Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map
• Video

Alexander Karp - September 14, 1995

And he came to Dachau?.

Came to Dachau. And Dachau, it was a total chaos. People were coming in, people were transported out. Other people were dying, because there was no crematorium. There was some built crematoriums in Dachau, but it was never used. They, they managed to exterminate and to kill plenty of people without the crematory in Dachau. And we were there until about, uh, towards the last days of April, and, uh, that time by train, we were transported--didn't know exactly where to, which way, but we found out that we are close to the Austrian boarder and, uh, we were embarked over there, [pause] were we in, it was little town by the name of Mittenwald. There was a river going through that area, and we were kept, not only our transport--there were many other people, obviously. They came from different camps, and they were just concentrated and assembled along the river front on both sides. In April, early part of May, it was still pretty cold, snowing, you know, and again from the people who came there alive, you know, more than half, if not three quarter of the people who were there, died. And from malnutrition, there was absolutely no food. I guess maybe we were eating, uh, grass and what, whatever came to our way, because we weren't in an area where it was residential. There were no people. It was simply bare field, and each morning, as we looked around, you know, the only thing you could see is you were covered with, uh, blankets. If somebody had a blanket, and the snow covered you up, and as we were getting up and shaking the snow off our blankets or clothes or bodies, you know, and we saw the faces who were lying there motionless, we knew that they were never going to get up. An awful lot of people from the ones who went there, died right there on that, on that riverbank.