Simon Cymerint - June 8, 1982
Evacuation from Auschwitz
Where were you...
So, that means--from Auschwitz to Oranienberg..
How did you get there?
By, everything by trains.
By trains.
Again, this was another holocaust. Because it was wintertime, we were not dressed. Just in that striped jacket. They took us on tra...on open cattle trains. In that time, they were beating and hitting and, and we got on--it was complete open. And I remember like now and we were traveling about two days. Open cattle. It was snowing and we were just from that snow, we licked, you know. Because here everything started to dry out again. But it was wintertime we could hold it out better than, you know, summertime, you fell. In the wintertime when it's packed it keeps you warm. And we came to Oranienberg and from Oranienberg we worked there in a factory again, and in nineteen uh, in April, this was twelve days in April, the twelfth of April we started to march. We left that Oranien boot camp and we marched through forests during the day. And at night we slept in the forest. But in daytime we kept going and going and going. We supposed to go to a certain destination. It was already, everything was uh, prepared. When they, when they caught that ??? with that uh, map, he had all the papers, where he's going to take us. And over there we're all supposed to, it was prepared graves. We saw it after, after we were liberated, we saw dugged up graves and we supposed to go to those graves and we supposed to get shot. And don't, everybody, no witnesses supposed to be alive because they felt the pressure already that they losing the war. So, they started to eliminate everybody. And just happened, if it's meant it to live, uh, two days if it would take we could reach that destination. But two days before we reached it they had to uh, run away. They had an order. We didn't know, but the Germans they told us all of a sudden that we were marching, we hear a, a whistle, you know. And everybody from, from the uh, the guards started to go forwards. And we are marching. We didn't know what happened. We knew that they called them, you know, the SS. But we don't know what happened. All of a sudden, one SS comes back. He says uh, in German, that we going to eat now and uh, everybody sit down in that forest. And if anybody stands up and runs away, the whole group is going to be killed. So we sat down by the trees. And all of a sudden, we don't see nobody. We see, we sit, you know, we didn't have a watch but accordingly we see it's getting already uh, dark. Nobody comes back. All of a sudden, we see Germans coming towards us with every...no belts, no hats, you know, everything off. And they said uh, what are you sitting here. He says, you go to the villagers uh, to the farmers, they'll give you food and clothes and everything. You are already liber...free.
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