JT: Walk slowly, or what?
CM: Well, you.. A bit more speed would be nice, but not too much.
JT: Ok.
CM: It’s rolling… yeah.
Maybe a bit closer to the window would be nice.. a bit closer to the window.
Yeah, that’s fine.
Jetzt.. you.. come to us.
IV: Here Mr. Terry now we are a place, ah… that is responsible that you survived I think this camp.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit of the story.
JT: Well, on the 15th of April, ah, the Schreiber Miloš Kučera saw me on the Appellplatz and he said when the curfew whistle blows at 21:00 o’clock don’t go to your barrack.
Go to the Heizung in the Wäscherei and there is a German with a green triangle, a prisoner, who will hide you.
And he told me that tomorrow all the Jews will be evacuated from the camp, so this is what I want you to do.
So I, when the whistle blew I came down here, and the German, ah, Häftling already knew that I was going to come, and he put me into this tunnel,
which was pipes going from the boiler, the Heizung, pipes that were filled up.
And there was.. and I was lying there for approximately 2 days, flat, hot, hungry, thirsty, afraid.
In the morning, on the 16th, I heard a lot of noise above, on the Appellplatz, and that’s when they took all the Jews on the death march.
IV: And then, what happened then?
JT: Then when I came out the, ah, SS had left and we were all standing on the Appellplatz
and I was recognized by one of the Ukrainian, ah, young inmates from my block, on block 9, eh.. 19,
and he said in Russian, "Один Żyd остал". Which in Russian translates to “one Jew remains”.
And, ah, within a short time the SS came back and so I went again to Miloš Kučera and I said, ah, “I am in danger, I’ve been recognized”.
And he said to me go to the Revier and seek Carl Schrade, who was the, ah, in charge of the Revier,
And Carl Schrade, ah, gave me a different number of a Russian, whose name, ah, was Waganow Wasilij.
And they put the number on my uniform and ah, they put me in the section where there was typhus.
And ah, I was there, and when they called out the name to give you the piece of bread at night, ah, they called out Waganow Wasilij and I said “дa”.
And I also knew a few words that he told me, ah, Carl Schrade told me to remember, memorize.
Ah, as to where I’m from and so forth, and I hear a faint voice of a man who’s very sick saying in Russian,
"Васа откуда ты?", “where are you from?”.
So I said "Из Харькова", from Charkow.
And he says, "Uu Ты мой земляк" , “you’re my Landsmann."
And so I got scared again, and I went to Carl Schrade and I said, I told him what happened, that I found a Landsmann from Charkow.
So Carl Schrade took me and gave me a different room in the Revier, and there I remained until, ah, the ah 23th, when the camp was liberated.
IV: So being here, you, I think you’ve been to this place quite often.
So now looking at this place is there anything that comes up, seeing this place?
JT: Yes, ah, it comes up and it doesn’t look like it did at the time.
But the memory of the feeling always come back and it gives me kind of a shivering feeling, like goosebumps and ah..
You know, it, it, it evokes the whole process, like it never leaves you.
IV: So during our interview before, you said, ah, every day the most important question was how can I survive, life, how can I stay alive.
In all these days here, in all, in all these years you went from camp to camp was there anything that gave hope?
Ma.. and gave the power maybe to be so strong to survive? Where there any parts of hope, or?
JT: Ah.. not really. But you see, ah, the hope was there, not in the conscious mind.
But it was there, in fact I think it was put best by the words of the polish poet Tadeusz Borowski,
who, ah, was in Auschwitz and who in 19.. I think 1946 committed suicide as a young man, who said that we never..
One of the things that accounts for the survival is that we never learned how no to hope.
We never gave up hope, and, ah, he, he wro... he wrote, in his famous book he writes about in Auschwitz, an incident..
To demonstrate this, is a man who comes off the train and is marching towards, I mean a group of people are marching towards the gas chamber.
And this man is exhausted from the whole trip and he falls down and the SS guard says to him get up or I’ll shoot you.
So he gets up and he walks a 100 or 200 meters to death in the gas chamber.
So you have 200 meters of hope, that last minute “I’m gonna shoot you”, so he gets up and he walks.
So, ah, hope wasn’t, of course there is, consciously may have thought maybe..
Maybe, but, ah, it was a day.. minute to minute kind of existence.
IV: So it was more kind of hope.. instinctively, like a signal from a… go on, go on, go on…
JT: From the unconscious, it’s almost like an animal instinct, drive.
The animal doesn’t think about hope, he just knows how to save himself from the danger, and that's what we were reduced to.
As..ah, our humanity of thinking and hoping and a.. it was taken away from us, with our names and everything else.
Everything that was ah.. yours, own, was not your own anymore. Even your body wasn’t your own.
Like we possessed nothing.
IV: Ok.
CM: Dann schneid' ich jetzt den Himmel ab. Weil der oben zu arg ablenken würde. Und geh halt auf die..
IV: Geht schon los. You can come.
CM: Bissel weiter wenn er rübergeht, so nach rechts. Dreht das mal eweng nach rechts, ja rechts. Nee, das war falsch. Ah Shit. Ah.
