The DP Camps
“He left us there for maybe an hour or two hours and then somebody came and started investigating us. You know some of them spoke German, some of them only spoke a few words of German, I suppose some probably spoke Yiddish, I don’t know. I don’t even remember in what ways they investigated us. It was in German or… So we told them that we are here in this TB sanitorium, and we wanted to find out… We have friends there, we have our things there, we cannot just remain here. They insisted we cannot go out. Of course, we knew the area so well and the camp was big. So we finally decided, well, we pretend that we remain. We walked around, then we finally stole out through some little fence and we started running through the fields to get back to Weissenhaus. And then we were there.
“We waited another few days. Then came this order that all the slave laborers have to come to the camp. If somebody would be caught outside, he’d be put in – whatever they were threatening us with. So we did. And, of course, we were Poles and we came to the Polish camp. But how was it that, I don’t remember now how was it Zelek and Stefan came there… I forgot how it was but while we were still there living with the Poles, there came three Jewish boys from a concentration camp. They were still wearing their striped clothes. Two were brothers from Warsaw, we found this out later. I think they came… I don’t remember which camp, from Dachau or Buchenwald, the three came. And they were the first survivors of the camps that we saw.
Was this the first time you heard directly about the concentration camps?
“This was the first time we knew there were any survivors of the camps. Then, of course, later when we were living already in Degerloch, many more came from all different camps, men and women.”
But at this first DP camp you were only a handful of Jews?
“Yes. And we were not separated, there were no Jews. We were still so-called Poles. By the time they came, we had already told the others, but we still remained with the Poles. So now, there we were. We were assigned six persons to a room. They still didn’t know that we are Jewish. So we were… and two girls slept in one bed. We were five, I mean we were inseparable the five of us. There was another Polish girl, Yunka was her name, who was assigned to our room, and she slept with Genna. I slept with Marina, and Eva slept with Nusha. I don’t remember how long it was, well the war officially ended May 8th. Up to then, nothing was happening. Then we came to Stuttgart, I think, in June.
“After May 8th, one day we decided we had to find out what’s going on. What’s going to happen. And we really had a hard time. We were getting hysterical. We were crying all night. And we were saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have survived. Maybe we should kill ourselves.’ All those things were going through… It was really a hard time.
“There in this camp itself the Americans started repatriating the people. Our Italian friends, they were the first ones to go home because there was not much of a problem. Then the French, you know the ones that were the closest, they liquidated those barracks and sent everybody home. With Poland it was a different situation. One didn’t know with the Russians: this was a Russian zone. But there were so many still there. There were Greek, there were… I mean from all over, from all over, wherever Hitler occupied.
“Then one day we decided we had to see what’s going on. So, we went to the office and there was this American from Texas who was in charge of this camp, and he didn’t know anything about Jews. I don’t even know if he had even heard of a Jew. I remember now… He was sitting all day long and he was strumming the guitar ‘Old Man River’ and singing to himself ‘Old Man River.’ That’s how we learned two songs, ‘Old Man River’ and this ‘Stardust.’
“So we come in and we talk to him, and we tell him what, actually we really asked him what to do. Of course, there was no transportation, the war was just ending. But that we would like somehow to get to Stuttgart. If a jeep would be going there in a day or two a week or whatever, because… And we told him we are Polish, but we don’t want to, we cannot go back to Poland because we are Jews. We told him the story, but he didn’t quite understand, but he promised that if by chance, you know, some jeep in a few days, he would let us go to Stuttgart. We wanted to find out what is going on with the Jews, what is going to happen to us.
“That was the day when we told the Poles. So then when we came out and they asked us, you mean, you just didn’t walk up to the Americans and talk to them. I mean, after all, the Americans, we looked up to them – they were gods. So we told the Poles. Do you know, they were so incensed! They even sent a delegation to this poor American who didn’t know quite what they are talking about, to remove us from their barracks because they didn’t want to be together with Jewish girls. This was already after the liberation! And then this Yunka who was with us, she was nice, and another one who was a good friend of mine, these two girls they remained our friends, but the others…
Some others were calling them already, ‘Jew lovers,’ right there and after the liberation. That’s why I have those feelings about the Poles. I don’t know. And these were people with whom we were working together and singing together. Anyway, that was actually it.
