Joseph Gringlas - January 14 & 22, March 18, 1993
Importance of Continuing to Work
Were you worried about that?
Yeah. If--I knew, you knew it, if you don't, you're not able to wor...stay on your feet and do something, you'll be finished. So I was--my brother was still, still okay. I don't, I don't know how. Because I told you he was in Ostrowiec still. At the time was in Blizyn, he was in Ostrowiec and he could, he, he was, he was, had money and he had--buy some food. But I, sudden...to Blizyn and Birkenau and then Nordhausen and then going through two, three weeks on the train, that I think was, I, I was almost finished. So they didn't want me to go to, they wou...let me stay in Nordhaus...in Dora. Not anymore to the, going to the working. Because I was, I wasn't able to do work anymore. So I thought I'm ve...they didn't want to kill me either because they didn't, probably at the time they--any eh, I mean, using ammunition was a bit too, too much for them, they needed it. So they, they didn't kill because to, to--I'm not going to survive anyway. So.
Did they give you food?
Yeah, they give us a little food, whatever ration they gave you, yeah.
But even, even...
Yeah, yeah, they still give you.
...when you...
Mm-hm. Yeah.
...were sick they gave you.
Yeah, I was not working and still got, got that ration. But I didn't, they knew that I, I going to fall anyway whether they're going to use me for the work. I wasn't able to. So that was a few, after a few weeks like that in, I was laying, laying, laying and so--and then Americans came with the planes, bombarding Nordhausen. One--I'll never forget that. And even in the barr...the, the Americans didn't know there was, they didn't know this was barracks like con...camps. They thought it looked like soldier--building, big buildings. So there was evening, about four or five o'clock in the evening they throw the bombs and, and we--I and my brother run thr...I was in higher floor. It went through. It was not--steps you couldn't walk through because the bomb came through, it, it slide through like a, because the steps was bricks, falling like, falling on top of the brick--of the steps. You slide through and we said we're finished, you know. And we walked out from the building and the whole kitchen corner was a kitchen building, the whole kitchen was burned to death. And lot of the guys were hit. So we went out and we came back, we're going back to whatever's left, we saw it was like burnt corpse, corpse, human be...the, the, from the camps cause the American hit the, the bomb. They hit that barrack, that building.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn