Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Harry Praw - June 30, 1982

Uh-huh.

So everybody had to jump in. Head--with your head all the way down. If they--and there was all--there was the SS guards all around that tank. If you didn't jump push your head all the way down, they pushed you down and that water must have been a hundred degree heat.

Hm.

And the same thing, who made it, made it and who wasn't fortunate just disappeared right then and there. They--if you couldn't walk, you couldn't work, you couldn't, you couldn't live with them. That was their motto.

Mm-hm. Did you work at the time you were there?

No, we were only about a week or two weeks in Buchenwald. And again, the same story. They rounded up certain camps, certain, certain barracks, assembled us again in, in, in the place. And again, you loaded up on cattle cars. Of course, you couldn't ask where you're going. And the same thing all over again, "You're going to fed and you're going to go to work, you're going to be in a better place, more comfortable." And we must've been in the freight trains for about a week. And the distance wasn't so far, it must've been fifty, a hundred kilometers or maybe two hundred kilometers which is a hundred miles--a hundred forty miles.

Why'd it take so long?

And some how you were going back and forth for, for a week because the bombs were falling all over so they kept you going back and forth. Until they brought us into a camp which was called Dora--like a name, D-O-R-A. It is now occupied by the Russians. It's in the Russian occupied sector of Germany. And that was already--that was a real camp. They must've had about quarter of a million prisoners of all nationalities, there all nationalities. That was actually the real taste of the camp that I got. At Buchenwald we were only two weeks, or a week. And guards--they had guards and guard booths every twenty, thirty feet you had a guard, running around with the dogs, barbed wires, electric fences. Not that we were there to go out but the fences were electric--electrocuted everything. Nobody would even dare to think of escaping or getting out of there.