“I don’t remember how long we still remained in the same camp, in the same barrack with the Poles, and maybe the Jews who came out from the camps, those few Jews who came. I think they also must have remained because they were assigned to the Polish barracks because they didn’t have any Jewish barracks at this particular camp.
“It was a few days later, or a week later, we went to Stuttgart to find out what’s happening. And then there was already, I forgot how we found out about it, there was this chaplain, Rabbi Eshkind, a Jewish chaplain. This must have been in June because by July we were all settled in the DP came in Stuttgart. I don’t remember exactly how we got in touch with him. There were several Jewish girls in Stuttgart: Genna, her sister Franca was there, and there were a few Jewish men, I mean two who we knew during the war who pretended to be Poles. One was working as a waiter; he was a little bit older. We thought he was an old man then, he must have been 38 or 40. And another one, Marion, who worked as a baker someplace. How they happened to manage to come to Stuttgart being Jewish, I don’t really know. And this Rabbi Eshkind started looking for Jewish survivors. He requisitioned a few villas in a nice place in Stuttgart called Degerloch. We were very few at that time and we were those first displaced persons. This was called the Jewish camp.
“I remember we went back to Weinsberg. We took our things and the rest of us, well those few Jewish people who were there in camp, then a few more Jewish people came. It was the end of June, maybe the beginning of July. So we all moved from Weinsberg to Stuttgart to this DP camp. This was like a small villa in that area, Degerloch. That’s when Felik and Stefan, they became sort of part of us, and we all lived in one house. I had a little room upstairs at the very top and Eva had a little room next door to me. Genna had a little room and Stefan and Felik had a room downstairs. So since we were so-called the first, we were the founders of this displaced persons camp, let’s say, so we all lived in this one little villa. But then, of course, it became big.
“We remained in Degerloch. And then some men were coming and people were pairing up. This one had a boyfriend, and this one was going to get married, and people came from different camps: from Bergen Belsen, from Mauthausen, from… So here was quite a large Jewish population. Then Rabbi Eshkind, I don’t know if he was still there or somebody else, took over a few blocks – those two streets in Stuttgart – Bismarckstrasse and Reinsburgstrasse. These were big apartment houses, three, four stories, and that was the center, that big Jewish DP camp. Degerloch was a suburban area, and it was hilly. Stuttgart is a very attractive city. These were like villas surrounded by little gardens. So that’s where we were.
Did Stefan and Felik talk about the concentration camps?
“We didn’t really talk so much about what was going on. You know, I think there was such a thing as an intoxication with freedom. One didn’t really talk about it. I think people talked more about how they were liberated, rather than about what was going on in the camps. I mean, for one thing, I think it was also taken for granted that we all knew that the camp was death, and that somehow if they didn’t die, it was a miraculous thing. We all knew what was happening before people were taken to camp. So there was no need, I suppose it was so…
“I have no idea how Stefan and Felik survived. It turned out that Stefan had a wife, a Romanian girl who was very sick. I don’t really know if he wanted to divorce her or, but this was later. Anyway, one day he received a letter from her. She was in a hospital in some German place in the German Alps. This was not far from Nuremberg where Benno lived at that time. So Benno came there too. Stefan and I went there and then Benno came and we met there. I remember I went with him to the hospital. He was also some sort of a tortured soul, this Stefan.
“He was very kindly and a very friendly young man. We were really sort of like brother and sister. I remember when I was going already to the United States, Stefan said, ‘Can’t you tell your cousin you have a little brother here that they should take along too.’ So we went there, and she was in the hospital and was very sick. I think that he divorced her because he eventually came to the United States, and he married. He met a girl here – I don’t know if she was a refugee or not – but then he died suddenly. He died of a heart attack. He was maybe 52 or so.
(To be continued)
