MH: .. out of Germany.
IV: {Technical instructions}
Okay. Can we start?
MH: Pardon?
IV: The, the camera is running.
MH: Alright.
IV: Okay. Er, I would like to focus on your personal story of course and on Flossenbürg.
MH: Pardon?
IV: I would like to focus on your personal story and on Flossenbürg.
MH: My perm..
IV: Your personal story.
Can you talk about your childhood a little bit, where you were born?
MH: My childhood.
Ich kann nicht..
Now.. I can't remember a lot of my childhood.
It was under the Nazi regime.
I was.. well, I can remember I went to a Jewish school, primary school.
I wasn't allowed to go to a Christian school any more.
I wasn't allowed to go to cinema.
There was a park near, near where I lived.
IV: In Stettin.
MH: And when I went to the park, I had to sit on the bench which said "Jews only".
So, my childhood was limited.
My friends were all Jewish.
And that was my childhood really that.. what I can remember.
I can remember my father had a hat factory, a small hat factory.
But in 1938, he was forced to sell the factory.
And then he worked for the new owner.
And that.. on top of it, he was arrested in..
Ich glaube, I remember it must have been er, November 1938.
The Kristallnacht.
He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
And he stayed there for two months and then he came back.
But he never spoke about, he never said a word.
And that's how we lived.
My grandmother lived with us and..
Well I can remember from my grandmother, well I told you that.. yesterday. {laughs}
She was an English teacher before she married.
And one of my jobs was always to go to a paper shop and get the English paper.
And the only paper they.. I remember I always bought was a Times.
But the paper always had holes in it.
And as I told you before, once I bought a paper and there was a big hole.
Because the paper was censored by the Nazis.
And what they didn't want to hear the population..
because there were Germans who could read English, so they didn't want to hear what was going on outside Germany.
It was really bad and so we lived till 1940.
IV: How did you become arrested?
MH: Bitte?
IV: How did you become arrested?
How did you become arrested?
MH: In 1940, in February 1940, the Gestapo arrived in the middle of the night, it was February 1940.
And told us that we were arrested.
We were allowed to take one suitcase.
And my mother woke me up.
I had to dress.
And we gathered as much clothing as possible for the suitcase and we were transported to a large hall.
And in the large hall were all the Jews from Stettin.
Oh, by the way.. I lived in Stettin.
That is now a Baltic port in Poland.
In, in the whole..
My parents had to give up all the German money they had with them and they were given Polish money.
Not a lot.
And a sack of clothing, a sack full of food.
And then we were taken to the trains.
And they were passenger trains.
And the trains took us to Poland.
We.. after three days traveling, we ended up in Lublin.
That's, that's a town.
And we were taken to a prisoner of war camp.
And the, the transport was divided into three different places.
Er, we went to a large village near Lublin, Bełżyce.
My aunt, sister of my mother, went to Głusk.
And the,
and the third lot went to another place I forgot the name. That is not really important.
Piaski.
Und.. And it was freezing cold winter.
And we were put on sledges, horse-drawn sledges.
And I can't understand how the drivers.. I know we followed the previous driver,
they see, the land was full of snow.
One, one couldn't see whether it was road or land.
And, so we arrived in this small town Bełżyce.
And the Polish Jews who lived there had to find us accommodation.
And we lost our suitcases, they stayed in Lublin and they never gave them to us.
So we had only our clothes on.
And my grandmother was on the sledge.
She had frozen fingers, five of them and feet.
And she was taken to hospital and she came, she came never out.
She died there.
And I had frozen, frozen fingers and toes.
I needed a doctor too.
Now what happened is they found us accommodation with a shoe maker.
He had a outhouse, just one room, for four of us.
And the Polish Jews gave us German Jews enough food.
They opened a soup kitchen, my parents worked there.
But because I was a child, I've, I got food from the barber, the local barber.
The local barbershop, he, he was a widower, and the daughter cooked the meals.
But I went there, I had nothing else to do.
