Tag #151795 - Interview #84041 (Yacob Hollander)

In February 1945 American troops began their attack. Every day bombers flew to drop bombs on Berlin. In March 1945 we were lined up and moved to Austria. About 6 thousand inmates left the camp and only a little over a thousand reached the destination point. We wore our camp robes and had blankets with us. They were thin cotton blankets of the similar fabric as our robes and didn’t warm up. We didn’t get any food on the way. People were getting exhausted. There were guards every 5 meters of our column. When they saw that somebody couldn’t move on they shot them on the head from their guns. There was a crew of inmates behind us. They were to remove the corpses into ditches on the sides of the road. We stayed overnight in abandoned stables or sheds sleeping on the ground. Many people froze to death. We often slept in the open air and when we woke up in the morning there were snowdrifts on top of us. I don’t know how long we walked till we arrived in Ebensee, one of the camps in Mauthausen, 3 km from there. We were given new numbers there. My number was 136803. We didn’t go to work from this camp. We stayed in barracks. There were 120 inmates in our barrack. We were starved and suffered from cold. We were lying on plank beds all day long trying to save the energy. Those who couldn’t move were put on the 2nd tier beds. They were candidates to the crematorium. In the morning and in the evening we got a cup of tea without sugar and 100 grams of heavy bread with sawdust once per day. At lunch we got one bowl, 300 grams of soup with frost-bitten potatoes and soldier’s left over food. The inmates became brutal from hunger. They sometimes took away bread from their weaker fellow inmates who couldn’t defend themselves. They even killed a person for a piece of bread. We stopped being afraid of dying. When I saw a dead inmate in the morning, I would search his pockets searching for bread or even breadcrumbs. In the morning guards with specially trained dogs searched the barracks for dead people pulling them down onto the ground. Then a crew took corpses to the crematorium.