Tag #137934 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

The guards weren’t there anymore and perhaps the light was out as well. There was a slightly uneasy silence in the concentration camp and we didn’t see the others so we decided to escape. We were very run-down but at least we were over our illness. We knew that we were caged in by wires. We decided to dig ourselves out below the wires, and that’s how we escaped because, naturally, we couldn’t have just walked out through the gates. It was a little foggy and there were some clouds in the sky. We crawled by the garbage – because they collected the garbage and leftovers from the kitchen there – until we felt that the ground was softer. We tried to figure out whether the wires were electrically charged but we thought they were just plain wires because there were usually tunnels between the electric ones. We scraped out a hole and crawled through. The forest was about 15-20 kilometers away from us and we wanted to get there in one run, when the spotlights weren’t on that part. There was a muddy village road. We got up and started running. We ran into the forest but we were so tired that we just fell down there and were gasping on the ground. But we had to get up straight away and walked all night. I think it was my idea to suggest that we continued separately because we only had one chance to escape if we remained together, but two if we separated. Sandor agreed and then we departed. It was extremely cold and dark in the Bavarian forest. This was at the end of April.