IV: The day eh… the American army came to set free the camp, it's 62 years ago.
You’ve been here many times, so is this still a special day in your life, this date?
JT: Yes. The 23rd of April, 1945, is sort of edged in my memory, because it was the saddest day in my life.
Ah… for the first time in eh.. 4 years, 3 years, eh..
I was able to think about something other than putting a piece of bread in my mouth or anything to eat.
For the first time I realized or I was painfully aware that I was eh.. alone in the world.
That I belonged to no one and no one belonged to me.
For the first time I could think and start the long eh..
never ending mourning process for my whole family, my father, my mother, my two sisters, my brother, who were all murdered.
So that was a sad day even though, ah, the camp was liberated, I felt I wasn’t liberated.
IV: Was it a long process? I think it didn’t came up on one day.
Eh.. it was one day of liberation but eh.. to let come all these sad things really back to your mind I think.. was it process, so which happened?
JT: Well, the process is a long process that never ends, because that kind of memory is like a scar that never heals.
So it goes on and on and so when I come here on the 23 of April the same kind of feeling is evoked and comes back because the f..
the memory and the feeling are combined and eh… cannot be erased.
IV: Maybe you would like to tell us a little bit about the start.
When you came you came to Flossenburg in August '44, but it.. this was not the beginning of the story, it was quite..
the end of a sad, terrible story for you and your family.
JT: Yes. By then, when I arrived here in.. in 1940.. 4, on August 4th, 1944,
by then you could say at age of 14 I was already a veteran of suffering, murder, fear,
living with the death all the time, and the fear, the ever present fear, the ever present hunger and cold and dirt, eh.. was already eh.. been experienced.
And the work, and the selections, going through various, every time you came to a different camp you were selected again to see if you’re going to survive or not survive and so…
Ah, by then I, you could call it, I was already an experienced Häftling.
IV: It’s a… and your first impressions of this camp.. can, can you remember this, when you arrived, what happened?
JT: Ah.. yes. At first we were eh.. brought into ah.. a separate part of the camp that was separated from the rest of the camp,
close to the crematorium, where the.. eh.. s.. where we walked around,
ah… completely naked for about four days, and the heat ah… in August was very hot, especially when you walk around with nothing to protect you from the sun.
And it.. of course we were extremely malnourished, we had no food, it had been a long trip from, ah, the, ah… Wieliczka, from my Plaszow camp.
And when I suddenly touched my head it was.. and I felt it was swollen.
It was the.. the.. the impression of the finger in the scalp was quite deep, and the fear.. eh.. was,
I something is physically wrong, and you feel immediately because eh.. once you’re sick the end is near.
But then we walked around and finally a doctor Schmitz came around with a number of people carrying eh.. paint and a brush.
And, ah, then somebody was there with a pad and pencils, and they examined us, they looked at us.
And including, ah, all the orifices of the body to make sure we that we haven’t anything hidden,
and, ah, then they put a number, painted a number on your forehead, and whether you are ah…
Arbeitsfähig or whether you are ready for the Muselmann barracks.
So, and finally they gave us the striped uniforms and they assigned us to barracks, and I was assigned to barrack 19, for all the boys under the age of 18.
And that was essentially the first experience in this camp,
in addition to which, you know, I see across the fence various people speaking different languages, with different numbers, with different nationalities.
And eh.. for me, it was a sense, perhaps, of hope, that I…
It wasn’t, you see in the previous camps there were all Jews, and the Jews were marked for Vernichtung.
And, ah, so the thought occured to me perhaps, this would be just a work place.
And ah.. it might.. might not be so bad, but it turned out to be just as bad if not worse.
I don’t know whether you can judge the basis of good or.. bad, or worse.. it was all bad.
IV: So then you came to this block, 19.. the Jugendblock for young people,
how many young people been there?
Between.. I think you must have been one of the youngest, with 14 until 18, so…today we say that are children.
So what, what was the daily life there, what was happening, how were they treated, what have they do to,
how were their behavior between each other?
JT: Yeah, Well, eh.. one thing, you know, that strikes me when you speak about daily life.
Eh… eh.. I can’t view it as life, eh… you see, the terminology, words eh… that we use now in everyday eh… discourse is not applicable to what our existence, quote unquote, was.
It wasn’t life, it was living with death all the time.
Now the… ah… the… existence was such where you.. your focus was very narrow.
It was a question of staying alive from minute to minute, not hour to hour, but minute to minute, because things happened in a basis of minute to minute,
at the whim of somebody else, not what you did.
Ah.. there were 8.. abou… approximately 800 young boys, vari… from various nationalities.
The contact among us was limited, it never was any close friendships, or… ah… any kind of protective.
