he said, “That’s it.” His hair stood up. He said, “Tell me where my family went?” So I told him. I said, “They came in, they threw them into factories, cold in winter. Snow and no food. And they took them out to the crematorium to Treblinka.” “Thank you. I really appreciate.” And he gave me a piece of bread. “Come over tomorrow. I’ll get you some more.” But I had already the fifty dollars in my pocket, but I couldn’t help nobody. So I called him aside and I said, “Look. I want to live. Maybe there is one chance out of a million to live. I want to get a job here. Talk to the main guy.” He cleaned up inside, but they had a block man, a “Blockfuhrer” which ran the show. That was the doctor’s friend. He said, “I can’t do anything, but I’ll talk to Moshe.” “Chasid” they called him. Nice guy. And I told him that I had fifty dollars and I wanted a job with that kapo – this was a murderer, a Czech. He had a group that went to the hospital, working down there. And over there you had a chance, when they were dying, take the shoes off, take the clothes off, whatever you could. Even the teeth. So he said, “Come tomorrow. I’ll talk to him.” The next day he had again no answer for me. I saw him again. Got to die. The third day he said, “I’ve got good news for you. He’s going to give you a half a loaf of bread and some salami and you have a job with the Czech.” It was like a new world. Here I am working already in a hospital. The beatings were still heavy.

Q: Can you describe this hospital?

A: It was barracks around, maybe forty or fifty barracks. Mainly they had gentiles, not Jews. I was the only Jew there. I was working over there and that Czech was a murderer. He had a black mark.

Q: He was a criminal.

A: He was a murderer by the Czech, then Hitler took over. He brought him in there so he could kill people. Murderer, professional murderer. And he was beating everybody, everybody. There was a gentile working there. The gentile he didn’t touch so much. And Jewish people, maybe a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty. And every day he killed one or two because they didn’t work fast enough, they didn’t have the strength. So here I was working and I was showing…I worked on a farmstead (?). I was very handy. I showed the guys how to bake stones. We were building the roads. The barracks were up already. Building the roads. They kept on beating us. One day I had an idea. I talked to our guy from Warsaw – him and his son. (end of side).

Kept on beating us. One day I had an idea. I talked to a guy from Warsaw, him and his son. I said, “Must be a way to change his attitude. We’ll cook him some soup or tea.” He had a little booth and he used to stay all day – it was cold. “We’ll heat the place for him and we’ll give him a haircut and we’ll wash his clothes and we’ll make him soup.” They were afraid to do it. I said, “What can we lose? So he’s going to beat us. So what can you do? Sooner or later it’ll get to us. He’ll start doing it and he’ll start liking it.” Anyway, two or three days. He liked it. We washed his feet, gave him a haircut, everything. One day he called us in. My friend said the guy was going to beat us, he was going to kill us. He started crying, the murderer. What happened? He said, “I never saw people like you in my whole life. I was the black sheep in my family, so I started murdering people and they threw me in jail. Here I see what you’re doing to me.” He said, “From now on I’m not going to kill no more. Hurt the people.” Anyway, he became a nice man.

We almost finished the roads. He said, “I’ll tell you what. Don’t work too much, just a little bit.” He wanted to drag on the job. He needed a job because otherwise…So I started going from barrack to barrack and giving some water and cleaning up and taking out the dead people every day. I had a pile maybe like a mountain. A mountain of dead people every day, accumulated. They brought them in from different camps. So I used to carry out the dead and cleaning and everything. Finally I wound up at the end by Mengele. I didn’t know Mengele from nowheres.

Here I am in the hospital working and picking up some bread here, old bread, mildewed bread. And you could not keep it on yourself. They would take it away from you or they would steal it at night. So we had a pile of dead people that we used to take out, a big pile. I used to leave it behind the dead people. The dead people never touched it. They were always dead, so I used to leave it there and the next day I came in the morning, I had a few pieces of bread. I gave it to my friend and so forth. So in the meantime, that “kapo”, the Czech, had a secretary, a man from Krakow. He was a convert - half-Jewish and half-Polish, gentile. He liked me because I showed the guys how to break the stones and they all looked up to me. And then Mengele had a Polish…he was an ambassador before the war. He also had a secretary that marked down the numbers like this and he used to write it down. Then they had a “Lagerfuhrer” that ran the hospital – a German, a doctor, Mengele’s doctor that he taught him. They put him there, Mengele brought him down there because he was a socialist. They put them in concentration camps, but they had privileges. So they all used to meet, those three people.

Q: Mengele and this ambassador and the Czech?

A: No. That ambassador worked for Mengele in selections. When they made selections he worked for him. He took out the numbers. Then at night they took them to the crematorium. The Jewish guy’s name was Max Stein. Very nice man, middle-aged man wearing glasses. He started getting close to me, closer, closer. He wanted to know what I did up till then and so forth and so forth. And every time I had to tell him something. He was very nice to me. Those three used to meet almost every day for five minutes, two minutes.

Q: Which three? Can you repeat?

A: The doctor, Ivan the German and the half-Jew, half-Polack, and the ambassador was taking the numbers. They used to come together once a day. So that Max was close to me. Every day he came over. One day he said, “Joe, you want to work with us?” I said, “Sure I want to work.” I didn’t know what went on. He said, “You do what I’ll tell you do and I will give you letters and you’ll do it. The rest is up to you. You don’t know nobody.”

Q: Ah, the underground.

A: Right. “You’ll bring in the letters. You take it and put it where it’s (?). And look over you, take care.” So I started doing it. Once a week they had a “Leichencommando”. To pick up the dead people and take them into the hospital and put them on the pile. They had about six, seven guys working. “Once a week you’ll go with them. Don’t ask no questions.” I started doing it and I did it up to the end. But before that I got sick, a little bit cold. Tonsils and that. So tonsils I took out and I didn’t feel good and I told Max. “Max, I’m going to die.” He said, “Don’t die. We need you. Don’t die.” I said, “It’s not up to me. I’m so sick.” In winter it was so cold and I used to lie on the roof. They had a chimney to keep warm. I couldn’t work no more. We called the father, that old man, that German that taught Mengele in Munich. He said, “I’ll talk to him and he’ll see what he can do.” And I was ready to die. Not getting gassed. Dying. A couple of hours he came running. Over there we didn’t have no name. We had numbers. He said, “Look….”

