Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Jack Gun - August 12, 1999

Conditions in DP Camp

What was it like in the DP camp?

In the D...DP camp was very good. Uh, we got good food. We used to get once a month certain packages from United States with uh, uh, that eagle brand milk. I'll never forget that sweet uh, condensed milk. Taste like candy. We used to get uh, chocolate bars every so often. And uh, we lived like in army barracks. And uh, controlled by the--we were in a American zone. So there were three different zones, I believe, that time.

Now your brother was, what, nineteen?

1945? No, he was already twenty-one.

Twenty-one. Did he go out? Did he go into Linz?

I'm sure he did, yes. And he worked uh, in fact, he worked, I think, outside the, the DP camp, he worked for Simon Wiesenthal had a, had an office then in Linz. And he worked for Simon Wiesenthal. And uh, I went to school, that's the first, that's the first time I got any kind of schooling. Never went to school before.

You're eleven now.

Eleven, over eleven. Eleven and a half. And this is where I first, and it was a, it was a make uh, how should I say, it wasn't a regular public school. It was a school only for the DP kids. So there were--the teachers were not qualified teachers. Uh, in other words, if there was a man that used to be a bookkeeper, he used to teach arithmetic. Uh, my sister-in-law knew a little bit of Hebrew, so she became a Hebrew teacher. A man that was an engineer was teaching science...


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