Everybody was.. lived in their own ah.. contained… ah.. entity, or self, ah, with the only aim is to stay alive, or to get something to eat.
And the Blockälteste was a man by the name of Giesselmann,
see, who was in charge of us young kids and he would put on his leather gloves,
and he, one of the things that he yelled at us was "drecksack", and he would smack you with his.. eh.. very hard, and we were quite weak,
so when he… eh… hit you, you went and ultimately fell down,
then he would walk off and kick you, and he broke many jaws, killed many people,
and he was tak.. supposedly taking care of us.
The other outstanding thing about that barrack, was the sanitary conditions.
They were, ah, totally inadequate for eh… toilets or washing, to keep clean, to keep one's hygiene was almost impossible.
So after a while you know, you felt.. eh.. dirty, lousy,
you didn’t have a tooth brush, you didn’t have tooth paste, you didn’t have a towel to dry yourself with..
So after a while you got to feel that you… indeed perhaps you are an "untermensch", you know, so it was all dehumanizing, degrading.
IV: So what do you think eh, how did you, how did he, how you did feel.
What about the other children, young people, what do you think are, how did they feel, how did they behave,
so you said there was no friendship, no relationship, everybody was concentrated.
JT: Yeah. Well, I can’t really speak for, for them, as to how they felt, you know.
I hardly know how I felt, because you didn’t..
Feelings were not really, ah, helpful in staying alive.
So the concentration was essentially, your mind was set on food, and not get in.. make yourself as invisible, that's the way I felt, as possible.
Because if ah.. an SS man came by, you, and so… a louse crawling, in which there were, quite ubiquitous,
you don’t know if you’re going to stay alive for another minute.
So, tha.. that’s the kind of thing…
And then the work, the Appellplatz, standing to be counted, early in the morning, in the cold and the rain, and the Oberpfalz wind here was just dreadful.
You didn’t have any, eh, isolation of any sort to protect you from the wind and the weather and you stood there for hours, being counted.
It was dark in the morning, early, the winter, and when you came back after work the same thing, you were counted again.
Or on occasions like the December 24th, 1944, they had the hanging right, where we had to stand on the Appellplatz and pay attention, and watch the hanging without any kind of emotional expression of any sort, of sadness,
and the SS walked around, checking to see if, looking at your face, at your demeanor.
So that’s kind of.. ah.. constant fear that we lived with.
Oh, I shouldn’t say lived with, it was.. wasn’t a life.
IV: Just.. existing.
JT: Exist… it was, I don’t know what you call it.
IV: Yeah. Emm, maybe you can tell what they did about the work.
Cause all these young people they also had to work, isn’t it?
JT: Well, the first two weeks I was assigned to the Steinbruch.
And what I, my job was, to take those granit cobble stones and throw them onto a lorry.
And after a day there was no skin left on my fingers from the roughness of the stone and the throwing it,
and the.. ah.. the condition that I was in, I felt, it won’t be long, I don’t think I can last, any.. so..
After about two weeks, I, I don’t exactly remember how, but I told somebody, and my suspicion is that the, the Schreiber at the.. on barrack one,
whose name was Miloš Kučera, who.. ah, a Czech national, who perhaps it was him because of the subsequent things that he, eh, helped me with.
I told him that I worked in the previous camps on airplanes for Heinkel.
And there was a factory here of Messerschmitt, so I was able to be transferred out of the Steinbruch were the, li.. the, the, the.. work was so difficult and many people, stronger than I, didn’t last very long.
So I was then transferred to the Messerschmitt factory, where I worked all day on the ah, part of the wing, the Unterklappe and Oberklappe,
and I worked there until about January, February of 1945, and then I was transferred to work in the Wäscherei,
which was the best possible job I could have gotten, because eh, there were, eh, a few prominent individuals who worked there, from eh, Hungarian minister, Hungarian general.
And eh, I got.. they.. the food they didn’t eat I was able to get, the soup, so that was..
And also one of my jobs was to deliver the laundry to the bordello, and so occasionally I would get a piece of bread from one of the women.
IV: So, if you compare to other prisoners, was there special treatment for these young people or they were just as, they had to work as hard as…, the same food?
JT: The same, the same food, it was the same kind of work.
There was no privilege of any sort for, because you were young.
If you are, you know, capable of work, you worked.
And if you c.., didn’t, you, you.. that was your end.
And every morning we took out all the dead people from the barrack in front, they were taken then to the crematorium, so this was a living with death all the time.
IV: And that’s a sentence I remember reading the book.
Maybe you can just explain a little what did you mean with “it wasn’t living, when it’s…existing with presence of death all the time”?
