Ohrdruf, the last Camp, was a very vivious Camp. It was, I believe when you look back in
history you can tell that the war, the Germans, must suffered a lot because we were working in
an area where there, there were mountainious area where there were having V1 and V2´s
manufactures or whatever it was.
I recall one time that we brought home a tremendous amount of people without arms or legs
because of explosions- they were exploding the mountains around Ohrdruf, in the vicinity of
Ohrdruf, and they gave no warning, and the people were working down there, that is the
rocks were thrown all over the place in order to make bunkers, or whatever they were
manufacturing down.
How long have you been in this Camp?
In Ohrdruf we were until the liberation, about six, seven months.
Again, I was very fortunate. I was working in the potato kommando.We were delivering
potatoes to all the camps around in the area and I guess we were, really we were fortunate. A
very old Wehrmacht man who used to be in the Wehrmacht, he must have been seventy years
old , and he used to be an SS man, rather the opposite, he was a Wehrmacht man and when
they put him to Camp to be our leader,our Inspector, guard Inspector or guard, they put him
into the uniform of the SS. He always complained to us that he wanted to remain in the
Wehrmacht, and they gave him this job. He was very cooperative because after work, i t was ten
of us in this kommando plus a Russian fellow, Sashka, who was the leader of this ten, and the
German let us, every day when we went into Camp ,he went into Camp with us and gave each
one of us a potato to take with us. This was, I guess, an extra nourishment for us. In this, an
incident that I encountered in this particular Camp was that we were all loading a truck, and
there was always the older German, he was an Obersturmführer , and then there was a guard.
And the guard at that time was was already from Ukraina, because you could detect his German
with a type of Rusian accent. And we were all loading a truck, and I was the last one of the
truck, I was trying to clean it up to get every potato off, and I guess, I was too late, and as I
jumped down the truck, I was hit by this Ukrainin fellow and I fell to the ground, unconscious.
They took me back to, we had a dispensary in the Camp, in Ohrdruf, and of course everybody
said if you get into the dispensary you never get out, because the food was cut in half, and you
have to sleep with open windows, and it was very, very bad. And of course, it was very painful.
Fortunately, a few days later they cut it. I developed a cyst from this kick from the German, and
they opened it with a knife- no anästhetic or whatever, and luckily iI did survive. But the
unfortunate thing, I had a very tough time in getting back to this potato kommando, which I
would say was almost the best one in camp. And I had to start working again, as I started first,
with the kommando that was going to the mountains and explosives and so on. And one day,
this old German was going through with the kommando to the Camp, and he saw me with the
other kommando coming into Camp, and he stopped one of our leaders, and he said, *How
come that Leo is not back with us, because he was sick, but after he was sick, why didnt he
come back?* Anyway, he made some requisition that I should come back to work, because I
believe I was doing my utmost to survive and be a good worker, and he took me back, and I
believe this was around already March of 45, a few weeks before the liberation. I honestly
believe if I would have kept on on a few more weeks down there, I would have never survived.
This gave me another opportunity of getting back my strength, and around the latter part of
April of 1945, we already heard some gunshots from our camps and they were trying to
liquidate the Camp. They evacuated the Camp, and we marched I don´t know where, I don´t
know how long we marched, but I know that four of us marched all night and by very early the
same morning, all four of us ran away. We left all our belongings behind us because it was very
hard to, because we had our blanket, we had our wooden shoes, we left the shoes because we
wanted to run faster and not make any noise, so all four of us ran into the woods, we wanted
to..
Where was this?
This was in Ohrdruf.
No, I mean, where did you run? Do you remeber the place?
Yes. We ran to the woods, going back the same direction we came from, because we did not
know any area whatsoever. So we went back, it took us almost the day to go back in the same
direction we came from, trough the woods, and we came almost to the Camp, and when we
came to the Camp, we heared a lot of shooting in the Camp. We were scared to go into the
Camp and we knew the area that when we went to work in Ohrdruf, there was an air raid
shelter for German- there was a German military area, actually- and all four of us went into the
bubker, and we wound up staying down there for four days and four nights without any food or
anything, until one morning we saw a army. We did not know what army it was, Americans or
Russians or whoever it was, we saw an army occupying the lower part of the area that we were
hiding out, and we were scared that somebody is going to shoot us. The fourth day, when they
came in and they settled down, we took our clothes-we had the stripped clothes like everybody
else had- and we started waving, and finally one of the soldiers came up to us, he had a rifle and
he started talking to us. When we came down the mountain from the air raid shelter, we were
confronted by soldiers. We did not know who they are, but luckily there was an officer who was
of Czech descent and he spoke some Polish, ans he asked us some questions and we told him
that we are from the Camp below. And we took them to the Camp, and this is the first time that
I saw the biggest massacre that I ever saw in my life. This was the shooting, when we were
trying to go in four days before, all the shooting was the people who remained in the dispensary.
There were also in this Camp two airman, Amreicans, from the Air Force, who were shot down
several weeks before, and they were within the same pile of dead ones . When we showed this
to the Americans, the pile of people that we were in this Camp, they hardly believed. And, of
course, the war was still going on, so we got scared that something will happen in here- the
Germans were still fighting-, so the Americans told us, or anyway, going back to that, we
almost died after the Americans came in, because when we talked to this. Of the food, because
they gave us this K Rations and wine in all kind, in all forms. We got so sick. It didnt take 30
minutes after we got through eating we got such diarrhoea that we thought we´re going to
collapse. In fact, the soldiers took us to a hospital which was...like a GI American set up
hospital primitively, and they gave us some aid, and we thought, we´ll never survive. But the
next day, the war was still going on. I recall, that Bombers came down, and strafed the area of
Ohrdruf, almost around the area where the Camp was, so we started running, and the Americans
told us to run towards, Gotha, which was about 3 km from Ohrdruf, and there was a lot of dead
bodies on the, soldiers, all over, it was like a battlefield, and we were running like crazy all the
way to Gotha.
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