And the first year, we had a, a teacher who taught us.
But we had no paper, no books.
So it was really more entertainment than learning anything.
And the following year, she was arrested, she went away.
And, and, er.. we had nothing to do, we the children.
And I sat in the barbershop, watched the barber.
It was comical.
He wasn't only the barber.
IV: When did you go to Plaszow?
MR: Pardon?
IV: When did you go to Plaszow?
MR: Oh. Much later. Much later.
You want to know? Because.. I tell you.
That was '40.
And '41.
I tell you, I must tell you this.
The barber was the dentist as well.
A Pole came in, he said:
"That tooth is painful. Oh", he says, "have a look."
He opened his mouth, the tooth is bad, it has, it has to come out.
So what was the anaesthetic?
A bit, a small glass of wodka.
He, he had to drink it and they got pliers and out comes the tooth. {laughs}
That was all until 1940 and then the SS came and arrested men for work and they were taken away.
And they had to form a Judenrat.
And the Judenrat was only for the Nazis' purposes.
My brother was interpreter for the Judenrat which helped us later.
And an SS officer came, and he wanted money and so, it's okay.
But at the same time, he told us when there will be a resettlement, so we went into hiding.
And by 1942, there were, out of the 4000 Jews, there were only maybe 2000 left.
And then one day they came, we knew when they come.
They rounded up the whole town, all the large village.
They murdered all the (???), murdered all the people in the hospital,
and they ran through every building and brought out all the people and they took them away.
And then there were only a few hundred Jews left over the night
and we had.. We were forced to clear out the houses, and there's, the announcement came to collect the goods.
And that was a very little ghetto, and that was about that time it was '42.
And the SS came, rounded up the ghetto and the SS officer sorted out the people.
And I was very lucky.
Because the SS officer liked German Jews.
He was an, he wasn't even an officer but an Oberscharführer.
And I passed the selection and out of these 300 people that were in ghetto, 100 were taken away including me and my family.
And the rest were murdered.
And we were three little boys who entered the first concentration camp.
That was near Kraśnik.
Well, the concentration camp was a prisoner of war camp for Jewish Polish prisoners of war which was there since 1939.
And they all worked in a aircraft factory for Heinkel.
And it was an Außenkommando from Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin.
So the first day, we marched out to work.
The, the, the camp was organised like a military, the, the, the man in charge company officer forced us three boys in the end.
And we marched through the gate.
And the SS commander was..
He said to, to the Jewish camp commander:
"Where does that little shit come from?
I sorted them out yesterday when they arrived."
I said.. We begged him:
"We'll be alright. We're going to be good workers."
And he was.. must have been in a good mood.
And he said: "Alright. I let you live.
I'll come around and see what it's like what you're doing."
So we worked in the factory for one day and when we came back, the Jewish commander said:
"You three boys never walk out the gate again.
I find a work in, in the, in the camp."
One got the best job in the kitchen.
The other one got a job in, in the cabinetmaker's,
and I got a job in the blacksmith's.
The only reason why it was a blacksmith there was because of the Kommandant had a horse.
And they needed horse shoes regular.
And I don't know, the carriage which .. metal wheel.
We found work.
And my major job was to pump the bellows for the fire.
But I had a more important job:
To pinch potatoes from the kitchen.
If I was, would have been caught, I would have got 50 lashes.
But so we had nearly every day baked potatoes from the fire.
And then I was a to look out the Kommandant because the Kommandant was a killer.
I remember, he was riding on a horse and he saw, there were people left to clean the camp.
And there was a man sweeped the parade ground, and he was leaning on his broom.
But he didn't hear the Kommandant coming on his horse.
The Kommandant took his revolver and just shot him.
Or there was, there was a man, he was, he said that he caused sabotage.
On parade we all had to hit him.
We were lined up in fives and we had to make space in the middle, two and three.
And then the guilty person was, had to run in between around the camp.
And we had to hit him.
If not the Ukrainians who stood behind would have hit us.
