Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Bert Dan - November 17, 1982

And uh, naturally the--my friends--they all left me--they wanted to know what happened and that, it was unbelievable, you know, and they're like--five minutes later they came outside and they said that all the doctors and lawyers stay outside. And they told that uh, they need doctors for something and all the doctors and, they went, they went one group and they were standing on the side and uh, they said, "Is there anybody who only has a couple of years, years, you know, in medical school," and there were another few guys who went over, "Yes, we are medical students." So they said, "Okay, you all come with us." And as I told you, they filled a tremendous big yard and we had no facilities, no toilets, stuff like that. And they went out back in the fields and that's where they, they had to go. And they took all those doctors and lawyers and the students and everybody and put their hand--they had to pick up that shit--excuse me for the expression--and bring it over like this here and throw it in the toilet. This was a kind of a treatment they started us out with in 1942. It was incredible, really, you know, it, it is, when I think back about it my blood is actually boiling. It is incredible. And then the next day they invited us up in groups of two hundred each and they sent us to different small towns and they put us in, in a school building and there was one commanding officer, like he was probably a lieutenant, or a second lieutenant, something like that, and he was in charge of these two hundred people and he had about uh, uh, probably twenty-five, thirty soldiers and we were next in the army and they are the ones who told us what to do. And they took us out and we had to make all kinds of crazy exercises like--and we were still new at it, you know and when everybody--when we, we left home we took along food and we took along our uh, belongings or whatever we had and everything was either in a, in a, a, in a back pack, you know, or a suitcase or whatever you had.