JT: Ok?
CM: Ok.
IV: Ok, the last two questions. So when you came here you came from Poland, your language was Polish.
Today it’s English. And in your book I r.. I read here in the camps you learned to speak German and it was important.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.
JT: Well, haha, again, the.. in order to survive you had to be able to understand German and you learn quickly.
And we saw that those people who didn’t understand, ah…. German, had a great deal of more difficulties staying alive.
Because if you didn’t understand, ah.. although..
If you didn’t understand the language you couldn’t follow orders.
And if you did not obey the order in some way or another you were at least punished, if not, you know…
And punishment resulted usually in a trauma to your body, emm, as well as to your mind, but the body had to be, ah, kept, kept you going.
If you lost the strength or if you got a broken f… leg or an arm you were no longer functioning.
And so your, your life again was at it's edge, so it was important to understand what.. and, in order to just get along with other people.
So the common language was German, so you had to learn it.
And at that age, you know, when you’re young, you learn the language much quicker.
IV: And so when you went to the States you, you learned English very well, and what about the meaning of the German language for you?
So there’s some people, they, they swore, I never will go back to Germany, I never will talk one word in this language. What about your feeling?
JT: To me it was on the contrary, I tried to understand which made me search out the German literature.
And I read Heinrich Kleist and Schiller and Goethe and when I came back as an American officer I went to a..
I was stationed in Heidelberg so every year they had Schiller’s "Die Räuber" in the castle, so I was..
I tried to understand, and so I read a lot of the German literature, you know to try and see, and unfortunately the humanities don’t necessarily humanize the individual.
IV: And yet the last question, I read also in your book, eh… in…
CM: (???)
IV: Yeah, I read also in your book that you said the time, during your time in the camp in Flossenbürg you lost your believe in God. Maybe..
JT: Well, ah, I felt abandoned by God. And so frequently I’m asked the same question.
Ah, there, there are two questions invariably that I’m asked is: “Do you hate the Germans?”
And the other question, invariably, is “do you believe in God or not?”.
So, ah, I… my answer’s been I don’t hate the Germans and ah…
I left God in Flossenbürg, because when I saw, and I thought about it, how children, little infants were smashed against the wall, or used for target practice..
What did.. what kind of sin did they commit, and so where was God?
Who is supposed to be omniscient and, ah, and to me that, ah, made me not a believer.
I don’t, I.. I.. it’s a personal kind of feeling, I have, some people have forgiven God, I.. have questions about it.
IV: Ok. Is there anything you think, what would be important for you to say.
Maybe some topics we didn’t mention, or… yeah, maybe, and I still have, maybe I also have one more question.
And this one will be, what was the most terrible, the most sad, the most cruel, terrible thing here in Flossenbürg, in this camp.
Or what was special, maybe different to other camps here.
JT: Special about Flossenbürg, you know… ah…
Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, when I was a geologist in the jungle of Venezuela.
I had an image of the Appellplatz, on a Sunday… and a pile of people were lying on top of each other.
And a… on the bottom was a Muselmann with a piece of bread,
and everybody was trying to get to that Muselmann’s piece of bread.
And the image of that came back to me many years later, of all places in the jungle of Venezuela.
And the thought was “how has the human being been reduced to such a state where this was possible?”
And so that made me wonder about what, how thin, the veneer of civilization is.
And how easily it’s stripped away, and we become… reduced to such a state.
And that is, I think.. a quintessential memory of Flossenbürg.
IV: Ok. Thank you. Ein bisschen tiefer. Ok so do you need a question or you can just start?
JT: Well, a, a, a.. a question is better.
IV: Ok… thinking back at this time here in Flossenbürg,
what do you think, what really is going through your mind, what do you think is important?
JT: Well, what is important is the fact, ah, that we are quickly disappearing, you know, even though I was one of the youngest here..
I’m, you know, 77 years old, and you wonder, ah… we carry a memory with us, a.. a memory of events that, ah, very difficult to convey to others in, in the, in this true essence, you know?
So what will happen once we're gone, and how is memory, our memory transmitted to future generations,
is something that I frequently think about and whether, ah.. as the political climate in various places changes,
what happens to all of this, you know, how will it be carried forward?
Because this is.. unprecedented, what happened.
It’s almost beyond description.. not almost, it is beyond.
And it’s a struggle trying to convey this to the future, and I hope that the young people come and learn.
IV: Ok?
JT: Ok.
IV: A little bit f., ten steps more. So that you can't see me anymore. Ok.
CM: Soll ich im Tele dahin?
IV: Eh, ja einmal, machen wir einmal, guck mal wie's ausschaut. Just a moment.
CM: Schaut gut aus, aber dann kann er noch ein Stück weiter hinter.
IV: Ja. Ok. Five more, you can go five more steps. Ok.
CM: Ein Moment noch.
Ja läuft.
IV: Ok.
CM: Oh, jetzt seh' ich ihn nimmer. Stopp mal, der ist am Geländer links.
IV: Dann geht's da eben erst los.