That was one case and another case which affected my father.
A man escaped.
Well normally, if a man escaped, 15 people were taken out from the company and shot.
This time, he got a brilliant idea.
He sorted out 15 people from the company where the man escaped.
And laid them out on the parade ground.
And they didn't dare to move.
And the Ukrainian rounded them up and hit them as they moved.
And my father was one of them.
And then my father because he, the Kommandant recognised him allowed him go two days early.
But the others were hardly alive when they were allowed to go.
Then there was a German Jew who spoke to..
You see, we all worked in the aircraft factory.
There were Luftwaffe officers who spoke to him.
And that German Jew was a captain in the Kaiser's army in the First World War.
He had an iron cross.
He was just as German as a Luftwaffe officer.
He wasn't very Jewish.
The German Luftwaffe officer asked him what it's like in the camp.
Because they were so friendly to him, the idiot told him the truth.
Well, what happened?
We knew it straight away because we got order to make a hook.
And the boy from the cabinetmaker came in and said:
"We have to build a gallow."
So we knew it straight away.
And somebody is going to be hanged.
Well, the gallow was put up in the parade ground.
And the Kommandant called out this German Jew and he said:
"You spread lies. And I had the information from the Luftwaffe officer.
I sentence you to death by hanging."
And he was hanged.
IV: When did you learn that you had to go to Flossenbürg?
When did you learn that you had to go to Flossenbürg?
MH: Oh that's completely different.
IV: Ja.
MH: From.. In 1943, my father, my brother and me were sent to another camp.
That was Mielec.
That was was near another large, large concentration camp, Plaszow.
And in Mielec, we worked in the aircraft factory again.
So I had to work in the aircraft factory.
But there it was different.
The factory was practically in.. the camp was in the factory.
We had no, not much, we didn't have to walk very far to work.
And it was smaller and there was no killer kommandant.
And we just worked.
And I got a job in the body factory. The body part.
Well what happened was: I became a riveter.
{laughs} Me, a riveter.
Well, what happened is:
When you build an aircraft, you build the skeleton first.
Put the skeleton in a frame, and then you put on sheets of aluminium on the skeleton.
And the sheets of aluminium must be riveted to the skeleton.
First of all, one man marked the holes, and I had to drill them.
And then they found out, the German Meister found out that I was small, I could be handed to crawl in.
So one man put the rivet in, and I had to crab a piece of iron and I crawled in, I held it against the rivet and then they riveted, and that was my job.
That wasn't a hard work.
And on top of it, the Meister found out that I could speak German.
He could speak to me.
And he was an old man, he wasn't a Nazi.
He, he must have been 50.
He said: "Look. I know you suffer a lot."
He whispered to me, he said:
"I leave you a sandwich in my box.
But you must watch it when you collect it."
That was at day time.
And on top of it, I had to interpret for, for the other prisoners when he wanted there's a work done.
He told me, and I had to tell them.
Whether they understood my, my, my Polish language I don't know {laughs}, but in any case that was alright at daytime.
But in this camp we worked in night shift as well which was worse because we hardly slept.
We came back from work, we had to clean the barracks and we did not much sleep.
And 12 hours at night in, in the factory and..
It was bad and the food was bad.
I give you an example:
they must have had bought barrels of Sauerkraut.
And for three weeks, we had every day Sauerkraut and potatoes.
Well that's alright when you have a nice meal.
But you, you live of it.
And I survived and.. because I had easy work and was light.
I had well done till 1944.
And.. but my brother and father had harder work.
In 1944 we stopped going to work and we could hear the Russian guns.
The Russians were coming.
So they took us and, and tatooed us.
I had a "K" and an "L" {shows his arm}, but I got rid of the "K" when I was in England.
That means "Konzentrationslager".
And they gave us pyjamas.
We had civilian clothes in, in .. before with crosses painted on the stripes, but no number.
And now we got the pyjama and we knew we were transported.
100 prisoners to one goods' waggon.
