Tag #154697 - Interview #94472 (Laszlo Ringel)

In April 1945 military troops were approaching Mauthausen and we evacuated to Gunskirchen town in about 20 km from Mauthausen. There were also barracks there and prisoners from surrounding camps were taken to this area. Germans were raging and we understood that the war was coming to an end. We were given miserable food: 2 potatoes in their skin per day. Many people died every day and there were corpses piling in the yard. Every other day corpses were loaded on trucks and hauled to the crematorium. It was horrific that there were meat parts cut out on some corpses. Inmates from the Polish barrack were selling meat saying it was horse meat… Germans began to watch them and discovered that they were cutting meat from the corpses. They killed 10 inmates doing this. The guards were Germans from regular army. [Wehrmacht] The SS soldiers disappeared, and these guards were rather loyal to us. The area of the camp was rather big and Germans didn’t mind that we walked around. We were not allowed to come into the barrack of Germans. We could find carrots and potatoes in abandoned storage facilities. When there were no air raids we were allowed to make food on fire. We began to receive parcels with biscuits, jam, cigarettes and matches from the English Red Cross. It was called the St. George Cross. I didn’t smoke and exchanged cigarettes for bread and biscuits. When we received the food it was better to eat it all at once since it was stolen at nights, even if we put boxes with food under a pillow.