Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nathan Weiselman - January 1, 1985

So, before we went to work, we... Yeah. Before we went to work it was about a half an hour in advance, in the morning. ??? the, the bells start to ring. And everybody came out from the barracks, from when the bells were ringing. And I was six, you know, Gestapo, and I was in the middle and they read the verdict. ??? "You'll be shot to death for violating the rules of the camp." ??? So, they, they, it was a whole str...like, a whole street. You know, it was probably about fifteen or eighteen barracks in one side and the others. You know, it used to be home of the villagers who, the villagers used to live, but they were all bumped out. And they read the sentence. When they read the sentence, it came out uh, a German instructor through the wires and handed them a petition, to the Germans. I really didn't know but they did explain the, the petition, that this, all the inmates in this and this barrack and that and that number signed, if they would change the verdict in, to my sentence, to leave me alive. They had an idea that they would organize their own guards from the inmates in twenty-four hours they'll be watched at the barbed, at the barbed wire, that nobody goes out unauthor...unauthorized, who wasn't authorized to go out from the, from the, from the Germans. So, from one barrack and another barrack and every barrack, they handed the same petition. And everyone signed. Then they did go on about a half hour through and through ??? then they, then they read the same sentence, supposed to read the same sentence, that I'm to be taken back to be shot, they said, changed it, changed the conviction that they're going to leave me alive, going back to the barrack for the only reason that everybody signed and all the instructors. So if it's any time happen, any, another time, a case like this, it would be the last case, it would never be let to live. And I was very lucky.

I guess you were.

Yeah.

Uh, this uh, uh, uh, incident uh, speaks very highly of the morality of the uh, inmates.

Yeah.

Uh, was it, were they, were the Jewish prisoners always uh, moral? Were they always uh, ethical people?

I would say in the time when I was in the concentration camp, they were very, very ethical people. I tell you why: the condition is, it make people changing. Because we still were fresh from the home, we were not so physical and morally exhausted.