A bucket of water and a bucket for urine. And..
IV: And did you know where you were going?
MH: What?
IV: Did you know where you were going?
MH: No. That was secret.
We knew we were going to Germany because where we were is not that far from the German border.
After a time we were in Germany.
But it took us four days.
And we hardly had any food and a half loaf of bread disappeared in no time.
And the bucket of water disappeared.
And around you people died.
And that's how I arrived in Flossenbürg.
IV: Do you know how many people died in your car?
MH: Maybe 10, 12.
That's how I arrived in Flossenbürg.
IV: What was your first impression when you got there?
MH: Well, the start was, we had never seen a proper concentration camp in Poland.
It was a Judenlager.
This was a concentration camp.
You.. With a proper built watch tower.
And it was all SS.
And not only the barbed wire.
But it was electric fencing.
And a meter from these barbed ones there was a white.. painted.. that, all the way round the camp.
If you stepped over that, that white paint, the, the SS from the machine gunned towers shot the people.
If people didn't want to live any more, they just walked across the white line and they were shot.
The first thing, we went to showers again.
They took all our clothes away.
Got different clothes again.
And then we were registered.
And the first time, we had a number.
Because in Poland, we had no number.
I got my number, 14979.
And the red triangle, that's political, and a yellow one.
And that formed the star of David, because I was Jewish.
And political prisoners had red triangle.
The Germans had just a plain red triangle.
The criminals had green triangle.
Then there were Jehova's witnesses and other.
But if you were Pole, you had a red triangle and a "P".
Italian had a red triangle and an "I".
Hungarian "H".
No, "U"! {Laughs}
Er.. Buchstabiert different anders in Deutsch "Ungarn", you know, "U".
So da waren Menschen, Franzosen und Belgier.
Ich habe einen Belgier getroffen hier.
Sein Vater ist... heute morgen, ich war, das letzte Mal wie ich war, ich war im selben Gasthaus.
Er brachte sein, hat seinen Vater, Vater hierher gebracht.
Now, I'm talking in German.
He brought his father, but he was not Jewish, he was Christian.
He must have worked in underground and got caught.
He was sent to Auschwitz and then they sent them here.
But he brought his father the last time.
This time he came on his own with his children to show them the concentration camp.
IV: Can you describe the arrival?
MH: Pardon?
IV: Could you describe the arrival a little nearer?
MH: The food was better than in Poland.
And we, we got cigarettes which we never got in, in, in Poland.
And I got cigarettes and I went to the first prisoner.
And bartered for a slice of bread and I gave this slice of bread to my brother because he... {shakes his head} I was alright.
IV: Could you live in the same barrack with..?
MH: Eh?
IV: Could you live in the same barrack?
MH: No. He was in another barrack.
I only saw him after work.
And my father wasn't really..
He had hard work he as well and he got worse.
And then, he went into hospital and the, the regulation in hospital after four days you were killed.
Everybody knew it.
They gave him an injection.
And that was the end.
And my brother came, came back from work and went to the barrack and the Blockälteste said:
"You're going on a transport."
He went to another camp.
And I didn't know what happened till, till after the war.
I inquired with the Red Cross.
And the Red Cross told me that he died in February 1945.
And I was on a, I went on a death march in April.
IV: We will come to that later.
MH: Eh?
IV: We come to that later.
MH: I see.
IV: Ja. Er, could you make friends in the camp? Was it possible?
MH: I had a few friends in the barrack but not, not really.
In Poland, I had more friends but here I didn't.
Because I always slept with different people.
And we were woken up five or six o'clock in the morning.
And one morning I pushed the man next door, but he didn't answer.
So, I had to go to, to Blockälteste and tell him the man next door is dead.
I had to drag him out and lay him down on the parade ground because he had to count and that was a burden.
IV: Was there any kind of support between the prisoners?
MH: Pardon?
IV: Was there a support between the prisoners?
MH: Not really.
That wasn't really..
Most prisoners looked after themself.
