Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Harry Praw - June 30, 1982

Mm-hm.

But that was really the best place of all. That was a taste of honey. They woke us up--first of all we got to camp, they first thing we had to do was take a shower. And we already heard what showers meant, because as I said before we always met new people from different camps but we didn't know until we got to Buchenwald and even to this place Dora that they brought in transports from all different directions. And then people started talking what happened here, what they heard there, they heard here, what the saw here, one escaped from there, what happened, what kind of showers they got. So, everybody--but still there was nothing you could do, you do or you don't. You're doomed if you do, you're doomed if you don't. So we just went and took a shower the first thing, it was in the wintertime. The first thing they did--and everything there was for kicks. The showers would shoot out was cold water. Always cold showers even if it was thirty below zero outside. So we took a shower, they gave us new clothes--prison, prison clothes.

Mm-hm.

And we had numbers on the, only uniforms. There was no names, strictly by number. If they wanted to call a prisoner, they called him by number. And they settled us in the blocks--we called the blocks--in the barracks. At four o'clock in the morning--we had to get up around four o'clock in the morning. They lined us up outside. Most--a lot of the time they gave us a bowl of water. They called it soup--cabbage soup but you couldn't find the cabbage. And they took us to uh, to the factory. The factory was located in the hills and it's funny that what we heard later in the last couple of years that this was one place that no bomb could penetrate that mountain.

Is that right?

Yeah, they used to produce the V1 and V2 rockets, I don't know, you probably heard about it.

Mm-hm.

And for the rocket if you--I always wa...f you watch a war movie you always see the rockets flying over London. And this is what we had to produce--inexperienced, inexperienced. The first night they put me to a metal bench--it was all machine shops, tool shops.

Uh-huh.