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When the gunshots could be really heard, he [the supervisor Pole foreman from the factory] taught us: ‘Don’t go anywhere! They will command you in the yard, but don’t move! Don’t obey!’ And he showed us how to evade. A few of us really went there, eight or ten to the fence, and he knocked the iron to it skillfully, and we saw it worked. However we didn’t dare to touch it, but he did. We said: ‘We went through this terrible year, should we die like this now?’ But he grabbed it, drew it apart – nothing happened –, and he slipped through it. Then the second slipped through. I didn’t dare. About four slipped out, but I wasn’t among them. They weren’t searched for. The Germans themselves, the supervisor soldiers escaped too. We started to notice that they are less each day. On the third day even less. That’s how we became courageous. We didn’t go anymore to the factory, but they wanted to empty the concentration camp. One night, when they took us out from the concentration camp, we lay down in quiet on the roadside. The procession passed, and we stayed there. This must have been by the end of March or middle April [1945]. Only the chief of the concentration camp kept on walking, he thought that if he took them [the prisoners] to a certain place, and the Russians caught him up, he would be saved, because he would have said: ‘Here’s the writing, the order to execute the prisoners, and I didn’t.’ So he would have escaped as a reward. But nobody protected him. They asked how he behaved. Everybody told them that he was an alcoholic crook, so they arrested him at once and took him away. He didn’t survive for sure, he didn’t deserve it at all. The war ended officially on May 9th [1945], we felt safe only then, that we weren’t prisoners anymore.
Period
Location
Germany
Interview
Bella Steinmetz