That.. But the only thing you wanted more was food, and there wasn't any.
And then food got worse.
It wasn't too bad when I arrived, but by 1945 it was very bad.
Because the Germans themselves didn't have much food, did they?
So that's it.
IV: What about the morning parades?
MH: Pardon?
IV: The morning parades?
MH: One hour.
IV: Always one hour.
MH: We stood there one hour.
That was alright in summer.
But in winter, it was terrible.
And because this camp is a mountainous, high up.
It's colder than in the valley, isn't it?
And I always searched a place in the middle with older prisoners around me {laughs}. They kept me warm.
But it was bad to stand one hour and listen to the lecture of the Blockältester.
"Ihr verfluchte Juden."
Jeden, jeden.. Every morning.
But he liked the Czechs because they got parcel from home.
And what he done was he opened the parcels and picked what he wanted, and then, then the rest it goes to the prisoners.
They dare not (???) to complain (???)..
He would have hit them.
He was in charge of the barrack.
IV: Did you have to stand longer for special occasions?
MH: No, not really, no.
Only when there was a hanging.
There were gallows in the parade ground.
And what I noticed that every morning when we stood on roll calls, lorries came.
Into the camp, through the camp into the prison.
And they were always full of, with soldiers.
But at that time, I didn't know whether they were Russian or American airmen.
But you know what happened to them, once they were in prison, they were shot.
Especially if you were a Russian officer, they shot them.
Or political.
Because in every company in the Russian army is a political officer.
It is not like the, the German army had the Wehrmacht and the SS.
And the SS, the SS was the political one, wasn't it.
The Wehrmacht were old and they were soldiers.
But in the Russian, they had secret police in every company.
IV: How many hangings did you see?
MH: Twice.
I can't remember it very good.. Twice hanging.
The sabotage. It was a Russian prisoner of war who sabotaged something.
IV: Did the Jewish er, prisoners also receive parcels?
MH: Jewish prisoners were..
We were the first Jewish prisoners here.
Because up to the older Jewish prisoners, never mind whether they were German or French or Belgian or Dutch, they were all sent to Russia, er, to Poland.
Because in Poland were the, the, the extermination camps.
Because they didn't even have a gas chamber here, did they.
So they.. It was all taking part in, in Poland.
So we were the first Jews here.
Sie sind uns, sie haben uns hier, er, {changes language} they brought us here {laughs}, what terrible!
They brought us here because they wanted workers in the aircraft factory.
Because we worked in, in Poland in the aircraft factory and so we were valuable workers to work here in the aircraft factory.
The ony difference was, in Poland we worked for Heinkel, and here we worked for Messerschmitt.
And there's one thing I must tell you that's..
I found it out.
Because our little camp of 5000 prisoners in Budzyn worked in the aircraft, it was saved from murder in 1943.
Because all the Jews that were hundreds of thou.., thou, thousands of prisoners who had to live in, in Bud.. er,
Majdanek or the Poniatowa Lager und Trawniki und Kriegsgefangenenlager, polnisch-jüdische Kriegsgefangenenlager in Lublin wurde alle ermordet.
Das hieß das Erntefest.
Ich glaube, da waren, I think I read it after the war, it was 35000 prisoners who were murdered.
So that meant there weren't a Jew left in the Lublin district except our little town.
And the final part was, I had a phone call from a prisoner who was in Budzyn.
That's a typical fairytale that, that people saw.
And he says, he worked in the office in the aircraft factory.
And he heard the director of the aircraft factory bargaining with the headquarters of the SS in Berlin to let us live in, in Budzyn.
I can't imagine that it happened
because first of all, all right, the man may have worked in the office.
But the, the director most probably would have made the phone call behind his shut door.
Not having the open door that everybody could hear what was going on.
That's a fairytale, isn't it.
IV: In Flossenbürg the village is so close to the camp.
MH: Pardon?
IV: The village is so close to the camp.
Did you, did you have any contact?
Could you see the people of the village?
MH: No, no. Nie. Never.