My number is…

Q: Can we see it?

A: Wait. One twenty-six, six twenty.

Q: Yes, he wanted to see your number and…?

A: So anyways….I’ll go again before because if you want a little bit longer…So here you’ve got a steady job – four or five hours a day cleaning Mengele’s office. He had three doctors. They came in the morning, me and a Polish boy, a gentile, and we cleaned it nice. Mengele said, “Nice, nice.” He never gave me a full smile, only a half. But the boys, the three doctors that he taught, yes. “Good morning,” and so on and so on. I did everything, cleaning the boots and everything. I did a good job.

So I wound up in the hospital.

He said a lot of times, I’d finish up….I pretended that I was not Jewish. I had the lapel (?) coloured. You had to try everything. So here I was in the morning and they went to Germany, the three boys, to see on vacation or whatever, and they came back and said, “Mr. Mengele” – in German. “What goes on in our country? It’s almost destroyed.” This was in 1944 and they used to bomb heavily in Germany. “And we’re killing Jews and our war can drag on and drag on and we’re not going to win the war. What goes on? All our country’s destroyed.” “Mein lieber Junge.” You know, in German.

Q: Who said that? These three boys?

A: The three boys to Mr. Mengele. So he had to give them an answer. “Mein lieber Junge. We’re working on special missiles, and it’s going to change the whole war and we’re going to win.” They said, “What are we killing the Jews for? The Jews are the smartest people in the world.” Mengele: “We’ve got to be the smartest. We’ve got to liquidate them. Their brothers in England, like Rothschild (?) and all the rest of them, I (?) gave them money to run the war. We’ve got a reason to kill them, to liquidate them. We’ve got to do.”

Q: “Uebermensch”?

A: This matters (?) in the world. The boys used to shake their heads. It was terrible what they saw at home when they went for vacation. So it went on and went on. And then I wound up in the hospital.

Q: You heard all this conversation?

A: Yes. I pretended I didn’t understand it. I talked to them in Polish, they talked to me in German, but I understood every little thing. But the Polish boy, when he went out, I said I understand a little bit. I didn’t want to tell. You had to watch every step.

So I didn’t feel good from lying on the roof – cold, winter, snow. Going to die. So that German which was there…(?) – he ran the whole thing, the whole “Krankenbau”, the whole hospital. Jewish people didn’t lie there. Only gentiles. Came running and he said, “Tomorrow morning go right into the hospital. Come with the (?) and go right in to the hospital.” What did I have to lose? I was dead. I’m more than dead. Just a couple of hours and I would be dead. I had a temperature. I went in and right away they started working on me. Shaved off my head right here.

Q: Who?

A: In the hospital. Mengele, with the three doctors. They put a stuff over me to knock me out. I don’t know what it was, but I heard with a hammer chipping around my ear. They call it a mastoid (?).

Q: Can you repeat again exactly what they did to you?

A: Yes. They operated on me and I woke up eleven o’clock at night. I saw I had bandages all over me. A guy is lying next to me. I said, “Who are you?” I talked to him in German. He was a German Jew. They found him in Berlin, the Gestapo. They brought him in there and he was sick. He was lying next to me. He said, “What goes on here?’ I said, “This is Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gas chambers. Me and you are going to be in the gas chamber tonight.” He tells me that I am “verrueckt”, crazy. I said, “You can say whatever you want to say.” “Not my people doing it.” I said, “Okay, okay. A mistake.” Came around eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock. They came in, took him. They didn’t take me. I was surprised they didn’t’ take me. Every day they gave me white bread with farina (?).

Q: What did they exactly do to you?

A: Mengele taught them, the three doctors, on my head. I needed aspirin to get away the cold, so they did it this way.

Q: What did they do? I didn’t understand.

A: They knocked out a bone around the ear. They made an experiment.

Q: I know, but what did they do?

A: They cut out the piece.

Q: Of?

A: Of the back of my ear. It’s very hard to see. They started giving white bread with farina (?), with margarine. The whole war I never ate it. I was there over nine days and they gave me back the job.

Q: But what was the treatment, the medical treatment everyday? What did they do to you?

A: I was lying in the hospital and I got better and then they gave me back the job.

Q: Did they give you some medicine or some…? Did they take blood from you?

A: They took out whatever I had. A little pus or something. I don’t know what they did. They didn’t give me any medicine, bandage. The second day they came out, Mengele with the three doctors, opened up and said, “Good, good, good.” They told them to give me that food, so they gave me that food. Nine days in the hospital. After nine days they let me out.

Q: Did you ever find out what they did?

A: No. I know what they did. They chopped out and took out a bone or whatever they did. An experiment. I had a cold, sneezing and so forth, and I had a little bit of a temperature.

Q: What did you feel in your body?

A: My body was good. I just had headaches, a cold. That’s what I had.

Q: And after ten days it was gone?

A: I felt better and better and better. They took care of me for nine days. Then they gave me back the same job and I did the same thing.

Q: During these nine days Mengele and his doctors, they were checking you every day?

A: Every second day. The first time they opened up the bandage, that was the first day. They came in, “Good, good.”

Q: Did they take some photos?

A: I cannot remember. Probably did the first day. Got back the job, kept on doing the same thing.

Q: What exactly?

A: Work. Cleaning places, taking out the dead and bringing water for the sick sometimes. They would give you a piece of bread. Most of them died. It was doctors and lawyers – gentile, always gentile. There were priests, a lot of priests. Used to get packages from home, but they were so sick they couldn’t make it. Our people couldn’t make it either.

Q: But after these nine days, were you still under the control of Mengele?

A: No.

Q: He checked you?

A: I never went into the hospital. Before I had tonsils. Hungarian doctor had a butter knife. He said, “I don’t have any tools.” I said, “Take it out.” It took him two seconds. He took it out and I felt better.

