Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Larry Wayne - 2005

Liberation II

When you wound up in Buchenwald and you were lying in a bunk I would guess, waiting...

Yeah, right. I wasn't doing any work anymore at that time, there was no work to be done.

So was--did somebody suddenly open the door and there was American soldier, is that what happened?

No, no I just told you, the, the day before...

You were in the sewer.

...I, I hid myself in the sewers and I didn't know. I would have died in there. Being dead wasn't that awful. When I was in the camp in, in, in Janina in the coal mines I wanted to hurt myself so maybe that uh, that I won't have to work anymore because it was such horrible work in the coal mine. But I never got much opportunity to do it. And then if you did hurt yourself and you got in the hospital, they didn't let you live too long anyway, so it's a smart thing that I didn't do anything. But death used to be a friendly, it wasn't a, it wasn't an enemy. You see these people die and it was like liberation.

Did people throw themselves on the wires?

Yes, I saw that too.

You saw that. Where?

I saw that in Janina. And one guy, one guy threw himse...the wire, and the wires were not loaded up enough, so they saved him, and they shot him two days later because he tried to escape.


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