The, what I don't understand is, there was a railway here.
Cause the railway brought us here, and we marched through the village to the camp.
But it's not any more, is it?
I don't know, do they still use the quarry?
IV: Ja.
MH: How do they transport the lorries?
Cause.. but it's not as big as it used to be, is it?
IV: No, it's small.
MH: Because they haven't got the prisoners any more, have they.
IV: Did you ever have to work in the quarry, too?
MH: As punishment one day.
IV: Can you talk about that?
MH: That one day maybe 100 prisoners were killed by the criminal prisoners.
IV: What was the reason?
MH: That was a punishment, I don't know, I can't remember what happened.
But the criminals pushed them down the mountains.
And that's what they had done before the war with the political prisoners.
So, so they, they helped the SS.
Of course the SS was there, too, because it's outside the camp, wasn't it.
They had to watch us.
But a lot of prisoners died that day, Häftlinge.
IV: What did you have to do on that day?
MH: Pardon?
IV: What did you have to do on that day in the quarry?
MH: Carry stones.
I took one large stone, put it on my shoulder, and I walked around with it all day.
Watching the guards.
{Laughs}
IV: Did you see a lot of violence between the prisoners in the camp?
MH: No.
Exc, except the criminals.
They could do with the prisoners what they wanted to.
They could attack prisoners, but they always attacked the political prisoners.
Of course when the Jews came, they attacked the Jews as well.
But mainly the political prisoners.
And most probably I don't know whether they asked the prisoner before they attacked him:
"Sind Sie, sind Sie ein Kommunist oder Social Demokrat?"
On the, on the, on the triangle you couldn't recognize whether the man was a communist or social democrat.
But I, I, I don't know, I don't know whatever called... they had black triangle.
But they were Germans.
Maybe they were smugglers or something. I don't know..
IV: It was for unsocial behaviour.
MH: Vielleicht..
IV: Did you get a lot of news, or some news in the camp about the political situation, about the war?
MH: No. No, I never asked, asked.
I didn't talk a lot.
That is, that was, you never knew whom you talked to.
It could have been spies from the SS.
That's why I was silent.
Because for extra food, people do anything they can.
IV: Did you ever have free time?
MH: Pardon?
IV: Did you ever have free time in the camp?
MH: No.
IV: No.
How did the food supply change in 1945?
MH: Because the Germans didn't have any food themselves, did they.
I've heard from prisoners of war who were in prisoner of war camps.
They got Red Cross parcels.
They had better food than the guards.
Because they got Red Cross parcels full of food.
And the Wehrmacht gave it to the British, Americans prisoners.
They didn't hold it back.
They were good..
But they knew that they had loads of prisoners of war in, in, in England and in America.
In America they had better lives than in Germany, the prisoners of war.
Better food. Honestly.
Not in England. Because England had the er, food rationing.
Even after the war.
Although they won the war. {laughs}
IV: Did you know about the V.I.P. prisoners in the camp?
MH: Pardon?
IV: Did you know about the V.I.P. prisoners in the camp, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
MH: No.
I know there was a barrack where there were prisoners, Häftlinge, who were political, a lot of French and later on also Hungarian.
They didn't work and I think they got better food.
But I don't know where, which barrack that was.
The only novelty I came across, it was a Negro. {laughs}
This morning I asked Skriebeleit what happened to him.
He couldn't know what happened.
He, he had a job in the kitchen.
And you know even in, this concentration camp was terrible, but here they, that have to be as anywhere just..
everybody said:
"Go and have a look at him!"
And I have never seen a Negro in my life.
Now I see them every day.
When I go to underground and in the street in London I see Negros.
And in London is United Nation.
But, aber es gibt auch Negros in Germany now.
But even then I noticed the Negros were separated from the..
They were all, they drove the lorries.
I never saw Negro soldiers with arms.
There was a separation at the time, I don't know
whether they didn't trust the Negros with the guns.
IV: Can you talk about the last days in the..?