Q: What?

A: Tonsils. This was before. Right in this little office. A Hungarian Jewish doctor. It is unbelievable, right? I am leaving out, I would say, eighty percent, otherwise we are going to be here the whole month. I might get a divorce!

Q: You are telling this so easily, like in a few minutes they are taking out things like….

A: Fifty years. I build America really.

Q: What was your attitude to these bodies that you had to clean?

A: Well, let me tell you something. You never forget and you never forgive, but you’ve got to learn to live with it, go on with life. I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a business.

Q: At that moment, at that time there in Auschwitz, what was your attitude to the bodies that you were cleaning them?

A: We have to die. I didn’t think any other thing. Yes, I had crazy dreams, I had crazy dreams. To me it was crazy, that I am going to survive, going to have a wife and children. I led my own business and people who were working with me, and this is the way it happened. When I get to the end you’ll see. I had another dream like this, before I was liberated. Fantasy. And then I was lying. My heart was going back and forth. Not enough food so you were starving. You feel like you’re going to starve, not get enough food. I had fantasies too. Fantasies, crazy things, that I’m going to survive. How I’m going to survive? I’m going to die. I am here to die.

Q: When you saw the first time Mengele, what impression did he make?

A: Do you want to know the truth? To me he looked like another German in a uniform, but I heard so much about him that I believed this was him.

Q: What did you hear about him?

A: Prior to that, before that, he was making, doing all kinds of things.

Q: Experiments.

A: Experiments. But from then on he had to stay on the ramp and see that the factory kept on going. Oh yes. Quite a few times they cut, in front of the office, they opened up people, not Jewish people. Gentile. Took out their lungs and this and that, and then they packed it in bags and put it on the pile. Quite a few times. Then we used to clean it up, everything spotless.

Q: When this experiment was done on you, did you feel something later?

A: No. I never had problems. I had colds, a lot of colds, but never had any problem with that ear.

Q: No headaches?

A: No, nothing, nothing special. And it went on and it went on like this.

Want to hear some more? So came around 1944. Kept on doing the same thing. Beginning of 1944 it started going full blast, gassing, gassing, gassing. Hopeless. So they’re closing up the hospital. Mr. Mengele with his people going to the train and unloading people. My friends lined up, working in the crematorium. They only lasted a month, three weeks, and they were gassed. This guy asked me a question, “How come you wound up on the ramp? You’re still alive, you’re going to be alive.” What can you tell? I said, “It’s my luck,” but I couldn’t tell him that I worked for the underground. Underground kept me out. So here I wound up with Mengele again. At night, before the chimneys were going up to heaven…fire, was very bad at night, the smoke and everything. We had to close our noses. So our duty, we had to open up the trains, the wagons, pull away dead…(not clear). We couldn’t talk to the people. They were asking us, “Where are we?” So I used to say, “Auschwitz, Auschwitz,” so I wouldn’t make the mouth. Otherwise they beat you. We couldn’t touch them to take down. They had to jump down themselves. Every night, twelve hours, from six to six. This went on for three and a half months.

Q: Where was this, the place where you were working?

A: On the ramp.

Q: Where they were bringing people. And what was exactly your job? What was your work?

A: Just opening up the trains, the doors, when they came in and go away ten feet. They had to jump down themselves. We had to clean out the insides, sweep them out, and take the bags – they had big bags, they used to bring baggage – and throw them under the truck. And I kept it for less than a month. Then I saw I’m going to get a hernia from those big bags. I was young. So I came up with an idea, to have a broom and a shovel and when people came down they threw away, they had apples, tomatoes. They never saw what went on down there because the fire was something terrible to see. You thought the whole world was burning. The smoke was just unbearable. Human flesh. So I did it less than a month like that. One day I came up with an idea that I would do the same thing, have a broom with a shovel. And I cleaned up in front of Mengele and his people, so I could go around where I wanted. Mengele liked it, his helpers liked it. I picked up all the rotten apples and everything, others to step on it, and I could go around the trains and so forth and so forth. This was going all night, ten trains a night. Ten to twelve thousand people.

Q: That was ’44.

A: ’44.

Q: The transports from Hungary.

A: Hungary we had maybe a quarter of a million, and we had from Lodz about a hundred and twenty thousand. Then they had from Algiers, Tunisia, Morocco, they brought in. Germany was there, they grabbed the Jews and they brought them in. Most of them were rotten. They fell apart when we tried to take them out. From Italy, Jews, Germany (?). So they had plenty of business, there was business. Every night. So I used to go with a broom and a shovel and nobody bothered me. They liked it. Mr. Mengele. And they had women separate, men and children separate, young men separate. They used to send them to Germany. But the kids at night, they put them with the old people, the sick people, whatever. They were crying and that opened up my heart. That killed me, that killed me. But they were on the other side of the train, but I was allowed to go around, cleaning. So the first night I took three kids, six to seven years old, and I had to hold their mouths, they shouldn’t cry. The women were separated. They used to take them to Germany to working camps. Once they got into working camps it was all over. …children in Germany (not clear). And I had to get them united underneath the train. I used to do one night three, one night four, one night six, one seven. Once a night. I didn’t want to do more than once, push them too fast.

Q: You were putting them where?

A: I was putting them back with their mothers. Right away the mothers they took away to another train to Germany.

Q: With the children?

A: With the children. And I did it up to the end, about two and a half months. Every night. They never caught me. Four kids, five kids, six kids. Boys, girls.

Q: You were the only one doing this?

A: The only one, the only one cleaning, the only one doing. Nobody was allowed to go out of the reach, but I was allowed to clean up.

Q: And these children were taken from their mothers the moment when they stepped down from the train?

A: Yes. They put them with the old people, the old women going into the crematorium, but the able people, they could work, they took to Germany. Right away they were short of manpower, they were losing countries.

