Print This PostMy grandfather, Norman Winiker, served in the 65th Infantry Division of the US Army in World War II and was sent to Europe in January of 1945. He saw combat and was eventually stationed at the Mauthausen concentration camp after its liberation. Because my grandfather spoke Yiddish, he was able to speak with the Holocaust Survivors there, and this letter describes what he learned from them about the horrors that had taken place.
Saturday & Sunday, June 16 & 17, 1945
Camp Mauthausen, Austria
Dear Folks,
I’ve started to write to you three times in the last three days. However, things happen around here which are interesting and take up my time. For example for our Orientation period yesterday and today, besides my giving the Home Front News and other incidentals, we had the good fortune of hearing about concentration camps & experiences in them from a man who’s been thru it all. He’s a very interesting person. He was a Major in the Yugoslav Army, spent 15 years in England studying engineering, has a great interest in Anglo-American affairs, speaks excellent English (including slang), is a lecturer by trade, & is a wonderful guy in general. He was taken as a political prisoner by the Nazis about six years ago. They suspected him of being in the British Military Service & they knew of his friendship for America & Britain. Anyway, he’s been in several prisons & concentration camps, the last one being Camp Mauthausen where he was when the 11th Armored Div. liberated the camp. The 11th Armored made him an honorary private in the U.S. Army. Right now he’s helping the Americans run the camp & I imagine he could do the entire job by himself because he can speak six languages.
Well, he spoke to us for two hours on Concentration Camps, the origin of them, the S.S. guards, the Nazis in general, his experiences & what he’s seen in the camps & answered any questions we cared to ask him. If I were to tell you some of the things he’s seen, you’d probably say I was exaggerating. But as he told us, when after this war or now, you see atrocity movies or newsreels of what occurred in these death camps or read stories written by those who’ve lived thru this terror, believe them because by God everything they say is real & has happened. I know, because I’ve heard the stories of these poor people from their own lips in German or English. We’re in daily contact with them. I’ve seen with my own two eyes the Gas Chamber (where people were packed in tightly, told they were to be given a shower & given soap only to be dead five minutes later by lethal gas sprayed from the seemingly innocent shower outlets or sprayers), the Crematorium (4 ovens capable of burning 8 persons at a time stacked one body upon another with a tray underneath the grate to catch the human fat as it melted); The hooks where people were hung beneath their chin while waiting their turn to be shot against a nearby wall; and the Quarry & it’s 186 steps of death.
This camp was built by rocks brought up from the quarry in the valley nearby. And as this Major said, “if only those stones could talk, they could tell of the tens of lives which were sacrificed in order for it to be placed in the foundation.” From the quarry to the camp are 186 steps up a steep hill. Each worker in the quarry (men & women) was given about a 60 lb. block of stone & he or she then started the ascent. 186 steps straight up & without stopping or pausing. If the person knew he couldn’t do it, he just dropped the rock & kept walking up the steps. At the top an SS man would either just shoot him on the spot or playfully give him a shove off the steep cliff alongside the steps. One of my guard posts is just atop this cliff & let me tell you about in the middle of the night I can just picture what went on & boy, I shudder. All this I’ve seen. The people here are glad to show American soldiers thru it all & to show us what their fate was to have been till we came along.
Yes, I’ve seen the bad malnutrition cases. Gaunt women with pipestem arms & legs. You look at them & wonder how they manage to still stay alive. And then some don’t. We have an “icebox” here with bodies who have died daily since we’ve come. Their forms underneath the sheet is negligible & they scarcely make a bulge in the sheets, just skin & bones.
Oh, yes, I might mention the large level area just before one enters the main gate of Camp Mauthausen with its’ layers of bodies (only God knows how many) & then dirt & then bodies, etc. till the land was raised about fifty to one hundred feet but I wonder if I haven’t said enough for you to just grasp of some of the things that went on in a German Concentration Camp. I know you’ve probably read stories about it all, but there’s nothing like seeing it for oneself.
I’d like to describe the physical aspects of the camp. It is located about 3/4 of a mile from any billet (formerly occupied by the Camp SS and their families) atop a high hill from which there is an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. You can see the winding Danube for miles & you can almost see Linz, fifteen miles to the west. There are two affiliate camps of Mauthausen & they’re known as Camp Gusen I & II. I haven’t seen them. Enclosing Mauthausen on two sides is a high stone wall built by the inmates as I’ve already described. On the other two sides is a high barbed wire fence which used to be electrically charged. With a high enough voltage to kill of course. There is another wire fence about a hundred yards further out & then there are watch-towers on the neighboring heights where machine guns were mounted. The major told us there was one successful escape that he can remember. Out of 723 men who tried it (they were all already under the death sentence), 17 managed to make good their escape. I needn’t mention what the others’ fate was.
The camp itself consists of lots of long, low, single story barracks not unlike those found in some U.S. Army camps. Women & men were segregated. Food was as poor as one can possibly imagine. Boiled grass or just plain grass was off- times the diet. Yes, life was very simple here. In fact, you could call it over-simplified. The camp has about 10,000 inmates at present with the great majority of them being Poles & Yugoslavs. There are shipments going out daily in American trucks for destinations in their various countries.