MH: Pardon?
IV: About the last days in Flossenbürg?
Er, when did you learn that you had to march ..
MH: One day, the Blockälteste said:
"You don't go to work anymore."
And nobody gave us notice, and so..
"Alle Juden raus!"
That was it.
Maybe I could have stayed.
Maybe they wouldn't have betrayed me.
But I don't know whether it was true.
And don't know what would have happened.
IV: What time in the day did you start?
MH: Eh?
IV: When did you start marching?
MH: In the morning we went to the railway.
They put us on waggons, and the journey lasted one hour and we were attacked by fighter planes.
IV: Did you get any food for that?
MH: And after that we had to start marching.
Because it happened a second time, and that's when the trouble started.
It was terrible.
We had no food.
They gave us half a loaf of bread when we started off here.
And we had no water, nothing to drink.
The farmers didn't give us, they attacked us.
They were frightened of the SS.
We, we marched through a small village, there was a bridge.
And the, the local people threw sandwhiches to us.
You know what the guards done?
They started shooting the, the local people.
They just started shooting their own people.
Because nobody, they ran away of course.
IV: Did you know where you were going?
MH: Pardon?
IV: Did you know where you were going?
MH: I don't know, I don't know.
IV: Where did you sleep?
MH: Where?
IV: On the march, where did you sleep?
MH: We slept in, in barn, you know in the farm houses and in a barn.
Because the SS had to sleep as well.
Am Morgen mussten wir, we had to carry on marching.
It was hard.
I'm surprised that I was alive. I was..
When the Americans liberated us I was half dead.
Because of the, the feet were swollen because we had to march with wooden soled shoes.
And this was very hard, very hard.
Can I have a drink?
{drinks}
It must have been four or five days.
But time... I can't really tell.
All I know, we were liberated and a lot of the prisoners who were liberated died from food.
But.. because I had a bad leg.
I don't know to this day.
Was it a guard shot me in, when the train stopped, or, or I was...
I had.. {shows his leg}
See the scars?
And I didn't tell the guards, of course they shot the prisoners who were wounded.
So I wrapped it up with paper.
And what happened was in a week, the wound festered.
And when, when I was liberated, I told the American.
And he said: "I take you to, to the camp, to the.. not the camp, hospital."
And the doctor had one look, and by that time the wound was.. terrible state because..
And, and that is my imagination about, if you are undernourished, you got no resistance against wounds.
It gets worse.
And they stripped the paper off and put antiseptic on.
And I was three or four days in hospital.
And it was a hospital for wounded soldiers.
And, and that saved my life because what happened?
And he, the doctor said:
"You mustn't eat a lot.
We give you a bowl of porridge and some slice of bread."
All the years I saw bread.
It was like rock hard.
Like a stone.
All of a sudden I see, I saw a white bit of bread.
It was fantastic, and that was their main bread.
And that saved my life as well.
After three or four days a, the doctor said:
"Now you can eat more."
But some prisoners overate.
And the stomach was shrunk to nothing and it couldn't take..
They died.
Er.. It's.. if you don't know if somebody doesn't give you advice, it's obvious that you do that sort of thing.
Ja. We live and learn. {laughs}
IV: At the end of the march, do you remember when you saw the first American?
MH: Well, they were very nice to us.
The first soldiers were friendly.
They threw us small package.
This, this package are special rations if they are cut off from, from the column.
You know.
You could open, it was a waterproof packet, square like that.
And you opened it up and you had biscuits in there, cheese, and the first time in my life, I saw chewing gum.
And cigarettes.
All in a.. And they, that was the tanks.
And then of course the, the infantery.
And they said: "We bring you.."
They, they didn't..
They felt sorry when they looked over us and they said, we need a sanitory.
The, the you know, they looked after us.
But in, in the hospital, they took all my clothes away.
And, they, they, the nurse said:
"We put your jacket on the floor and it walked away."
It was full of lice.
And I had no clothes.
