Nathan Nothman - November 30, 1982
Conditions of Ghettos and Concentration Camps
What type of food rations did you have in Kraków-Płaszów, how, in, in...
In the ghetto?
...in Płaszów, in the ghetto.
Uh, completely nothing. They didn't give you--they give you a, a ration, I forgot it. A Jell-o, ano...a marmalade. What they gave you, nothing. You couldn't live nothing. You couldn't even, you couldn't even survive from it. Absolutely nothing. There was nothing to eat. You couldn't survive on that. Oh the, I mean the bread was a bread, but it was nothing. It was completely clay.
After you left there and went to Gross-Rosen, what were the conditions like there, comparing to Płaszów ? Was it worse or was it...
Much worse. There was nothing. There was a nothing. They, they just hit us and beat us and kick us and gas chamber us, and there was, I mean, so many friends of our broken ribs. But they didn't, they didn't even mention it, because if you mentioned to it, you wouldn't survive. So something happened that ??? organization ??? came with a truck and took us to, to ??? and we worked there. And then the Nazi--Sturmbannführer, I forgot his name, young, young person. Vicious, vicious, ah, so vicious it's unbelievable. It's, it's unbelievable to describe. They, they kill--they shot and then they, they done everything--to us--to them we are not human, we are animals. If--a animal I will treat much better.
Was there any kind of resistance that you knew of in the ghetto or in...
In our ghetto, there was no, I don't know. There was no resistance. People hide, but there was no resistance.
Mm-hm.
There was--we could have had resistance but there's not enough place. There not place, like in a big ghetto when you got a half a million or 40 million. We have only in ghetto 50, 60 thousand and they--there was a two mile by three mile and there was ??? that was the biggest mistake.
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