Jack Weinberger - February 6, 1983
Kapos
Um, were there Kapos in the camps?
Oh Kapos were, oh yes, every camp had Kapos, every, Kapos were actually inside people, you know.
Were they mainly German or?
No, inside you could have been German, you could have been uh, Jewish but at least they had a better chance of survival. Of course they had more food and that's it. Everything was, main thing was just food, food.
Do you remember what you were thinking while this was happening, I mean did you...
Well, we were thinking, all the time thinking about home. Thinking about Shabbos, family together, mother, where is mother, how is she doing uh, food all the time, main thing was food, food, food. We were not--comes to a time that people are not afraid to die. We, we were not scared already by the dead because dead was around us, every minute. I never saw him there, five minutes later it could've been me. I mean, maybe another three, four days and I, I had no food. How, how am I gonna survive? This was ??? Uh, I remember another person, he died in Ebensee. The same day they were putting us in the trucks to take us in the sanatorium, the Americans.
Yeah.
People already had very little uh, pile uh, little things, bags, I'm ready to go home. But when I came back from this sanatorium they brought us back to Ebensee, those people died, after the war. They went into the village, they ate to much greasy food, you know, which we didn't have it. Their stomach just couldn't take it. I remember one, one week uh, it was in, Sechsundzwanzig, block twenty-six. Uh, I don't know if you know if you ever saw a military barrack here in the United States. Have you ever seen a military uh, you ever see it? Were you ever in a camp here?
Yeah.
You know what a military barrack looks like?
Yeah.
It's exactly alike, same thing. We were put in there um, I would say at least 500 people in one, one barrack. I mean no beds. I'm not talking about beds. We were sitting on each other, sitting like this. The windows were taken off, it was February of 1945. That must have been the coldest winter in history, so cold. The windows were on purposefully taken off, no clothes on. Just, people used to die, you know what I mean, that's all. That's all we would have. We had one man there, he was crying. His face was so swollen up from hunger, from starvation. Sometimes a person swells up. His eyes were covered up and swollen up. And uh, there was a doctor, a doctor there which he was a doctor ???, you know, hometown, you know. They were from the same city, he said, "Doctor Fishbien, I know I'm going to die, cut me open, do something maybe, maybe I'll survive." Look, I never ran across, I remember seeing; I never saw something like that in my life. I don't know why I want to starve. So he just took uh, something that he found, a sharp object, a needle or something. He just cut him here and the water just start pouring out from him. I, I don't remember seeing that, those things. I remember they used to cut through the dead people, eat it like horses, like, like, like animals biting off a piece of meat and eating, from, from the human beings like cannibals. Now they are a nation among nations.
Do you...
Like today the headlines in the Detroit News the first time in history it happened. These people, you know, you see with their friends, they're making a big headline out of it. He didn't make such a big fuss uh, when that happened in Germany. Just picked up innocent children and women he just killed them for no reason at all, for no reason at all.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn