Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Emerich Grinbaum - October 3, 2000 & January 8, 2001

Deutsch

Slap, yeah.

...slap. That's all. It's not bad. So then, the, the German was satisfied. Okay? So then later on, oh, he's Jewish, why, what his people are saying, what, what does he think you know, he's the same like we are you know, something. And they explain to him, listen, "You, you, you stupid. If not him, we will be beaten up much more severely." Something like that, you know. So this type of, of, of behavior it happened. But he was very smart and very nice. So that he, he, he saved her from beaten up many you know, when, when he saw that. So he give him you know, because he was an, an officer that something.

So there was nothing afterwards that...

No, no, no. We, people are, finally understood him, so this guys--on the contrary, the Freidman guy was very, not very good. They didn't, they, they hated him. But they understood Deutsch. And Deutsch tried to cheer us up, when afterward. And especially then, the best place was the, the bathroom, you know. The bathroom we're sitting ten or twenty, sitting on ben...all the jokes, he tried to, to cheer us up. And he was a sense of humor.

So the other guy well um, Meyer or um, someone like Meyer would have been the equivalent of Kasztner.

No, no. No, no. I'm talking Friedman, Fried...Fried...

Yeah, but...

Meyer was the Lagerführer for the SS.

Lagerführer. Friedman was a Kapo.

I don't know.

He was a Kapo?

He wasn't a Kapo. He was the Arbeit, Arbeit, uh, something Ar...with Arbeit, Arbeit ???. He, eh decided whom to send. He really didn't decide it, he gave advice but they, they followed his advice. So he was--and he was, he was sometimes uh, relatively rude, you know. He, he rude and he even beat. But that, that guy, I don't know what happened with him because he stayed there and, and we left in April, so I don't know. But going ahead, if you want I'll tell you. Uh, then uh, with the--I--we heard that part of people, not everybody from the A...Allach took--were taken to the train, so some people left who knew Busch, the, the uh, guy, the officer. And when the American came, liberated Allach, group of Jews went up and they told, they went up the com...American commander and they took, this guy was very nice to us. They took most of the officers SS prisoners. I mean, they, they give him a piece of paper and they let him go.

No kidding.

Yeah that, they--they told me later on I met people during the, they let him go. And he deserved that.

It's like a Schindler story.

Yeah, he deserved that. I don't know who he was, he deserved that. He was from Munich, somewhere close and he deserved that. He, he salvaged us you know, because there was no typhoid. He salvaged--he changed the attitude of the Kapos at that time. So you know, he could, he, whatever...ever. So that was an exception. Maybe so...


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