Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Harry Praw - June 30, 1982

Were those people who didn't work or they were just chosen...

You couldn't, you couldn't ask no questions. But if you didn't see nobody hanging there you thought something was wrong so you already you lived with it. So you thought maybe they saw from that. So at anytime when a German got drunk, whether it was two o'clock in the morning or one o'clock in the morning or four o'clock in the morning or during the day they sounded an alarm. When they sounded the--you heard the alarm you had to grab whatever you could and run outside--roll call. Most of them were drunk, and to them they got drunk so the first thing they did is kill a few Jews. That was their daily routine. At this particular place we didn't have too much bread--very seldom we got a piece of bread. Our main meal was four o'clock in the morning.

Four in the morning?

Four o'clock in the morning before we went to work they gave us the main uh, the main course. That was the cabbage soup but we couldn't ever find the cabbage. Somehow, I don't know, but we are here to tell the story. How we did it, I doubt if any--many of us could figure that out how we managed to survive.

What do you think the reasons were that you survived?

I don't know. And then we worked there 'til--for about four months. And the end of Janu...the end of March the Russians came nearer and nearer, they had to evacuate that place. This was already in Germany. We already heard the bombardments pretty, pretty close from all the side, day and night. So, if we worked day shift and the bombardments were always at night so we couldn't, couldn't get out of the factories so we had to work. So the guys were lucky they stayed in the barracks and that they didn't have to go to work.