So at that time Russia came close to Auschwitz, about sixty kilometers. We could hear the bombarding – boom, boom. So they started taking out people to Germany. So we were about a thousand people, a group. I had a boyfriend, he stood right with me. From Warsaw. He came and I saved his life too. I saved his life. He came, he was going to go to the crematorium, but I got him away under that job.

Q: How did you do that?

A: How did I do that? They liked me.

Q: How did you do this specific…how did you save him?

A: He came a night before from Russia. He was a Polish boy. I did a lot of them before. He lives now where I live. His name is Abe Levy. He came and they told him, “Joe helps. Joe knows the guys.” I went to the guys, to the kapos, and to the foremen. I said, “Here is my cousin.” So one guy said to me that he already maybe six, seven times took in boys like that. He said, “Joe, how many more times, how many more cousins you got left?” I started laughing and he started laughing, but they loved me. I had sympathy from people, what I did. And I got him in. And he was standing next to me in the group to go to Germany. All of a sudden, he was talking to the guy – we were standing five in that group, like the army. He was talking to the next guy and a guy came over, in the underground, “Go into the sewer.” Before he turned around I was in the sewer. So I went into the sewer.

Q: But was it big enough?

A: Yes. And I saw a gentile there. He belonged to the underground too. He didn’t know about me and I didn’t know about him because it was really secret. And about half an hour later they took out that transport. That boy that I saved went to Germany and he survived. I heard dogs barking in the (?) sewer. They were looking for us. They counted us so…(not clear). They were good at it. The dogs started barking around that thing. We had to go out. They took us to hang us. So I a rope on my neck, he had a rope on his neck. I said to him, “It’s all over, finished.” He said the same thing to me. And all of a sudden, from far away, two guys came running – one was a German and one from the underground. The underground took over already because the Germans wanted to be good in case they caught them. They…(?) hollering like this, “Don’t do that.” They were ready to pull the thing. He took us down the ropes. Then they took us to the camp and there were just a few people left. (?). They tried to gas them. So they had to wait two weeks for another transport to go to Germany.

Q: That was already ’45?

A: This was ’44, before November. It was getting already cold.

Q: November ’44.

A: Yes.

Q: But this was not anymore in the hospital?

A: No, no, no. Now they took us to Germany. It took a couple of days by the time they took us into Germany. They took us into Germany, so wherever they took us they would meet us. They needed us in one place.

Q: Where to? Which place?

A: A place near Berlin. Oranienburg. There there was no work for us. Then, from there they ran us to….I forget the camp. Not too far from Berlin. Sachsenhausen. We were there two days and we didn’t have no food. We were marching a couple of days near Oranienburg. No food. So here runs a little boy and asks, “Who is from Miedzyrzec?” Polish boy. So I had to tell him where I lived. He was a “Stubendienst”. He worked in the barrack. I said, “I didn’t eat a couple of days. Can you get me a piece of bread?” He got me a piece of bread. We were lying there a couple of days, two or three days, on the ground. It was cold already, winter.

Q: But this Polish boy that asked, he was already there for a long time?

A: A long time. They were not there because he probably did a crime, so they put him in Sachsenhausen. So here they were going to take us to Berlin and we still didn’t eat. So here we were in the station in Berlin, the railroad station, and we smelled food. The Swedish Red Cross brought us some food – big buckets. Now we were going to have a little bit of food? All of a sudden the siren blew and they turned off all the lights and they took us away from the station maybe a mile. And the whole night we were lying in the ditch. The English came in the whole night – going and coming, going and coming. Bombarding the daylight out of them. And the train used to go up and down, up and down, the whole night. The next day, no food. I asked for water, anything. We were ready to die from starvation.

Q: Maybe you would tell us a little bit, for so many days to be without any food…

A: You can live with water four or five days, but…I mean, you can live without water four or five days, but food you’ve got to have. So we had water, anything, the woods. Whatever you could get ahold of.

Q: What did you eat?

A: Anything we could find, anything we could find.

Q: Like?

A: Anything which could go through the mouth.

Q: Like what?

A: Like roots from the ground. We cleaned them off and we ate them. Different things we found. In the garbage cans there, you know. So we did whatever we could. So we hear they’re taking us near Munich. Landsberg. Maybe you heard about it. Over there they built under-tunnels. Hitler was going to win the war, so they were going to bombard all day long, so they were going to be underneath.

They took us into Landsberg, Kaufering. Maybe you heard about it. Over there were over eleven small camps.

Q: There was Kaufering One, Kaufering Two, Kaufering Three.

A: Till eleven. So we were working there, carrying those cement…into the tunnels. And they beat us. We had very poor…the soup was like water, like water. So everybody was complaining that we were giving this guy heavier….they picked out Joe Rosenblum. So three days I gave out soup. I didn’t have nothing left for myself. I said, “Now guys, see? There is nothing for nobody.” Over there what I did, every night when I came home from work, sometimes they took us to clean up the station, the railroad station in Munich. It was maybe forty kilometers. They used to take us a lot of nights. So we picked up garbage down there to eat, anything what they threw away, the Germans, when they used to go to work. So we were there. After work I used to go and climb the trees to catch birds, take their eggs, little eggs. It was wintertime and there was a fire we built by the lake…(not clear). I did it every day. And then I went to the kitchen where they peeled potatoes, picked up the skin, washed it and cooked it. This was a delicacy. So this went on all winter.

Q: You were in a group of how many?

A: We were in that group a couple of hundred, maybe two eighty, three hundred people. And we were sleeping…there was nothing but dirt (?). And outside was with dirt, covered up. It was not barracks. It was like nothing.

So here it comes…getting a little bit warmer around March. Finally, the underground cut up with me.

Q: You were at that point where?

A: Germany.

Q: Where? In Kaufering?

