Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982

At this point did you have any thought about your family, your sister...

I knew that I haven't got nobody. I could see, I could see and watch in the middle of the day when, when they, when they took people out to kill 'em, that they had trucks with extension, you know, with extension to make it higher. And they had piled up people--like a have piled up people, you got to be stupid not to know what--where they take those people, see. The same thing they did in Zduńska Wola, they took people--all the people who couldn't walk to the cemetery and throw them on, on the trucks. Somebody came to me and said, "They throwed up your grandfather and grandmother." They were married sixty years. They were probably eighty-eight years when the Germans killed them both, or eighty--eighty-three, I guess, some--I knew they were over eighty. So uh, by the end of April, one day in the morning, they said that we should go to the ma...you know, the, the uh, the storage areas from the camp. And everybo...

The warehouse?

The, the storage area, you know, I don't know what the hell you--in, in Dora, that was exactly April, April the 1st, 19...1945. And everybody should take himself whatever he can, a, a blanket and pants. Whatever you can grab, take it with you.

Oh.

And after that we should stay in line and everybody's going to get at least, where they have a bread--everybody's going to get a whole leaf of bread.

Loaf.

Whole loaf of bread.

Yeah.

So we, we stand there. Thousands of people, it was just un...undis...all together there was no more going to work. When we went out for the last time we saw the SS was burning their propanes and all those things. They couldn't burn it inside in the, in, in the tunnels because there was no air. So they, they burned it from the outside. Every few yards or every few was standing an SS man and, and, and building a bonfire with, for the propanes and papers. We saw it with our eyes, understand that that the end of it. So when it got dark, the bombardment stopped. They, they, they, they uh, told us to stand up in hundreds. And they start to march us out to the, to the railroad tracks. It was in Ap...the beginning of April 1945.