Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Benjamin Fisk - November 8, 1982

Now you left Bismarckhütte after five months and you went then to Auschwitz?

Yeah.

Okay, how did you travel from Bismarckhütte to Auschwitz?

By bus--by truck.

By truck, okay. How close was that?

Uh couldn't been too far. It was maybe fifteen miles, twenty miles. Who remembers? It was so long ago--too long. Maybe fifteen twenty kilometers or something.

Wife: He went to Buna.

Yeah, I went to Buna-Monowitz. Monowitz, yeah, Monowitz.

When you got there what--can you describe for me what that was like? What did that look like? What did...

Well, they--before you went in it was "Arbeit Macht Frei." "Work Makes You Free," it's in Auschwitz, you know, part of Auschwitz they had camps all around and it was a part of Auschwitz. "Arbeit Macht Frei," in the front--big sign on top. You probably seen them in movies and stuff when they showed Auschwitz, you know?

Wife: ???

Hmm?

Wife: ???

What you talking? I can't. Forget it. Well, when I came in I was the strong one already. The Germans weighed me. I weighed thirty-five kilos--seventy pounds. I was strong enough, you know, enough I could take the ??? I was strong enough I helped to carry a lot of people out of the truck, you know. When they were weighing them there were some of them that were ??? already, you know, you didn't see them anymore. Many they were sent to the hospital and that's where I got liberated. In the same hospital--the labor camp--probably three months, two months maybe--I don't know exactly how long. It wasn't too bad because there were because people from my home town. Some of them a piece of bread--worked in the kitchen--bring a little soup, you know, it wasn't too bad plus I didn't have to work, I was in the hospital, you know. The Russians were getting closer already so they were cautious, you know. They evacuated the camp, you know, and we stayed behind for two weeks. We wait in the snow, wintertime, you know, and outside--was January, you know. No food nothing.

So you got to Auschwitz toward, toward the end of the war really--two, three months?

Yeah. They left the people, you know, they left us behind. And they had some guards, too, but the Russians were bombing, you know, they got--the guards took off the last three, four, five days. There was nobody there but we didn't know, you know, we were still afraid to walk out and some of us did but I couldn't go because I was sick, you know.