A: In Kaufering, yes. Me and two more guys, they were mechanics. I gave myself out as a mechanic, but it was not enough. They took us to another camp closer to a factory where they were making ammunition, so the Germans they should have. They told me, “Joe, you know what you’ve got to do.” There was no question asked. I knew what I had to do. So what I did there, they made the thing to shoot up to the planes and that had a metal like they do on roofs, you know, roof metal. Galvanized or something like that. There was a pile maybe a hundred sheets and they were wrapping it and shooting up. There were two Lithuanian Jews – they were mechanics. So I started making some little cans to give….there were a lot of Polish workers there. They were from all over, but they were not prisoners. They were working there and they volunteered. They had a lot of food. We didn’t have nothing. So they used to buy it from us, we made it dirty and then sold it for a little bit of soup and I gave this guy, the other guy. And then the rest of it we threw it in the garbage because there was no other way of doing it. You had to have a reason. I counted up maybe a hundred sheets left. This was less than a month before the end of the war. And they caught the two guys. “What are you doing?” But most of it was already garbage. They used to take away every night, cut it up, cut it up, sabotage. Finally they caught up with them and they said that I…with them. They took us into the office. It was a nice man, nice dress and nice lady. Told us, “This is sabotage. They can kill you in a second. I’m going to let you live. The war is almost over. Don’t do that.” But we were so hungry that we just were falling apart. So one day we were going from work – no, this was before – going from work and my back, from carrying the cement… for the skin. It was winter, ice, and the water was running. And I said, “I’ve got to wash up my neck” - because we didn’t have no water in the camp – “otherwise I’m going to die.” It was eating at my neck from carrying the thing. So I saw the water going from work and I took off my shirt and I washed it out. My skin got to be read, like a tomato. When a German was passing by they used to say, “Oh G-d. How can a guy to that in such a frost, cold? Big pile of ice on the water. So the next day I did it again, so a German gave me a shirt and gave me a thicker soup – potatoes, a piece of bread. That’s the only one that had a heart. A few of them had hearts.

And then the war was almost over. April the 15th they got us all to Auschwitz. We came to Auschwitz, we had to sleep outside. It was still raining, it was cold.

Q: Was Auschwitz different on April 15th than before?

A: Well, it was entirely different. Over there it was a death camp. Here you worked and you died of starvation. So we came in to Dachau, we marched to Dachau. From all the camps, from eleven camps. We marched in to Dachau and over there, there was no place for us. We had got to sleep outside. It was cold. They put out a lot of clothes from before when people died. So we grabbed a shirt, whatever we could.

So they took us in and we heard artillery knocking the whole night, the whole day. Boom, all day long. The Americans and the French, fighting Germany. So now they were giving out cans of meat, horsemeat, I don’t know. So me and another guy kept together, that Frank. So we stood in the line and they gave us a can and we had mouths shut (?) in about an hour. Then I said to that guy Frank, “I’ll give you my clothes, you give me your clothes, and we’ll go to take another one. Maybe they won’t recognize us.” They didn’t recognize us, so we got two cans of meat.

Q: But tell me, wasn’t there already an atmosphere of nervous…?

A: Germans? No, they were cool.

Q: Cool?

A: Didn’t bother them nothing.

Q: But this was already the middle of April and…?

A: Yes, yes. They went on like nothing happened. So April 15th we got into line and marched. So we marched about fifteen days.

Q: The “Death March”.

A: The “Death March”. So we had no food or water. So we came as far as thirteen kilometers from Switzerland. But in the meantime…

Q: Tell me a little bit more about the “Death March”.

A: I’ll tell you. I cannot tell you everything, otherwise I’ll be sitting here till Passover! Anyways, I like to talk to you, believe me. There is so much of it that there is no end to it.

Q: When the march started, did they give you something to eat?

A: Yes, they gave us cans, but we got two cans. We changed our clothes and they didn’t recognize us. You had to manipulate to survive.

Q: What shoes did you have?

A: Shoes? Not shoes like that! We picked up some old shoes. We were dying on the march. You took off the shoes, you took off a better jacket, you know. And we went, marched. A hundred and twenty thousand people – gentiles, Jews. But somehow they had packages from home, the Polish people and the rest of them, but we didn’t have nothing. We were…nothing. Nobody cared for us. So I came up with an idea. We walked through farms, so they had pigs and they had some stuff which the pigs ate. And there were guards every sixty, seventy meters, on both sides, with guns. They would shoot you if you got out of line. So I told him, I said, “I’ll run. When they go this way” – they went slow, by the way, because nobody could go fast. “This way is ‘come’. Not to go, stay put.” So I did it on one farm and he did the other farm. But you had to watch. You picked up all the stuff. It was wet, everything was falling out, old potatoes and old stuff – for the pigs.

So here the water was running from here…(?) And him the same thing and we gave everybody a little bit. That’s all what we were eating. And here they were dying by the hundreds. You got up…sometimes they stopped a couple of hours at night. Sometimes. So they were dying like…Hundreds of them every day and night. I was working again, nights. At night we could not run to a farm. You would get shot in a second because it was dark. So they pulled seven wagons with horses and they put their bags, with food, with their shoes, the Germans. They used to get food everyday coming to them. They brought it up. They had everything, the bastards. So I said to that guy, Frank, “Frank, we’ve got no strength to pull. At night we’ll push the wagon, we’ll cut off their bags, take out their bread, get salami, get margarine and eat good, give our friends to eat. And then we’ll pull away half a mile back.” They kept on going. This went on for quite a few days. Now they go to take their bags – no bags. One German is hollering to the next one, “(German)”. “Have you seen my rucksack?” “You dummkopf. You don’t know where you put it.” I got a laugh. (not clear), but we knew that days were left that they’re going to either shoot us or let us go. Then they brought them the food and the money, then it was quiet again. And we did it for quite a few nights. We would throw the bags in the ditches. They couldn’t find it. Maybe twenty miles it stretched, those people marching. Then we came thirteen kilometers before Switzerland. Was ice, snow down there, mountains. And here there was fighting all night, night after night. The Germans were moving away from the front. They had a lot of horses with wagons. It was so cold and so snowy we couldn’t go up the mountains. So we were lying in tunnels of ice and snow and the whole night a few of us got killed. A whole night. You heard it coming from both sides. We had to lie flat on the ice and snow. We got up in the morning and hundreds of horses, Germans were lying dead. We tried to cut up pieces to eat. Couldn’t eat the horsemeat, couldn’t eat. I was so hungry. So we go marching again.

