Fred Ferber - September 11 & 25, 2001
Conditions in Mauthausen II
Mauthausen, that's a, that's a...
That's the same camp I was in, yes.
But they could have sent him to Auschwitz or...
They could have sent him, they sent him to Mauthausen, a lot of Polish prisoners were in Mauthausen. Once again, Mauthausen was easy to die, to die. You just drink the water over there and eh, you get the runs and, and it's all over.
When you were in Mauthausen did you notice that there was a number of homosexuals that were sent there or was that not...
No, at that time I did not notice it. I noticed it in eh, as I explained it, I think I stated to you before eh, in Gusen II, I noticed it because...
Pink triangle?
I don't know if they were pink triangle, but they were either political I think, but they all, most of them were eh, eh...
Gay.
That's correct.
Um, while we're on Mauthausen, I want to come back and talk about Miriam and how she came into your life and all that. You said, I think it was at Gusen actually, you said that
...you were carrying the dead, piling the dead up.
That, that was a way of life, it was nothing special for me, for anyone else. Eh, eh, we had to carry, sometime you see a whole pile and you see it in pictures. Sometime you have to move the pile of dead. Sometimes you put them on a truck. It wasn't always me that was doing the work. When they caught me, I was doing the work. You know, it was, it wasn't a regular Kommando that was doing this in, in Gusen II. E...e...ev...depending where, in what, in what, in front of what barrack they were they took some people, they took half an hour, an hour you threw them out, you put them on a truck wherever and, eh...
So it was ad hoc, it wasn't something you had to do every day.
No, no not everyday. But everyday if, if you, if you, if you go from one place to another in the camp and you have to jump over, over a corp...a corpse, there was, it was, it was a way of life, it was nothing special about it.
And then the other thing I had a question about was, also Mauthausen, the, the pictures that, that the German soldier gave back to you...
Yeah, yes.
You still have those pictures.
I still have those pictures. These pictures I carried in my eh, in my eh, in my shirt sleeves. I forever had my shirt sleeves up and, and in the sleeves I always had those uh, uh, five or six pictures uh, carried forever. It was uh, very dear to me.
When you come to the campus will you bring them so we can scan them into the, into the website?
I--we corrected them ever since. I'll, I'll see if I have any with--here. I, I'm sure I can find right over here some of them, uh.
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