Friday, September 7, 1945
DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE and The Legal Chronicle
I Was in a Death Camp
By ALFRED WERNER
Before the Anschluss, Dr.
Werner was a newspaperman
in Vienna. He spent a half
year in the Concentration
Camp of Dachau, Bavaria, to
be released in the spring of
1939 or condition that he
leave the Reich immediately.
After a lengthy internment
in England as "enemy alien"
he managed to go to the
United States where he con-
tinued his career as a writer.
cal
,ne
of
aid
of
iew
ritll
"Infamous Dachau Falls; 32,000
Freed"—when I read this head-
line, I had to draw a deep breath.
I almost wept with joy when I
learned how the commanders of
the U. S. divisions that captured
the prison camp were hoisted to
the shoulders of the seething,
swaying crowd of liberated Rus-
sians, Poles, French, Czechs and
Austrians who cheered the Amer-
icans in their native tongues. I
myself happened to spend six
dreary months at Dachau, having
been one of the thousands who
had been imprisoned by the Nazis
in November, 1938, after a des-
perate young Polish Jew, Hershel
Grynszpan, has assassinated a
minor German official in Paris.
Needless to say, the pogroms of
the "Black Thursday" had been
prepared long in advance, and
young Hershel's deed merely
served the Nazis as a welcome
pretext. .. .
Before 1933 the small, neat,
somewhat old-fashioned city of
Dachau was a rendez-vous of
painters, the Woodstock of South-
ern Bavaria, for it offered the
artists beautiful vistas, especially
when you got a glimpse of the
snow-covered Alps in the South,
glittering like blue mountain
peaks in a fairy-tale. But there
are also swamps a few miles off
the city, and the Nazis selected
them as site of their "model
camp" for "recalcitrant ele-
ments." It will never be estab-
lished how many hundreds, or
even thousands of anti-Nazis, in-
cluding many Jews, died while
draining the grounds and con-
structing the buildings, under the
kind supervision of Elite Guards
who "made their lives bitter with
hard bondage, in mortar, and in
brick, and in all manner of serv-
ice in the field," as the Pharaos
dealt with the children of Israel.
To write a book on Dachau,
one must have the descriptive
genius of a Dante, and to illus-
trate it with pictures, one would
have to be as great a painter as
Breughel. Superficially, the camp
did not look much different from
an average American army camp,
except that the Dachau camp was
surrounded by a high wall, the
top of which was covered with
glass splinters and nails, by a
structure of barbed wire charged
with electricity, and a moat
filled with swiftly streaming
water. In addition, a dozen ma-
chine gun towers were distrib-
uted all over the camp; at night,
huge search lights penetrated the
grounds. It was almost imposible
to escape. Once in a while we
actually heard the tack-tack-tack
of machine guns when a prisoner
had run towards the wall, not be-
cause he had thought he could
elude the Nazis, but because he
preferred quick death to a life
of torture and shame.
"How did they treat you in
Dachau?" When I was there, the
Nazis still refrained from sys-
tematic mass murder of their
prisoners, and the "Brausebad"
(shower-bath) had not yet been
converted into a gas chamber. But
the camp commander, SS Haupt-
strumfuehrer Gruenewald did not
interfere when his "boys" wish&
GREETINGS AND BEST WISHES
TO THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
FOR A HAPPY AND
VICTORIOUS NEW YEAR
.:411 4p,
HOTEL WOLVERINE
Page Five
REFUGEES EXHIBIT ARTS AND SKILLS AT FORT ONTARIO
Viewing examples of the skills of the residents at the
recent Arts and Crafts Exhibit of the Emerg ency
Refugee Shelter at Fort Ontario, Oswego, N. Y. Ma-
terials for use in the art classes are supplied by NRS.
Other exhibits come from the workshops of the Voca-
tional Training Courses whose instructors are provided
jointly by the National Refugee Service and ORT.
From left to right: Joseph Silverstein, newly elected
chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Fort
Ontario; Edwin Rosinberg, First Vice-President Of
NRS; and Alexander S. Holstein, Vice-Chairman of
the Coordinating Committee.
to have some "fun" with the pri- and the Steel Helmet organiza- signed to Jews—and Gypsies!
soners. If the "fun" resulted in tion) wore green somewhat warm- Nevertheless, the Nazis failed to
the death of a few "Untermen- er winter clothes, "decorated" create a kind of superiority com-
schen," so what! Quite a few with a red triangle. We received plex among the "Aryan" prison-
Jews already had perished during only half of their bread ration— ers who, in general, behaved most
or immediately after our jour- and bread was the staple food. A decently at the rare occasions we
ney to Dachau which we made in number of particularly disgust- got in touch with them.
pitch-dark, hermetically closed ing and humiliating "jobs" like
We Jews were of various ages.
freight cars. Crowded together cleaning the camp grounds from There was among us an eighty-
like herrings, we had, for twenty- all kinds of dirt was chiefly as-
(Continued on page 12)
four hours, neither food nor
water; we had to answer the calls
of nature on the spot. A few of
us were beaten to death by the
We Greet Our Friends and Wish
guards, others collapsed, and
others went crazy.
All of Them a Happy, Victorious,
At the camp, Gentile prisoners
were in charge of the Jewish bar-
racks, each comprising 700-800
and Peaceful New Year - -
men, a number which was gradu-
ally decreased through death and
release. These trustees, political
prisoners who, in general, sym-
pathized with us and treated us
as humanely as possible, had to
see to it that we kept our
"homes" painstakingly clean and
that we adhered to all strict camp
rules. In general. Jews and Gen-
tiles were forbidden to mix. We
Jews were housed in a separate
section of the camp, we wore a
Star of David (a red triangle
topped by a yellow one) on the
right breast above the prisoner's
number. We were given only the
thin blue and white striped sum-
LE SHONO TOVO
mer garb which we wore even
TIKOSEVU
when the temperature was below
zero, while the Political Prisoners
(Communists, Social Democrats,
MAY THE ENTIRE HOUSE OF ISRAEL BE BLESSED WITH
members of the Catholic Party
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1945
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Upon this momentous occasion in the lives of the
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replete with peace, happiness and contentment
JANET'S
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