Return journey from Auschwitz: the diary of my grandfather

German Passport to travel to France before the start of the war.

Foreword

This testimony written by my grandfather Gustav Karl which tells of his liberation from a satellite camp of Auschwitz starting on 18 January 1945 and his way back through Poland and Ukraine until Odessa where he was repatriated to Marseille on 10 May 1945, and Lyon on the very next day.

This short journal (1300 words) is very lively and full of all the nice foods he found, was given, and purchased along the journey.

The text, handwritten with a pencil in Sütterlin, the gothic handwriting learned at school back then, was almost impossible to read. I recently had scans transcribed into readable German and I translated it into English. The oral language is left as such and all approximations are mine.

Most of the facts below come from administrative archives including Bad Arolsen archives.

He was born in Walsdorf, a small village near Bamberg in Bayern in 1906. He was a cattle dealer in the family agricultural farm. He was arrested for the Kristallnacht and interned in Dachau on 11 November 1938. He was discharged on 05 January 1939 and lost his German citizenship. When he came back home, his father, after having seen his son arrested, had died on 3 December 1938. He might have been discharged from the camp of Dachau on the promise to emigrate.

French Visa 

He applied successfully to a visa to France on 23 January 1939 and emigrated on 24 February 1939. He had found a job as farm hand in the department of Aube, according to a certificate of 9 January 1939, and was later registered in and out of military forces in Toulouse in July 1940. His cousin Siegfried, a baker in New York since 1937, tried to sponsor him for a visa in May 1941 while he was living in Toulouse, but the visa was not accepted. Siegfried then emigrated to Buenos Aires. His other cousin Artur had emigrated to Brazil early enough and became an entrepreneur in San Paolo.

He registered at the French police in Lyon in February 1942 and stayed there until he was denounced and arrested by the Gestapo on 13 March 1944. Tortured in the prison of Montluc, he was sent to the triage camp of Drancy and deported to Auschwitz on the 27 March 1944 in the Transport 70. His number was 176264. He was incarcerated in the Gleiwitz subcamp as forced worker in a repair workshop, sometimes “with pointless tasks, carrying stones, digging holes and plugging them up the next day” (http://auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-sub-camps/gleiwitz-i/). He also told he had had his nose broken by a Nazi and that as former cattle dealer, he was sometimes assigned to feeding the dogs. We understand he might have been able to take from their food.

Trip to Odessa

One of his sisters Marthe had left early enough and stayed hidden in Paris with her two daughters Jacqueline and Paulette (they took French names) and her son, who was killed in the French forces at the Liberation. His mother Rosa, his other sister Sophie, her husband Kurt Horvitz and their three children Lothar, Adolf and Carola, were deported in 1942 to Majdanek and murdered.

After his return in Lyon, he was sent to healing sanatorium in Aix Les Bains and Divonne for general weakness and other ailments.

Back in Lyon, he found a job as seller in a butchers. This is where he met my grandmother Renée Stein in 1947, she had accompanied the father of a friend who had also come back from Auschwitz.

They got married in 1948. He sued the persons who denounced him to the Germans for treason, and lost. My uncle was born in 1949 and my mother in 1950. He died after a heart attack and a month at the hospital on 21 January 1981, when I was 5 years old and my brother 8 months old.

My grandmother has an amazing story of her own. She followed a difficult and dangerous itinerary, which is very well documented. Born in 1923 in Austria, her father Oscar died in 1935. Her mother Seraphine tried to secure emigration in England while she left my grandmother with a family in Constanz, Germany between 1938 and 1940. She was deported with the Stux family to France and arrived in the camp of Gurs in the Southwest of France in October 1940, where she met her best friend Hannelore. She worked in the camp kitchen. They were then deported to the nearby camp of Rivesaltes in March 1941 until June 1942. She learned her mother had been imprisoned a year in Vienna and later deported to the Warsaw ghetto, where she perished.

The teenagers were rescued from the camp by the OSE, l’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a humanitarian organization assisting refugee children. They were released with a group of other young people just before deportations started from Rivesaltes to Auschwitz. Hidden by organisations in Charry, Moissac, in the forest and then the castle of Bégué, and finally in Cazaubon in the Southwest of France, she was then sent to Paris in December 1943 and Lyon on 10 January 1944, the day of her 21st birthday. In Lyon, under a fake ID, she worked as a florist, following the training she had to interrupt in Vienna in 1938, and participated to Resistance from March 1944 by distributing leaflets.

Renée's fake ID

Fernand Sentou, the mayor of Cazaubon, the village where she had been hidden between November 1942 and December 1943, forged an ID claiming she was born in Moselle, in the German-speaking region in the East of France, and Sophie Coursange, the lady of the Lyon protestant home for young girls who hosted her, her friend, and other young girls in Lyon, knowing that their papers were fake, were both recognized Righteous among the Nations. She testified tirelessly and commemorations were very important to her. She died in 2016 and I miss her very much.

The diary

The original diary

1945

At noon on 18th January, we left the repair workshop.

Early on the on 19th, the departure march left from Camp Gleiwitz.

We walked all day until night where we arrived at Heitlabeck (under jovial Cymbalmusic?)

I had already been stolen a loaf of bread.

On the 20th at noon, again departure.

We had a can of meat to share for 7 men & a quarter liter grey soup.

Then we had to march past the Oberscharführer SS squad leader (a Doctor) where he took out those who could no longer walk.

Among 1300 men, there were 88, including myself.

