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Joseph Gringlas - January 14, 1993

Your brother was with you.

Yeah, brother still with me.

Did he come to you in the hospital? When, when you were sick?

I was sick, e...even, he had to go to, going to work out withthe other ones. I was in the...

But the two of you were in this building together?

Yeah, at the, at that time where the, where the bombs fell?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He came to you.

Yeah, because at nigh...even if they came and took him back fromthe work back to Dora, see in the, the buildings. So he stayed with me.

I see.

So, eh...

So the camp was destroyed?

It was still left, a few eh, a few, a few buildings and destroyedthe lab and, and we, we just stayed, there's. I think that time was no feedingbecause everything was a chaos. The feeding, the one with the ration breadwhat we, we got. And next-ten o'clock in the morning again the bombs cameand it was out-ten o'clock it looked like it was dark from the, they cameso many planes, it was dark and we ra...dark, dark outside, I don't know,suddenly got dark. I don't know what, why it was so dark. And we ran, we wentup. SS and the camp, concentration camps people, they just walked out fromthe camp because there were bombs coming down and down...that, building thebarracks. And we were laying on, on the ro...on somewhere on a field. Andnext to me was an SS laying, sta...laying right next to me, from the guards.And I was healthy. I'm next-I'm even now with him, dead. And the bombs hadcoming down and he said and the one thing he said to me, he said, "Bye," thatmeans we finished. The SS. The guardman next to me. He said bye because everythingwas falling, bombs from all over. And after the, the bombardment was quietdown, he looked around, a lot of people killed. Horses, soldiers. A lot ofthe killed SS. And we went-where we're going to go? He had on the uniformand no place to go. He got back into the camp. Got back to camp there wastotally chaos after, was no building, there was no food, nothing. And theytook still people of us, to take, took away from us. And I don't know. I thinkthey took them to, to the woods to be killed. 'Cause we never seen them again.Some SS. And after awhile, it was getting-we heard the fighting going on atnight, we hear that, you know, we hear that-those guns, ar...artillery gunshitting Nordhausen, getting close. Anyway, they left. Whatever the SS, theyleft and we were left uh, to, the ones that sick. Yeah, by the way, when therewas the bombardment, I got a shrapnel into my side. And got close to my heart.So I was bleeding all over me. My brother was injured in the leg. He was hitright in the leg with one of the shrapnels. And he was not so bad and I was-Icouldn't breathe because from the, from, from the shrapnel came in-went intomy inside. And I went-was a lake next to the it, I went and I washed myselfout. There was no SS. It was like chaos. There was no...nobody guards youanymore. And then after a day or two we were laying into a, like a opened,like a-it must have been like a stable.

Did anybody bandage you, did you, doctor, nothing?

Nothing. I just. The rea...I went, I saw la...a lake, so I wentdown and cleaned myself with the, that, the, the, that injured, eh place,to get the blood.

How did you stop the bleeding?

It stopped.

Just stopped.

Yeah, from cold water or something. It stopped. Nature I guesswas healing.

But was the sh...shrapnel still in you?

Yeah.