Louis Kaye - May 9, 1983
Concentration Camps
How long were you there at that camp?
Where?
At this camp.
At this camp, I was about two years. I was... Before '42 I come in, I was about a year and a half, two years, and then they liquidated camp, they took me to another camp to Cz?stochowa. Then I was over there about three or four months and they took me to Buchenwald. And I was in Buchenwald a few months, they took me to Dora-Nordhausen, out. I was liberated April 11, 1945 by General Eisenhower. When I was going to Washington, was going forty years later when I was liberated, thirty-eight years, I was liberated '45, '83, thirty-eight years later I was liberated.
Why did they keep transferring you from camp to camp?
I don't know. Number one, I... They transferred me from one camp to the other because the Russians coming closer. They have to pull the, out the people to Germany, they need people in Germany to work for the ammunition and everything. Germany was working V-Eins, V-Zwei, Nordhausen uh, in the top of the forest and it works underground, like a tunnel. And the funny, the funny thing is people outside they used to come to work in Nordhausen, it was marked outside ??? and the people come in working to cook in the kitchen, later on I was working there in the kitchen. They could not talk to us at all. When the American come in in '45 I hear the American asking the German, do you know that here was a concentration camp. No, we don't know what's the... Was smelling like a slau... like a slaughterhouse, stinking from the people from the crematorium and everything. They don't know nothing. And all together I was over there maybe a little village in Dora.
And you say some of them would come from the outside and work inside.
Yeah. They could not talk to us.
They saw you there, right.
Yeah, a woman, yeah. I worked with them. They had a sign, was right, remember, there was a sign ??? They're not supposed to talk to us, like standing. I was working that time in the kitchen, and they could not talk to us at all. And the same people that was going home back and forth, and when they asked him what's over there. They don't know, they didn't know it was a concentration camp.
They knew who you were though.
Yeah. They... The people knew, they don't, they don't want to say nothing. They, they say it never was a concentration camp.
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