Tag #139122 - Interview #99202 (Ruzena Deutschova)

I didn’t have to work in the munitions factory. The factory was four or five kilometers [2-3 miles] from our quarters. I thought that everything was underground, since the big trees covered everything, they nearly barricaded the camp in along with the factory. I was in the factory one time, when my sister got sick. I saw what work they did there. In the Allendorf shell factory, they filled bombs. The work was very difficult. They left in the morning, got a half liter of milk. They drilled out the bombs, put in the wicks and the detonator. It looks like the work was very detrimental to your health, that’s why they gave you milk, too. We stayed in Allendorf until March. Allendorf belonged to Buchenwald. At the end of March, they evacuated us. We marched day and night, for I don’t know how many days. The Germans with us, but they didn’t shoot us. They were going to Berlin, we didn’t know where we were going. The locked us in a pen where there were sheep grazing. They wanted to burn us up with the pen. The SS who were with us in the camp didn’t do this. Adolf Hupka was his name, he didn’t burn us up. He was a decent person. Whatever he could, he did for us. He was a decent person. The female supervisors in the camp were very horrible. But he was decent, very decent. He said to us, ‘Tomorrow you will be free, but I don’t know what will happen to us.’ The next day we started off again, they took the death-head insignia off their caps and coats. Then we spread out in a forest, I think it was the Black Forest.

We just kept fleeing. A Pole took us in to his manor, and told us to be quiet. The manor was full of tanks and German soldiers. We thought we’d fallen into a nice little trap. There were probably twenty of us, the rest had fallen behind. That night he brought us milk, we calmed down a bit from that. All at once a black tank was stopped in front of us. They were blacks. Americans. Soldiers, officers, they even spoke Hungarian. They said, ‘Stay here. We’ll come back for you at night’. And they came back for us, took us into a village, and housed us in a school there. The Germans were all around us, there was hay and lice, fleas everywhere, but we were so glad. We left again a week later. We ate tinned food, that the Americans brought. The local Germans all hid. The mayor only came to us a week later. The American officer threatened to hang him if he didn’t find us places to stay. There were about thirty of us. He put fifteen in one group and fifteen in another place. After this the mayor personally came and wrote down what we needed. They gave us a lot too. They always filled a huge box with food, we didn’t suffer from hunger again, they took care of us.