150 wives and children were sent to Terezin as a preferred transport June 1942. All husbands had been executed May 28, 1942 in Sachsenhausen. They all got arrested May 27, 1942. Normally they would have been shipped off to the east. I was 16 years old at the time when the Gestapo and police came to our home to pick up my father. I asked them, “Where are you taking him?” They replied “You will see him in a few days.” Lies! When we arrived at Terezin, an SS chief on a horse started reading all the names of the men, and said these were executed on orders from Heinrich Himmler “abtreten” (dismissed).
We were already given a place. It was a horse stable to sleep on a stone floor on hay. Czech prisoners came earlier to get the town ready for new transports, to build all those bunk beds for the whole town that had been evacuated of all their inhabitants for the incoming Jews. Terezin goes way back to 1700-1785 when it was an army town. At arrival at the railroad station, crooked German soldiers told us, you better give us all the following because inside they will take it all away anyway. Watches, jewelry, articles made of precious metal, cigars, cigarettes, drugs and stamps. I helped an incoming transport from Frankfurt, classy lady said to me: “Young man, please get me a nice hotel”. She must have been in a terrible shock when she was taken to one of the big army barracks way on top under the roof to sleep. Thousands got the same treatment where to stay. The town had seven Kaserne and newcomers were put under the roofs. The original Terezin had only 7,000 people, but the
full camp with Jews had a steady 85,000 prisoners. Transports were sent to Auschwitz and new ones came in all the time. One day the Nazis decided to have a head count of the camp, who ever could walk had to go. They wanted really to know how many escaped. We stood all day in a very large field. After a while, we thought they are going to bomb all of us in one shot, but it never worked out. They marched us back at night to the camp.
1,500 children came from the Bialystock camp in Poland. I was put to help them: to give them a shower, to clean them up. They refused to go into the showers. The reason … they had seen their parents in Poland go into the showers…but they never came out, and they never saw them again. They were kept in Terezin for some time, until the Nazis changed their mind and deported them to Auschwitz to get killed. We had a nice young man in the camp, Freddy Hirsch, a youth leader. He volunteered to go along with the children. They killed him too.
In October 1944, Hitler got an idea to make a phony film called “Hitler gave the Jews a town”. He had the whole town spruced up and painted, stores built, like a bank and café where one could buy clothing, printed money and food stamps. This was to fool the Red Cross Commissions from Sweden and Switzerland, and built a Gazebo in the park for a band and the kids also had a playground. They were brainwashed good and told what to say to the camp SS leader and to call him uncle. So when he gave the kids a can of sardines, they had to say “Again sardines uncle”. These poor kids, they never saw a can of sardines in their whole life. My brother and I and others were taken outside the camp to a theater to dance with pretty Czech girls to American Jazz Music. The director was the famous Kurt Gerron. After finishing the movie, he was transported to Auschwitz to get killed because he knew too much about Adolf Hitler. To reduce the number of prisoners for the movie, transports were
sent to Auschwitz by the thousands. Bread was made from chestnut flour, if you did not eat your ration the same day it got moldy. Old people died like flies, younger ones got “Impetigo”, a caching disease, and other sicknesses. But only one drug to cure all is called “Brontosil”.
In 1941, 2,430 died and in 1943 of those aged 80 to 100 years old……. 41,348 died. When the Russians liberated the camp, they found thousands of shoeboxes with ashes and made a human chain to dump them in the nearby river before the Red Cross inspection came. My mom was able to stay there because she worked for the German Airforce and was splitting “Mica”. We were seven guys who escaped the death march. We were in Romania on the way to Palestine when we were told by the Red Cross that Terezin was liberated by the Russians. We went back to look for our mothers. Out of seven men only two found their mom.
Leichte Sprache
DGS
