Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Edith Roth - March 28, 1982

Differences in Guards Between Camps

Then he says uh, oh he says and oh, that no, then he started to laugh and left, left the table, just left the table. But every time he was drunk, we saw him, he kept on saying, you know he-then we found out he was working at the crematorium and he was our, he was our boss, he was in our camp, in our camp where we working, they sent him to this job from Auschwitz. I remember him. I remember him so well.

Well...

He was a drunken bastard, who didn't even know, he must have been a...

Did you notice a change in the kinds of guards from one camp to the other?

Yes, there were a lot of Wehrmacht guards.

At Bruntál?

Yeah, we, we did, who were, we had, who were quiet about it, but we had about, we had about two--three Wehrmacht guards, who, who, when they lined us up in the morning to go to work, I was always late, running after the line because I didn't want to be going in line to work. My sister had one problem, so this Wehrmacht guard once told me in my ear, we're standing by the gate and he says "go slow," you know, "go slow," "don't turn," we, we had two or three Wehrmacht guards who had to do uh, what they were told to do, they were soldiers.

Did they ever help you out, besides that one?

We had a occasion where they helped us out where they, they, they smuggled in food for us. One occasion, it must have been a New Year's night or some kind of a holiday where they really, where they brought us, about eleven o'clock or midnight, we got food without the SS knowing it, this one time it happened, and we couldn't-that's when we found out they were Wehrmacht and not SS.


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