Q: And the Germans were still there, still right with you?

A: Yes. They ate good, they had good clothes and they had good drinking.

Q: Even when it was obvious that it was already the end they were going on?

A: Like nothing happened. Till the last minute. So we were marching, marching, marching. Then the stink left. I weighed at that time maybe eighty pounds. I weigh a hundred and sixty now. Eighty pounds. My hand was like a finger soup (?) – bones, just bones left. So we were marching, marching and it got to be dark. They took us in to farmers, to barns. They took us in. It was a big village on one side, so they threw us in, maybe three or four hundred. There was hay and they were watching us, naturally. Before we were sleeping, we were knocked out and we were so weak, hungry, wet, cold. We were lying on that hay and I had a dream again – I’m going to get liberated. It was just crazy to think like that. I opened my eyes. They disappeared, the Germans disappeared. And here I am, it’s right by the highway. I hear tanks, big armour, and I hear a different language, not German. It was dark and I ran out. It was the Americans coming, on both sides, and in the middle tanks and armour. When they saw us they got sick and started giving us food. They did everything they could, everything. They started crying. It was just a terrible scene. Even they cried. And they all came running and they kept on marching and they gave us everything they had, chocolate. We couldn’t eat. Our stomachs were already finished. And all of a sudden M.P. – you know what M.P. is. Army police – with a jeep he went around like this, came over fast. He probably saw things like this before. He said, “Go in. I’ll take you. I’ll take you good places.”

Q: He said to you?

A: To me, to all of us. They loaded up six, seven on the jeep and he spoke German. I said, “Are you really German, Christian gentile?” “No, I’m English.” He spoke a good German. He said, “I am ‘Deutschjude’.” A German Jew. “I came, I was fourteen years old, to the States and went to school.” And the army drafted him in this M.P. He said, “Come. I’ll take you into a German farm.” So in the meantime it was already early in the morning. The truck that they had their food, they gave us some food. They used to make with eggs what they called pancakes. They threw it out, they couldn’t eat it anymore. So they took us into a farmhouse. He knocked on the door, nobody answered. He threw in the food and the door opened up. He said, “I brought you survivors. Will you kill these people?” He said, “Verfluchte Deutsche”. He cursed them. “Take a look what you made of our people.” He cried. He said, “Just give them for right now a ‘haberflocken’.” Do you know what a “haberflocken” is? What we eat in the morning. “I want you to clean them up, give them a shower, cut their hair, give them some clean clothes.” So we were there about four days. He came everyday to see us. And from there he took us to a school where they taught the SS, Gestapo.

Q: When you saw the Americans, were you happy?

A: Happy? Like a new “neshama”, like a new heart.

Q: Was there a real happiness?

A: It was like a new life. Happy is not the word for it. They took us into this school and they took care of us. They gave us doctors, whatever we needed. And they gave us food. We were there maybe two weeks. Then we started to look human, half-human. And they gave us clothes. They just took care of us out of this world. What the American army did for us. And after the ten days, started coming a lot of refugees to Munich. It was about eighty kilometers from Munich, that school. Then I saw a thing which I don’t want to mention. It’s not a nice thing to talk about. What our people did. I left out maybe eighty, eighty-five percent, but you got enough material.

Q: So you were there…?

A: You’ll see the book. You’re going to get the book.

A: The Americans gave us help. They took us to camps, they gave us food, they gave us medicine. They gave us anything they could. They were very sympathetic. They were very hurt by what they saw, even the generals. But what they did for us mainly, they didn’t forget about us. They took us from one camp to another one, if we wanted to go. They gave us clothes, a lot of them. And I went to work for them. I was with them for quite a few months. They treated me very nicely. Very sympathetic, very good-hearted people, and even now I love them. Of course, there are a few bad ones. You get lost. But the majority are good people, honest people, like my friend Mark, who would take off from work and come work with me. There are a lot of good people. My wife is a sick person - she is in a wheelchair. Our next-door neighbour is a nurse, a registered nurse. She comes in twice a day for the last twenty years. She shops for her, she helps her, she gives her medicine. They are good, good people. There are a couple of bad ones, so what can you do?

As far as Mengele, I can tell you. Ask me questions and I’ll answer. How he looked, how he acted – I’ll tell you.

Q: After you were with the Americans, what happened to you later? You came to America?

A: Okay. I got a place by the Germans. In that area around Munich there were a lot of Nazis. They were afraid that they were going to punish them, the Americans, the French, the Russians. They were afraid they were going to take away their homes, they were going to put them in jail, so they tried to do good. So I lived by a Nazi – you know what a Nazi is. And I hated him. Then I took him, the same guy, a friend of mine with me and I worked for the American army. I was ready to go fight in Japan. They took in a lot of people quietly, Polish people. They were fighting, they picked them up and they worked for them. So what I’m trying to say, I lived there and I hated to go home after work, to see their faces. I made friends with a captain who controlled all of Bayern, around Munich, the whole area. He supplied all the food and everything for the army. It was a big army they had. I got to be friends with him. I used to take him out to the bar and I used to introduce him to people because they couldn’t communicate. To me it was a second language. So he was very good to me and one day I said, “Right away, we’re going to go to Japan very shortly.” So he gave me a permit and with that permit I went to Poland, right after the war. This was maybe a month and a half, two months. I had to ride on the train, on the roof. There was no room for us. The army, the Russian army, was going. And after that time I was on the locomotive all night. But we were used to that life, so it didn’t matter. So I finally I made it to Poland, I made it to my city, middle of the night. I didn’t see nobody, everybody was asleep, so I waited and got up in the morning, went to the river, washed up. I found those people which they brought in a lot of them, came to that city. They wanted to set up shop, they wanted to live there. I didn’t want to live there no more. I wanted to go to America. I had an uncle there. So my cousin was still alive, the one which was with me. He they took to Auschwitz No.1. He was a bristol-maker and he had it very, very good. The Germans brought him bread and everything. He didn’t have to go through selections like me. Auschwitz No. 1 was good, like a sanatorium. I found him. He was liberated before by the Russians, six months before. He said, “Stay here. We are going to go to Germany and in Germany we are going to go either to Israel or to the States.” I said, “No, I want to go. I’ve got my family in Detroit, Michigan.” The war was over in Japan. We didn’t have to go. Then I had to go to high school and then I had to go…as a mechanic I drove for the UN, UNWRA for quite a while. And then I got married in ’47, end of September. We came here March, ’49.

