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Bernard Klein & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984

Were these SS men, or were they Wehrmacht?

E     This was mostly SS.

B     I don't know, SS, yeah, young soldiers.

E     And I think to describe to you what happened after when everybody started to run toward the warehouses and tried to, to, to get the food which they didn't see.

B     Chaos broke out, of course, first. I can't even say that it was jubilation we were being freed, because I don't think we could...

E     Comprehend it even.

B     That what is happening. All we knew is that the Germans left and, ah, we broke into the warehouse and, ah, I don't know if you mentioned the incident where you almost got killed, ah, trying... he was one of the... heroes [laughing].

E     Heroes, running into the warehouse trying to bring out some food and everybody started grabbing from him and he wound up on the bottom of a big piling. He could have been, he could have suffocated from the mass of people lying on top of him, trying to grab the food that he grabbed. I ended up with empty pockets and empty hands because people were so hungry for the food... And as I mentioned before, what, what they did with people is completely dehumanizing them, dehumanizing them by all this.

B     Well... To weakness also. People had no energy to do anything. The sanitary conditions broke down completely. And that's what make us decide to...

E     To leave immediately.

B     About two or three days later after the... we felt that the Germans are totally gone. That we are going to leave. We, I think my father was instrumental in organizing about 10 or 11 of us into a small group and say, "Let's go." We had no idea, no maps, no compass. We had no idea where we are. But for some reason we just, I don't know how, we figured out the direction that we should going.

E     And we did.

B     Actually, we mentioned to you, Bernie mentioned to you, the, or, or the encounter with first Russians. But eventually, eh, in Poland we run into or came across a Czechoslovakian army.

E     That was close to the Czechoslovakian border.