The others marched off & we stayed.

Then a Captain came & said, “yes, what should do with these people? If they are not able to walk, they will be shot“.

Of course this was a moment which nobody could imagine.

We were then moved to a barrack, led by 2 SS & told we would be driven later by car to Blechbauer (a place, a cage of metal, or Blechhammer, an annex of Auschwitz III-Monowitz), but we didn’t believe it.

Later the Captain came again & said he did not mean it seriously & said a barrack can be heated.

Well, then satisfied soldiers brought us soup.

Auschwitz coupon.

We had not eaten so much for a long time as that night.

At night a car really came & drove us to Blechbauer where we were received by the Oberschaführer & got into an H.K.B. (Häftlingskrankenbau, prisoners’ infirmary camp, the barrack of the sick prisoners) & got another soup, at 21 early.

It was called Gleiwitz I.

We went off, but I was still tired and I said I wasn’t gonna walk along.

Later on, we could already see that it no longer okay went & it was a mess.

The prisoners went to the kitchen and were getting food & the SS were already not there anymore.

So about 300 of us left early, from which (I heard 2 days later because the Russians were around), were then all shot.

The Russians came to the shootings many of us were shot because they had plundered the kitchen, etc.

At night a grenade fell on one barrack.

That was a terror.

That was further done by the the SS before they left, because the Russians were not far anymore.

They also set the barracks on fire.

Once it was stated the Russians were here, the joy went all the way out.

We were free men again.

Then we left the Jewish camp & went to a civilian camp of Frenchmen & English where we found lots of food.

3 friends and I got ourselves a room and have well established as we were all very weak.

I was the cook and found about 30 pounds of beef, flour, noodles, beans, fat etc and so we ate.

I went out for food every day, i.e. probably always with the others, & cleaned up.

Then we found 14 more ducks and a goose.

Every day we ate 2 ducks with red cabbage & dumplings.

Omelettes without milk and eggs too.

We stayed until March 3rd.

March 45

We have gained good weight, since we didn’t have anything else to do than eat and sleep.

Then we even found a quarter Pork (ham), out of which I made bacon in jars.

I had 3 full cans & still took extra meat out of it.

On March 2nd came a Russian officer & said we have to leave for Gliwice, so we packed our things & wanted to leave the next day, but another Russian came early. We’d have to work

So the journey was postponed and then we drove in Br… from …forst to Gliwice where there was a Comité.

We stayed overnight and received bread & meat

We slept well but had to get up early at 6 o’clock to leave because the train went to Katowice at 7:20.

I had a very heavy backpack & 3 bags of bread & 2 blankets. The other comrade had … A cart.

There was solid snow and when arrived at the station, no train was going.

So we had to use the tram, of course the route was often interrupted …because the Germans had to…

We had to change 5 times, then we arrived in Katowice and went to the Red Cross that lead us into the Ferdinand Pit (a school building) where there were already many comrades.

There I met again Marcel Kahn.

There were 5 men per room. We got up 8 o’clock in the morning.

Then there was soup, soup again at noon with bacon & coffee, 700 gr. bread, evenings sweets and coffee with sugar.

We did not need to work, a few times I have unloaded wagons, then I went every day to the city.

For 8 days I worked at the Comité until noon 2 o’clock, then I went to the café or for a walk.

You could buy anything.

You only had to have Zloti.

We then sold what we had brought along & then we could have a good life.

It wasn’t easy for me to walk past the pastry shops, I always bought something, because it was already a long time I hadn’t eaten things like that.

It went very well here for me.

One simply earned money, and gave it out for bacon, butter, cakes.

There I got my old weight back, 64 kg.

But what I was eating all day was incredible.

Yet it went well.

We simply went to the market & bought there, because again we had money.

And then we waited for the Departure.

Today, April 22.

We are expected to depart for Odessa. We wait already since 9:00 a.m., at 1:00 a.m. off to the station, where there were 40 wagons standing for us.

There were 60 men in the big ones and 20 men in the small ones.

The journey went well over Gliwice, Lviv, Tarnopol, Odessa.

The journey lasted 6 days.

Ukraine is very beautiful, you see only big areas of fields and meadows.

At the railway stations where we stopped, people came to bring bread, sausage eggs etc.

We had enough to eat.

There was a big business going on because everyone was still selling stuff.

When we arrived in Odessa we had to walk 5 km with luggage and we were accomodated in a school, very clean.

A commander (Frenchman) welcomed us & for the first time again we received chocolate and 20 American cigarettes. Food was available also plentifully, one went to the city which is very big & picturesque.

I bought ice cream again which I hadn’t eaten for a long time.

I had 15 rubles.

On 4 May 1945 at 1 o’clock I was walked onboard of an English transport steamer (large) which was ready for about 200 persons.

This is the first time I’ve been on a ship and to the sea. It is quiet.

To eat we received immediatly sausage & white bread & cocoa, then we went to sleep, each had a bed with a mattress.

Early there was… with tea.

Then it left on from Odessa.

I went to the deck by noon.

Then there was soup, meat, potatoes, vegetables, pudding and …

Then I went back up on the deck where there was wonderful sun & took a rest.

The trip spent well, it was 3 days.

in the infirmary where a good bed was had the food.

It was wonderful every day.

The first time we stopped in Istambul, which we saw from the ship, then Crete, Corse, Marseille. We arrived on 9 May 4 am and stayed in the harbour until the next day early where we already got up a 3 a.m.

Gustav, Renée, and Albert (1949).