Q: But before this you were all the time in Europe?

A: Till 1949, yes. In Germany. Yes, I had a nice place there.

Q: Mostly in the D.P. camps?

A: No, no. I had enough camps to last me a lifetime. I got a friend of mine, a German, a policeman, that I made friends with, and his wife was the one to have places, but he couldn’t, so he made it so I got a nice place near Munich. I did pretty good there. I was driving a car, making business from one city to another one, taking the people from UNWRA to different places. I did pretty good there in Germany. But I wanted to get out of there. I hated their faces, still hate them. I’ll hate until the end of my life.

Q: I would like to go back to Mengele.

A: Just ask me questions.

Q: I understand that he did with you one experiment. Did you maybe see, did you see Mengele doing other experiments with other people?

A: I saw him do them, open people. Dead people and open them up and check the liver, the heart and so forth. We had to clean that up after he did it. Quite a few times. Before he got on the ramp.

Q: What did you see him to do, except…?

A: What I saw him to do? This is…you might laugh. In the office he was like a normal man, talking to the three doctors. We did the cleaning for him and everything else. He never said a bad word to us. He gave me - I looked nice, I was young, blonde with blue eyes – always a half a smile. He never gave me a full smile. The young doctors, yes. They asked, “How are you doing?” and so forth. And I had quite a few conversations with them, with the young people. He never gave us a piece of bread. The three doctors never gave us anything. What we did, picked up a little bit here and a little bit there and tried to survive. But he never said anything bad to us. But when it came to the selections my heart was going like this, he shouldn’t point with the finger. Maybe he pointed with the finger, but that secretary, the Polish guy which was involved with the underground, he had to write it down. Maybe he said it, maybe he pointed with the finger, because all my friends wound up in the crematorium. That was with the finger. So when he saw me, that guy, the secretary who worked for Mengele, he knew who I was and what I was. So quite possibly he pointed his finger a few times, but…But he had a pencil, marking down the numbers, see? He always smiled to me, he always said hello to me, that guy, but he was his secretary.

Q: And Mengele, did he see you? Did he behave to you specially?

A: I don’t know how to say it. He never said anything bad, he never said anything good. He went about his work and they went about their work. The young doctors were very cordial and he never spoke to us too much, but he used to say, “Nice, nice, thank you.” That was the whole conversation that I had with him. And when I was in the hospital I didn’t talk to him, I couldn’t talk to him. I was afraid to open my mouth. Maybe he would recognize that I was Jewish. I cannot understand myself how it was.

Q: So you were there nine days and they didn’t discover that you are Jewish?

A: No. I don’t know. One thing that I can say, that guy – this was the big boss over the whole camp – was the underground…

Q: This Mark Stein?

A: No. Mark Stein, too, but the one which ran the whole camp, a German, who taught Mengele to be a doctor in Munich. He was there because he was a Socialist. They put him there and he brought him in because he was his friend. He had a lot to say with Mengele. Mengele taught him everything, not to kill. He was a fine man. We used to call him “Father”. When we used to do business with the gypsies down there, he used to come and say, “Boys, watch yourselves, watch yourselves.” He was like a father and we called him “Father”. So he probably made the “shidduch”. That’s the story and that’s the glory.

Do you want more? I can go on and on and on.

Q: Do you remember some episode from that time that you were in the hospital?

A: Yes, it’s a good question. Most of them were doctors. They came together with me, they from Warsaw, I from Miedzyrzec, the same days, and we all had the same numbers. Whoever saw this number in our group helped. They brought me some bread. I wanted some milk – they brought milk. They worked in the hospital – not for Jewish people. For gentiles. They knew that I was Jewish. I had the same number. They were very nice. And do you want to hear a little bit more? When I went out I was weak, after nine days. We had a foreman…

Q: When you went out from the hospital?

A: Yes. I was weak. We had a foreman – he was from Warsaw. He came a little bit later to Auschwitz-Birkenau than I. He had twenty-eight instead of twenty-six. He was a big guy and he was cursing us and he was beating us. My people. This was wet, rain. There was mud and he threw me in the mud and he kicked me. In the meantime those doctors saw through the window what he did to me. I was one of them. They didn’t say nothing. The next day he sold them a bottle of vodka. We had money because we had a lot of civilian engineers coming in. They never searched them. So they saw what happened. That guy sold them and they opened up and it was water. So the next day they came on the job they beat him so bad that he couldn’t see where to work. And I told him, I said, “If you hurt me again, I’m going to tell these boys and they’re going to kill you.” From then on he stopped.

Q: By the time you were there, did you try to build a certain technique to survive, some little tricks?

A: Sure, absolutely. These are the tricks I gave you, what I did. I did everything to survive and I survived. Anything I tell you, there is maybe another eighty percent more. I survived, I did everything to survive. But I was lucky. G-d was good to me. To find fifty dollars to get a job or doing with a wheelbarrow they had put away at the right time. I did a lot of things like this. I had quite a few guys that were religious, tall guys, and when we stayed for lunch or for soup, we had Russian boys down there and they were really rough, so those guys stayed in the line for a little bit of soup. They’d throw them out and they went in. Poor guys came crying. I was with the partisans. They trained me how to fight back, for six months, so I had to fight them. It went on and on and on, so they could get a little bit of soup. They went back in line, get a little bit of soup, and that’s what kept them going. A lot of things like that. Every day was a lot of action.

Q: So you came to America in ’49?

A: Yes. And I liked it very much.

Q: What was from ’49 till today? You probably did something.