All I had was a shirt and no underwear never, no socks, nobody in the camp got this.
And the shoes they threw away.
So I was naked in bed.
And they gave of course a night shirt.
And then the doctor came. He says:
"I have to find you clothes."
He came back with Hitler Youth clothes.
So that was the first clothes and then:
"What am I going to do for shoes for you?" he says.
"I know. I go to, to the army headquarters and find the smallest pair of boots."
And he brought me fair brown boots. It was long and straps on the.. But it worked.
And socks, they were very good, very.
They felt sorry for us more than anything.
Of course some of them were Jewish, they, they, they helped us more than..
IV: How long did you stay in hospital?
MH: Pardon?
IV: How long did you stay in hospital?
MH: About four or five days and then they released us.
And then the United Nation Relief Organisation took care of us.
Aber, but they made a mistake.
They put us..
I told you before, didn't I?
They, they put us in a barn.
No, in a barrack.
Army barrack.
From, from the German army.
But we had to, there were Polish prisoners of war there who were going home, who waited to go home.
And they, they would use to fight with us because we grew stronger..
But they were working on farms.
They carried on with the farmers' wifes and were healthy.
They were really antisemites then.
Er.. Der eine, the only help we got was from the Jewish soldiers in the village.
They said: "If those Poles cause you trouble call us and we sort them out."
We er, very cheeky.
They were so bad.
And one day, they stood on parade every morning and hoisted their flag.
A red and white flag.
You know what we done?
By the afternoon they all were gone.
I don't know where they were.
We grabbed to the flagpole and pulled their blowing flag down.
You should have seen them how they foamed there.
They were going to murder us.
But we told the Jewish soldiers come and help.
And they informed the United Nation Relief organisation.
And they said: "You can't stay here.
We find you a new accomodation."
And we were 50 boys, young people.
We ended up in a convent.
It's a joke, isn't it?
Jews in a convent {giggle}] in Indersdorf.
That's where we stayed.
But the nuns were very nice to us.
But they liked us because we got food.
We got food from the United Nation Relief organisation.
And we got food from the Jewish soldiers.
They brought us food because the Americans, they don't know what saving means.
I don't know.
They eat twice as much than any other person.
You see they have a steak, is that big.
Have you ever seen them, they eat..
It's amazing. And they are all, that's why they are all big.
And that's all wasted food.
Terrible.
And they didn't even put themselves out.
It was wasted food they gave to us.
So we were loving it.
We had never seen food like it since before the war.
IV: And later on, what was the first time, you returned to Flossenbürg?
MH: That was three years ago or four years ago. Four years ago.
IV: What did it feel?
MH: Pardon?
IV: How did it feel for you?
MH: Well, I go to Holocaust survivors club.
And they put a note out from the consul general, the British consul general from Munich.
On it stated that any person who was in prisoner in the concentration camp of Flossenbürg should write to the office for proof that they may come to claim for slave labour.
Because we had to put in a claim for slave labour.
So I thought I got nothing to loose.
I wrote away.
And within a week I had an answer.
They made a photocopy of the book when I arrived in Juli 1944, July 1944 from Plaszow concentration camp and my number.
And I send that in the claiming.
But that wasn't it.
They sent me a letter after that and invited me for the reunion.
But I didn't want to go.
I haven't been in Germany since Oktober 1945 when I left.
And I didn't want to go, come back here.
But then they didn't leave me alone.
Following week I got another letter with a programm what would happen at the weekend.
And it said on Sunday, there'll be prayer in the Jewish prayer hall for the people who died here.
And that's when I decided to come.
If not, I wouldn't have come.
Of course, they were very nice to me.
IV: When you see the camp today, how do you feel?
MH: Pardon?
IV: When you see the rest of the camp today, what, what do you feel?
MH: I don't, don't know what's going on. All the building were gone, isn't they.
The government must spend a lot of money.
There you are.
Did I say enough, what more do you..?
IV: I think that was very good.
MH: It's enough, isn't it.
IV: Thank you.