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Szymon Binke - June 16, 1997

When the doors opened there, what was it like it? Was it...

They took us off the, not like Auschwitz. No, it was, well, [laugh] it wasn't good, but it wasn't as bad. We alrea...maybe we knew what to expect, or I, I knew what to expect already, so I wasn't too shocked. And we walked probably for an hour at night. Got into that Camp 7 and uh, we laid down. It's uh, you probably, were you in Dachau? Okay. You saw one of those barracks, how they were. The, the, the roof, then you had two uh, two uh, uh, one on each side uh, uh, shelves like and a ditch dug out through the middle? That's where you were walking, in the middle and those two shelves was where you were sleeping. Well, when I got in there, it was pitch dark. I didn't know. We were so tired, walking for a long time. So I just laid down. All of a sudden people start stepping all over me, 'til I found out I'm supposed to uh, sleep on the shelf. And there we weren't very long. Several days and we got moved to Lager 4. Then we started to go out on work uh, details.

You walked to Lager 4 also?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. That was in, it was all in Kaufering.

And what was the work like?

Well, we worked, the two big ones was Moll, which was uh, uh, construction firm and Holtzman. Holtzman is still a big construction firm in uh, Germany, in Munich. In fact they're on the German stock exchange. And we were building some kind of underground factories. Uh, I was carrying cement, bags of cement.

You were thirteen years old?

Yeah.

And you were carrying that?

Uh, that was in forty, '45. Yeah. I wasn't even thir...yeah, I was thirteen, yeah.

And you were carrying bags of cement?

Right.

Hundred pound bags, fifty pound?

Uh, fifty kilos. Yeah, a hundred pounds, 102, something like that.

Uh, I presume that you had gotten food already at this point.

Oh yeah, yeah, there we, food. That's, [laugh] we'd get a, a soup. Let's see, what the heck, when did we get fed? I think after we came home. Yeah. We would get soup after, after you came home. You stood in line in the kitchen. And I guess we got some bread, which you had, you'd, you'd save for during the day. But the soup was watery, you know, maybe a few vegetables here and there. No, no meat or...Sunday was a good soup. They gave us like a, a, it was like uh, noodles with, with uh, milk and watery milk and it was sweet, a little sweet. That was a, that was a real good soup, yeah. Not too many noodles though, but it was sweet you know, we're hungry for sweet.

Once, once you got to Kaufering or even on the train or even in Birkenau, did, did you and your father ever talk about what might have happened to your mother and your sister?

We talked about 'em, but uh, we didn't expect uh, we still didn't know what happened to them.

So did you think that they might be alive?

Yeah.

Even in, even when you were in these camps?

Later on we heard that people coming, you know, from the older uh, uh, prisoners they knew more about it, they knew what was happening in Birkenau then.

No, no one at Birkenau said anything like...

Not to us. But my aunt, well which I met after the war, she says they told my, my mother and her sister and her sister-in-law, you know to, "give up the kids" or they are gonna get killed. So apparently somebody told them.

But no one said they were going through the chimney or anything like that to you?

Not, not to my knowledge, no.

When you began to think that they might have been killed, what, what kinds of things went through your head?

[laugh] What kind of things. What can you do? I was angry, bitter. In fact, I uh, after the war for the first few months I was uh, uh, very aggressive, very animalistic. [pause]

How?

Towards Germans.

Violently you mean?

Violent, yes.

This was around Seeshaupt?

After Seeshaupt probably, yeah. In Seeshaupt I wasn't very long, because my father got sick. I think he had typhus. And we wound up in the hospital in Bad Tölz, t-o-l-t-z, which probably was right around there. Oh there we met one person that was shot in the mouth, in his throat or something because they were gonna take us into the Tyrol mountains. They had ditches dug already, line us up and kill us and bury us. Well, he was one of the people that arrived and he, I guess they shot him and, but didn't kill him and he was found after the war still alive. I, he, I don't know if he was Jewish or not, I can't remember. But I remember him being there. He was shot someplace in the throat.

So when you were in Bad Tölz you...

I was in, in, in, in hospital. Because my father was sick.

Your encounter, you encountered Germans there?

Yeah, yeah. All the doctors and yes, nurses were German.

And you and you were violent towards them?

[sigh] I don't think not yet, then. Not yet. After I got out of there. In Feldafing.

All right, let's go back before we get, get to that. You were in camps. You went to Camp 7 and then Camp 4.

Four, then three.

Then three.

Three we were just maybe two weeks or so. I don't know why, but maybe that camp Landshut. See, they took us, we, we know we were going to Landshut, 500 of us. It was a brand new camp. Maybe it wasn't ready yet. So we were in, in Lager 3, in Camp Number 3.

What was, what were some of the worst things you remember about the Kaufering camps?

Dead bodies in the wintertime piled up. Hundreds of 'em. I mean not, not just, I mean high up. Just throw 'em up, because they didn't want to take up too much space.

Mountains of bodies.

Yes. Mountains of bodies. Yeah.

Lice yet?

Yes.

You were talking about lice there?

Yes, yes, yes. Lager 4, yes. Lots of lice.

How did you cope with that?

Just swiped 'em off, scraped 'em off, tried to, tried to, you know we'd undress and try to pick 'em off our clothes every evening. It was a daily routine. But the next day you had 'em again, so, because they were all over.

Was there disease there?

Yes. Typhus. A lot of typhus. In fact, in Mühldorf, I had I think it was typhus. I must, I must have had a light case, because uh, I went to work, well my father saw the shape I was, I could hardly walk. He tried to drag me to the, there were, there was a hospital you know. So I kept postponing it, "No, I don't wanna go," and "I wanna stay with you," and this and that. Finally one evening, oh, by that time my uncle, his oldest brother got, also got sick and he wound up in the hospital. Well, one evening he finally says, "Sol is there, you'll be with Sol" instead of, you know, "until you get well." Okay. So I agreed and [laugh] by the time we got there, I see the guy closes the door. He says, "Come back tomorrow." Okay. So I was happy I didn't have to go. That night they took him away. They took him to, back to, to Kaufering. He survived, but uh, we thought for sure he was dead. Because by then, Kaufering Lager 4 was the Krankenlager, the, the, the...

Sick camp.

Sick camp, yeah.

So did you go to the next day?

No. No, no, no. Not, that the thing is, you see, [laugh] he didn't want me to go now.