A: Very nice. When I came to America naturally it was hard to get a job, very hard, because people came home from the army. They came first naturally. So my wife found a job for thirty-five cents an hour at that time in a baker’s shop as a salesgirl. I looked for a job. My cousin, she worked in a warehouse for this…they sold all kinds of things for bakers. She got me a job. It was two hours to go to work, two hours back, and the guy paid twenty dollars a week, and it was not nice. Hard people, arrogant. They were born in Warsaw. Very arrogant. So came another baker who made doughnuts and so forth. He was a Greek. He was very nice. Then, after three or four months, I doubled the business for him, me and a comrade, and he was going out of business. He was sick and he wanted to sell the shop. He needed money. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars. I didn’t have that kind of money. So I went to my uncle and I said, “Uncle, you were always nice. Can you lend me?” He said, “Sure.” His wife - had an apartment house and stores – “she controls all my money. I would give you it gladly.” So I lost that job. Then they needed a painter, helper. So I got a job. The guy paid me twenty-five dollars – a Jewish guy. Friday he took off five dollars so I wouldn’t run away when I learned the trade. So I worked a couple weeks for him and I moved on again. I didn’t give up hope. So finally I found a nice Jewish contractor who took me in. He started paying him thirty-five, forty dollars – at that time it was a lot of money. I learned a trade. I did a little bit of tricks too. So there was a guy who was an artist doing beautiful work. He used to close the door so I wouldn’t see it, but he didn’t realize there was a window I could peek in to see what he was doing. So I learned all the fancy paints. I worked for the guy for three years. I became his foreman. He liked me very much. I was making good money, but in wintertime they had no work. They had no work, so I had to go look for little jobs during the week to pull me through. I worked for him for about three or four years. Very nice man, but they didn’t have the work in winter. It was cold. Michigan. So then I said I had to go on my own. “If you go out on your own you don’t know these people.” Finally, finally I got a builder. No, no. My neighbour was an engineer and they used to play poker – all educated people. Lawyers and accountants and so forth. So I said, “Genara, try to find me a job because I don’t work in the wintertime. I have to look for little jobs. What my wife makes, it’s not enough.” Anyway, he said, “Yes. I’ve got a friend that’s playing cards this Friday. We are going to play in my house poker and I’ll ask him.” He asked him and he knocks on the door. He said, “Joe, I think I’ve got something for you.” I talked to the guy and he said, “Can you do everything for the house? Everything?” I said, “Sure, I’m a painter, but I have no work. I’ve got to get some work for the winter.” He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the address. Be there tomorrow morning and we’ll see what we can do.” So I was there early in the morning, waiting by the door, sleeping on the steps. I needed a job. So, this company built a couple of thousand homes a year and they had painters that they couldn’t do the work, repairs and so forth, so they used to go out on the job and check it over and bring back the work orders. They couldn’t do it. In the meantime, they couldn’t get money from the bank because they didn’t take care of the repairs. So he called me in and he said, “This is Imy, this is Irving and this is Jimmy.” He showed me three suitcases with work orders. “You’ve got to take care of the houses. After they move in, they’re falling apart.” So I got a guy. “Come with me. We’ll try to do it.” So we started doing and it took us six months. We cleaned up the whole mess. He said, “Now I’m going to give you big jobs. If you can do that, which nobody could do it, you deserve all our work.” After six months I bought a house – two floors. That’s how much money I made, and the guy too. “Now I’m going to give you jobs. All the work.” So after three or four months I had seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five people working for me. I became the biggest contractor and the best in Michigan. Rated by the union. And I did it there for thirty-some years, thirty-five years. I was the best by the state, by the county, by the city, by the government. And I’m still doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

Q: You have a family?

A: I have a family. My daughter is highly educated. She’s a scientist in blood and fungus. She lives in California. She’s got three children and her husband is president in a big company by his father, making toys all over the world. Since then we’ve bought properties, a lot of properties, fixed them up, people living there, in Michigan and in Florida and everything is fine. Life is nice. My wife is in a wheelchair for the last eight, ten years.

Q: How many grandchildren?

A: Four grandchildren. My son has got a daughter – she is in college – and my daughter has got three children, four, nine and thirteen. As a matter of fact, in a month we’ve got to go to California to a bat mitzvah. We’ve got a lot of friends, like Mark. And other friends and everything.

Q: A good life.

A: And my son works with me.

Q: You have a good life.

A: Thank you.

Q: And you deserve it.

A: Thank you. G-d bless you. If you want more, I’ll give you more.

Q: But you probably never forgot the family.

A: G-d is good to me.

Q: That perished. You never forgot the people from your family that perished.

A: No. Especially with children. I feel a lot of times guilty. Why I feel guilty? I shouldn’t, but I do. I see the children – you see, I’m a Masoner, a Shriner. You know what it is? They have twenty-seven hospitals in the United States. Only good people belong there. And mainly children. They’re taking children and they cure them, they heal them. We are highly (?) people. So those kids I used to take to circuses, for lunch. Once a year there are circuses and we support this organization. Shriners and Masons – they are all over the world. So I feel maybe I could have done more to save, but I was afraid that I was going to get caught. It was very dangerous. If they found me with that I was finished. So I feel guilty that I didn’t save more. I took in all the refugees from all over the world, Jews mainly. I made productive people out of them, gave them a job, gave them security. They’re still working for me, some of them. I made productive people. I gave them a job, I gave them insurance and I gave them a trade, a lot of them. Hundreds of them.

Q: But you probably never forgot your family.

A: No. So my mother’s name was Mindel.

Q: These are the people of your family that perished.

A: Right. My mother’s name was Mindel and my father’s name was Samuel. My brother next to me was Haimy, Chaim and the youngest was Bernie Berek. My sister was Fay, Faige, and the other sister was Rachel, perished. And one sister survived in Russia. She lives in Florida.

Q: And they all perished in Treblinka?

A: Most of them, yes. One brother, Haimy - I think I told you that they shot him in front of me.

Q: Thank you very much.

A: Thank you. G-d bless you both.