IV: Being working, being starving, losing your brothers.
What do you think, what was the most terrible, the hardest thing to bear in this year, for you as a young, 13-year-old boy?
MH: Lost my family. I lost my childhood.
Didn't have no childhood, lost my family.
It is still in my mind how my parents looked.
Can you imagine as a child of 12, 13 lost my family..
And the worst thing, lost my two brothers, on the way. Shot, virtually, in front of my eyes.
This is.. something I can never forget. I cannot get it out of my mind.
Knowing that my parents were gassed.
You know, it's in my mind how my mother looked and my father, you know..
And being taken to the gas chamber.
This is something, until I have breath in my lungs, I will never forget it.
And my.. I lost half of my family.
And to this day, I don't want to go into..
Politically, what is happening in Germany.. And I can't forgive this and I cannot forget.
And it's wrong how the Germans behaved.
I'm not taking anybody individually as an example, like you or somebody else.
As a whole, the German government, the German people.
Here I am, I'm giving you just a little example.
I'm getting from the German government "Gutmachung". You've heard of "Gutmachung?"
In English, you say "peanuts". Nothing.
Yeah, the very people who murdered us, who killed us, SS, are getting high pensions here.
They getting ten times more than I am getting and they're the ones who were killing the people.
How can one explain that?
I'm asking ordinary German people, how do you explain anything like this?
SS, who were serving, murdering here, are getting high pensions.
I'm the one who was persecuted, who were killing me and my family.
I'm getting nothing, they say "Gutmachung".
Yes, sort of "We are going to give you something, saying sorry for what we did."
How does the German explain that to me? I asked questions.
And look, everybody says when you speak to German people:
"We couldn't do nothing because if you opened your mouth, you did something, you finished up in a camp like here."
So, in other words, the whole of Germany would have finished up in a camp.
Nobody supported the Nazis.
To go into the SS, you had to volunteer.
When you were called up, you didn't - they didn't put you in the SS.
You had volunteered, you could go to Wehrmacht. You were called, you were volunteered to service.
So in other words, everybody says: "We are not the ones, we could do nothing."
But there were millions who did it.
There were, where did these people come from, these SS..
Thousands of hundreds of thousands of them. You know.
It's amazing, you know. So this is something, you know, it makes you suspicious.
I know the younger generation, obviously not.
But they should ask their parents or maybe their parents were not - the grandparents, who did all these things. You know.
A lot of the people don't want to talk about it.
The younger generation say: "Look, we have a different generation now. It is not our responsibility."
It is responsibility. It's the responsibility of the German people.
Nevermind you didn't do it, but your parents and grandparents they did it.
So, they've got to take responsibility.
The German come and say: "Yes, we're taking responsibility and we're paying you compensation."
You cannot pay compensation for anything like this.
I'm going to murder you and I'm going to say your sister and brothers:
"Here's ah, 1000 Ma- ah, Euros because I killed your brother."
That's what this amounts to. I know, well, they can't bring somebody alive again. I understand that.
But it is the way they behave. I cannot understand this.
How they can pay pensions to these people.
I want an answer.
Tell me, why pay somebody like that. Ex-SS men.
At the end of the war, you know, I remember, at the end - they were mostly elderly SS because the younger ones were sent to the front.
You know, they were fighting.
It was mostly sort of middle-aged SS men.
And that, he must have had a heart, that I can still remember.
In Dörnhau, where I was working, there was one SS man who took us out and was guarding us.
In groups. Because they took, if they took 20 or 30 in a group, they only needed one or two SS man to do that. And..
The work we were doing was only about half a kilometer from the camp.
So lunch-time, they used to send two or three of us, to bring food for the SS. Took away, the food.
So, I was waiting, he was eating and I was waiting.
And this SS man, a few times he did it, while I worked there.
And he was the same SS man who was coming to guard us.
He always left a little bit, he says to wash up, I should go and wash up the dish.
So he always left a little bit. And used to pick me and says, he knew me, you know.
He felt sorry. He must have had a bit of a heart, he left a little bit of soup in the bottom of the dish.
But they were mostly middle-aged, at the end of war.
Because the youngers were sent to the front. It's like.. So what.
IV: I can't answer your questions.
MH: These questions I keep asking. I know..
Anyway, what do you think, how was my ah, testimony?
IV: Great.