David Burdowski - May 13, 1982
Death March
Did you hear about the war news? Towards the end did you know if the Americans were winning or...
Nothing. Nothing at all. Never--we never knew. The only thing we knew that uh, when we were in Jaworzno, that all of a sudden we could hear rumors that the Russians are getting close, the Russians are getting close. Then all of a sudden we could hear already the, the uh, canons at night, especially. And one night they come in about ten o'clock at night and they took us out. Every--the whole camp and we walked from, from Jaworzno to Katowice. We walked for all night and all day without stopping. And we got into Katowice and we were sleeping outside. The snow--when we woke up--and we were laying down on the, on the middle of the square. We lay down in the middle of the square and in the morning you woke up, must have been about maybe an in...uh, a foot of snow on us, right outside. And after awhile as we walked, you know, the shoes fell off your feet because--from walking. Uh, so you walked with, with the rags around your feet. My feet were swollen, my feet were frozen. Even after the war my feet were frozen even for four, five years. I suffered from, uh...
Frostbite.
From frostbite. Uh, as we were walking uh, there were days--that's all we used to get maybe three, four potatoes a day to eat from camp to camp. As we arrived in, in uh, in one camp, in Buchenwald everything was bombed on top of that. And we were sitting there and before even we got into Buchenwald they finally took us on a train for four days and four nights, I don't know. In four days and four night we didn't eat nothing. Nobody had anything. We were sitting in the cars--in the, in the uh, train cars. And that's all we, we survived on was the snow that was falling down because it was open cars. So the snow that fell in, we could eat that. That was our, our food for four days and four nights. Finally when we arrived in, in Buchenwald, the camp was bombed. We didn't have any water, nothing. After a day later, they finally gave us the first little bit of soup and a piece of bread. It's hard to describe when you're sitting--when the memory come back, you know. But uh, you can sit like that for hours and from each camp it'll take you hours to describe the suffering and, and the thing that we went through.
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