JT: Yeah, well, it’s sort of in a sense of we ourselves were, in a sense dead, because we no longer were human in a sense.
And the difference, you know, the… ah… the difference between those who, ah.. were no longer living, you see, I hesitate to say the word "died".
They didn’t die here, I mean, there was no death, it a.., the way a civilized, ah, individual dies.
Then there’s a funeral and a mourning and a… these people, they, they were.. I would call it murder.
They, ah… their life ceased, but you see, between them and us was only a matter of a second, or a minute, or a day.
We were on the same… we were not here to stay alive, unlike slave labor, you know.
It is in the interest of the, ah… the person who makes you of a slave, to keep you alive, because you then are of economic value.
Whereas with us it was, death was the, the end, you see.
They didn’t, ah.. the Vernichtung durch Arbeit was the aim.
IV: Just to change my position, oops.
Ah, so maybe you can tell me, do you remember so, about food.
What did you get in the morning, in the evenings, and then maybe you can tell me a little bit about that.
JT: Well, the food was, ah… very… I, I don’t know.
You see, again, when you speak you use the term food.
You know, it’s like a different language. Ah… you wouldn’t consider it, ah, food as such.
In the morning we did get ah.. coffee.
Ye.. I wouldn’t call it coffee. It was, but it was something, at least, if not warm, at least tepid, that you took in, anything that you could get into your stomach was the aim.
Th.. that was, so, you got that. During, ah, lunch, in quotes, you got soup.
And ah, I, ah.. had to think, it’s almost like a science or philosophy, as to where to stand, the strategy of where to stand and line for the soup.
Because if you were at the front you would get mostly water.
If you stay, stayed in the… in the back, you may get some solid in, in.. in the, in the eh, soup, which was mostly of a… turnip. You know what turnips.. R… Rüben?
IV: Rüben.
JT: Yeah. Was, it was ah.. or perhaps maybe a piece of potato.
Noth.., nothing of real nutritional substance. But something, more solid.
But there is a possibility if you’re at the end of the line you might not get anything.
Or, you could maybe wipe the ah, the kettle, from which the food was..
So that was the kind of, ah.. gives you a sense of what our existence was like, in terms of food.
At night, you’re given a piece of bread and, ah… then again,
I would get the bread, hold it like this, and eat it like this, so that no crumb would fall to the ground, and, ah… I would eat it all up.
Because if I didn’t and I saved it there’s a possibility that somebody will either steal it from me or knock it out, or something like that.
So this became a very precious kind of thing.
Sometimes you got, with the bread you got, may have gotten a piece of margarine.
But the essence was to, you know, get the most, the crumb that fell to the ground.
So you were reduced to this kind of dehumanizing process that was relentless, was ever present, in addition to the fear, in addition to the exhaustion, in addition to the cold…
And, and these words, I have a different kind of connotation than they have now, you know.
Like hunger. I mean the average individual, when you speak of hunger, it's maybe they didn’t eat for a day or two, this was ever present for a lo.., years.
IV: So now when I ask my next question, I know that you say you can’t use these words, but… what about medical care?
So, I know they had the Revier, there were doctors, I think..
What’s, what would be the word for this? What happened there?
JT: What happened there is ah.. you didn’t want to find out when you were there.
You never wanted to be there, because, ah, not, you know… you, you, you learn, ah…
In that circumstances where your life is on the line all the time, you get develop a sense.
You see people who, ah.. go there, and never come back.
And ah, once you get a.. an illness like, ah, dysentery, which was very common, typhus, you go there, you, you, you don’t come back.
So the kind of care is, is… you can’t speak of it in terms of what we as in, in a civilized world think about, in terms of medical…
If, if you, I mean, especially I found that afterwards, about the, what they did there, I mean the nature of the practice by this, especially Dr. Schmitz, Heinrich Schmitz.
He… ah, well.. he was a… himself diagnosed as a.. as a… a.. psychotic.
He, ah, was, had been castrated and he was a… not taken into the service, the German army, and he was given a choice either… something..
So they sent him to be the caregiver in a concentration camp.
So that‘s the level, now there were some inmate doctors who tried to be helpful.
IV: So before you t.., have been telling about hangings, what about punishing?
So many prisoners told me that they.. also there were, openly for the public they made the punishments, that also everybody had to look.
Did you see any king of this, or?
JT: I, I don’t see, I didn’t see the ah, public ah, kind of punishment.
Ah.. but the punishment was that you were taken into a room and you were put over a horse,
they stripped your pants down and then they gave you 25 lashes, or 50 lashes, depending on the severity of you, quote, crime, and ah, they came out very injured, so we..
I saw personally the after affects, I didn’t see the process itself.
IV: Ok, so let’s make a little break.
JT: Ok.