Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982

SS Cruelty

The meantime during the day what I found out after the war, I don't know if that, if that story fits in here, but anyhow, we'll try, try to put it into pul...to tell what the Germans--how the Germans acted with things. That either the whole Jewish Congress or whoever got in touch for doing something to get in packages to the, to the, to, to, to the concentration camps. And somehow some of those packages arrived to Dora. Now during that day we were standing there in that chaos, they put out tables, and put those packages up for grab. We didn't--they received the packages, but they never, they never give 'em to anybody. But at that time they put out cookies, and something, whatever it was over there, and people got violent. As soon as they start to run to grab those package they started to make order, but the German to make order is to put a few SS men on the roof and start to go, to go over the, the ground with, with machine guns and kill a few thousand people. That, that's the way it was--the last minute was like that.

In other words, people were running to get something to eat...

Yeah.

...and they...

Yeah, so they shot them.

How did you manage to survive that?

I don't know, I--that's what I'm trying to tell you. I, I, I can't--I didn't do nothing to it.

Did you run to get some food?

No, I didn't run. That--I was not that type to, to push myself to any place, I just...

Well, you must have been hungry thinking there was some food there.

I, I--at that time we had a leaf--a, a, a loaf of bread, everybody. But there was cookies and things which we haven't seen--sugar we haven't seen for years.


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