Tag #133037 - Interview #90175 (Pavel Werner)

I remember that when Auschwitz was being liquidated, our Rapportführer [German for report leader] said that we shouldn’t go on the death march, that we were really still children, that we should stay in the camp, because the trip would be extremely hard. But we shouted, ‘we’re strong, we’ll go,’ because we were afraid to stay in the camp with the old, weak and sick – we already knew that it smelled of something unpleasant. We were afraid that they’d kill us on the spot, though the gas chambers weren’t working any more, but that they would shoot us or get rid of us in some other fashion. So it was decided that we’d go. Which was, when I look back at it, a big mistake, because we wouldn’t have had to undertake that difficult death march, and for another thing, within about ten days the Russians arrived at the camp.