That’s enough about the camp in this letter. I’d like to tell you the story of another person with whom I’ve had more than incidental contact. This is going to be of much greater interest to Ma & Pa. When I came back from Paris, & found the boys in the new billets, I also found that they were having people come down from the camp & clean up our house. Well, I didn’t pay any attention to them until three days ago. I happened to go down to our basement that morning & there was this girl ironing the O.D’s of a couple of the boys. She looked at me, I looked at her & finally she said, in German of course, “I think you’re Jewish.” I told her I was & found out she was Jewish also. It came as a surprise to me when she told me that there are several thousand Jews in Mauthausen now. It’s a wonder that they’ve lived this long. Well, anyway, since that day I’ve spent hours & hours talking to this girl. She returns every day to do ironing, sewing, etc. I’d like to tell you her story. She doesn’t speak any English only Polish & Yiddish or German. Now, my Yiddish is rusty, but I can understand it pretty good. Since she does most of the talking, it’s a good arrangement. One other difficulty though is that she’s from Galicia & I remember Mama saying that they speak a little different than us. But we make out O.K.
She was born (30 years ago) & raised in Cracow, Poland. Her father died in the first World War & her mother remarried. Like in Mama’s case (or did her father remarry?) the step- father treated her badly. He wouldn’t let her go to school (she’s a very intelligent girl) but made her stay home & work. She managed to learn tailoring work (schneiderei) in her spare time & that’s become her life’s work. She was in love with her uncle from childhood but he lived in another town (Limburg).
When she was 18 (I believe), she married this uncle. They were very much in love & lived happily together till those fateful days of September, 1939. At that time the Germans of course marched in & immediately her husband was sent to a camp in another town. She had a small baby & soon he contracted T.B. from one of the people who was now living in this girl’s place. The Germans didn’t bother her for a while because of her child’s death & she worked for them in a tailor shop. Meanwhile, she was corresponding with her husband. Then in a new round-up, her luck gave out. She was sent to a real camp & has been in different camps ever since. She didn’t hear from her husband anymore & she found out that all her relatives have either perished or disappeared.
How she ever survived through all the bloodshed that surrounded her, she herself doesn’t know. Just the hand of God. She has told me many of the things she’s seen happen in these camps down to the last detail & I just can’t bring myself to write them down. She’d describe an incident & then she’d ask me, “Didn’t you Jews in America hear about these things?” I told her yes but I just couldn’t answer when she came back with “why didn’t you do something at the beginning?”
She was very despondent when I talked to her the first time. Her child, family, home, & old life were gone. Her only hope is that she can find her husband. When she mentioned that she has even thought of suicide, I couldn’t blame her in some ways, but I gave her one of the longest lectures I’ve ever given in Yiddish on the greatness of life and the presence of everlasting hope. I’m telling you I put my heart into it & I believe (& I hope I’m right) that she won’t think of suicide again.
This discussion evolved itself into a debate on philosophy. We began to talk in the abstract. Then, we had quite a talk on the Jew in the world today., & let me tell you, she opened my eyes up to a lot of things. We compared the Jew in America & the Jew in Europe. And we talked about Zionism. In all my talking, I advised her to go back to Cracow & try & start a new life. She kept insisting that without her husband a new life was impossible. I think her view will change.
Now, she has an uncle in New York City. He is her father’s brother. His name, as she gave it to me is Hersh, (probably Harry), Fliesser-Baar. Now, I’m guessing at the English spelling of the name. You could probably get any number of American names out of it but please try & see what you can do about locating him. I know it’s a million to one chance but she’s such a nice kid. (I call her a kid when she says she feels like sixty). She’s tried to locate this uncle thru the Polish Committee here, but you know what chance there is of that with all the confusion around here. Her name incidentally is Celia Berqa Feltstein or Fladtstein. If you do find the uncle, I guess the only thing he could do would be to inquire about her thru the Int’l. Red Cross or Polish organization that deals with that stuff. I asked her if she had ever heard of Mishnitz (Ma’s town) or Wolyner (Pa’s town). She hadn’t heard of Mishnitz, but she said that her father died in the last war at Wolyner. I don’t know whether they’re the same town.
She asks me a lot about America & I tell her all I can. Also, I’m teaching her some English. She’s a good pupil. I’ve given her several things which I had around. Things like a box of cocoa someone sent me several weeks ago, some lifesavers, coffee from our “K” rations, sugar, couple of packs of cigarettes, & some other stuff. I also have some German marks (not American-made) & I’m going to give them to her. She’s very happy to be able to talk to me and as she said once, “I’m glad to be able to tell everything to someone.” She says that the people aren’t the kind to listen to someone else’s problems. They have their own.
Yes, things are quite interesting around here. The guard duty is easy, 4 hours on, 12 hours off. Our chief job on guard is to check the passes of the inmates. We’re very easy with them. As I said once, there are beautiful showers, baths, & a swimming pool up at camp for American military personnel only. The Army nurses use them also. The showers & baths at different hours, of course. Our only other recreation is ball playing. We have a nice field just behind the nurse’s quarters. Yesterday, I played in my first ball game in at least six months & am I sore today. My arms & legs ache, but I’ll soon get over that. We are allowed to go around our company area without a shirt on & yesterday I got a little sunburn on my shoulders. My body was very white previous to that.
The Danube has been placed off limits. Some of the boys had been down their fishing. However, I think the reason for its’ being placed off limits is that too many German women had been hanging out down there. The mail situation still has me peeved. Not at you all, mind you, but at the darned delivery service. You aren’t getting my mail & yesterday, we didn’t even have a Mail Call. I received a letter from Jack which was written on June 5 at the Ritz-Carlton in Philly. It was a swell letter & I’m sorry he had such a short leave. I guess Lil was sorrier however.
I notice where the meat situation is really getting serious in the States„ New York especially. In fact, I made it the main subject of my “Home Front” talk this week. I figured the boys ought to know that you folks back there aren’t eating to your heart’s content. We’re probably (undoubtedly) getting more meat than you are. I’ve pretty well reached the end of my four days news letter. I think I’ll go back to writing a short letter every day. Or try to, at least.
Well, love to all Your loving son, Norm
P.S. Please Send Me A Package of Food.