Martin Weiss
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BILL BENSON:
Good Afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson. I am the host of the Museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us today. We are in our tenth year of the First Person program. Our First Person today will be Mr. Martin Weiss, whom you shall meet shortly.
The 2009 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person. First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their first hand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each First Person guest serves as a volunteer here at the museum. With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August the 26th. We now also have First Person programs on Tuesdays through July. The museum’s website at www.ushmm.org provides a list of the upcoming First Person guests. This year we are offering a new feature associated with First Person.
Excerpts from our conversations with survivors are available as podcasts on the museum’s website. Several for this year are already posted, including Marty’s podcast from his appearance on First Person last year. You can also hear Marty’s entire program from last year on the website. The First Person podcasts join two other museum podcast series: Voices on Antisemitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. The podcasts are also available through iTunes.
Marty Weiss will share with us his First Person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 40 minutes. We will follow that, if time allows, with an opportunity for you to ask Marty a few questions. Before you are introduced to him I have several requests of you and several announcements. If possible, we ask that you stay seated with us throughout our one-hour program that way we minimize any disruptions for Marty while he is speaking.
If we do have time for questions and answers at the end of Marty’s discussion and you have a question, please make your question as brief as you can. I will repeat the question so everyone in the room hears it including Marty, and then he’ll respond to your question. If you have a cell phone or a pager that has not yet been turned off we ask that you do that now. For those of you who may be holding passes for the permanent exhibition today please know they are good for the entire afternoon so you can stay with us comfortably till we end the program at 2 o’clock and then go to the permanent exhibition.
The Holocaust was the state sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims, six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti, or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, hatred, antisemitism, and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades and remind us of the constant need to be vigilant citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice, and hatred wherever and whenever they occur.
What you are about to hear from Marty Weiss is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Marty’s introduction. And we begin with this 1946 portrait of Marty Weiss. Marty was born in Polana, Czechoslovakia in 1929. On this map of Europe the arrow points to Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, Marty’s life changed dramatically when Nazi Germany and its allies dismembered Czechoslovakia. In this photograph, Adolf Hitler, in violation of the Munich Pact, reviews his troops at Prague Castle on the day of occupation March 15th, 1939.
Germany occupied one half of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the other half. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, conditions in Polana worsened. By April 1944, Marty’s family was transported to the Munkacs ghetto. On this map showing the partition of Czechoslovakia, the arrow shows the location of Munkacs. In May they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center where Marty, his father, brother and two uncles were selected for forced labor. On this map of major Nazi camps the first arrow points to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The second arrow points to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria where Marty and his father would be sent. They would be then taken to a sub-camp of Melk, where they were forced to build tunnels into the mountain. That is where Marty’s father perished. Here we have a photo of a slave labor camp.
We next see a prisoner registration card, which documents Marty’s transfer from Auschwitz on May 21st, 1944 to Mauthausen on May 28th, 1944. His prisoner number is on the upper right-hand corner and is circled: 68912 Ung-Jude or ‘Hungarian Jew’. His name is on the upper left-hand corner and circled. This document comes from the newly released massive archives of the International Tracing Service, or ITS, which were closed until recently and they’ve now been made available to this museum.
It is massive in that it holds records from the Nazis on 17 million of their victims, both Jews and non-Jews. Marty saw this document for the first time this past year. And I think you could probably just imagine what the impact of that would be to see this card documenting something as terrible as that we will hear about. And if there’s time later, we might hear a little bit from Marty about what this document really means.
Marty was liberated at the Gunskirchen camp by U.S. troops in May 1945. He returned to Czechoslovakia were he found some surviving family members. In 1946 they immigrated to the United States. We close the slide presentation with this 1991 photo of Marty Weiss.
After the war, Marty moved to the United States. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Marty had a very successful career in the grocery business and retired about eighteen years ago. Marty and his wife Joan have two children and four grandchildren. He and Joan moved to Washington, D.C. to be close to their daughter Gail and her family. I’m pleased to let you know that Marty’s wife Joan is with us. Joan, if you wouldn’t mind, a wave and let people know you’re here? And Marty’s daughter Gail and her daughter, their granddaughter, Stephanie is also with us so if you both would . . .
Marty has been a volunteer with the museum for the past ten years. In addition to leading groups of students and FBI agents through the Museum, Marty is active with The Speakers Bureau. He has spoken to diverse audiences across the country, including at US military bases such as Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico and Fort Sill in Oklahoma, as well as at a prison and colleges, such as Kings College in Tennessee, as well as the National Labor Board and just recently, spoke at the National Security Agency or NSA.
Marty recently spoke to a group of eight-graders; this is in the last six weeks or so, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. This was especially noteworthy for Marty because Grand Forks was experiencing terrible flooding. Yet despite the conditions, 700 eighth-graders turned out to hear Marty speak. And he describes just how impressive that was for him to have this remarkable group of kids who listened to him. With that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our First Person, Mr. Marty Weiss.
Marty, thank you so much for joining us and for your willingness to be our First Person. Joan, Gail, Stephanie, thank you for being with us, and to all of you for joining us today.
Marty, you’ve told me that your life as a youngster in Czechoslovakia before the war was basically a good life. Let’s begin your First Person account today by you telling us about you, your family, and your community in those years before the war began.
MARTIN WEISS:
Well, in the 1930s I remember I was in grade school. Actually we lived not much different than here in the United States except we lived in Europe. But we had very nice schools, government – we had a democracy, which I like to point out. Most European countries at the time did not have it, but Czechoslovakia did. So we were . . . we felt very comfortable. Being Jewish was not a problem because according to the government everybody was equal, and individuals may have been prejudiced, but otherwise we had no problem living there and things were pretty good.
I remember I was a little boy, by that time I was like probably seven or eight years old, like Poland, which was next door. And I remember they had kind of anti-Jewish laws in Poland, and the same in Hungary. And they also had what I would call a class system. There were certain people that had connections to certain titles, and that entitled them to be very arrogant. In Czechoslovakia we didn’t have that. A person was a person. You achieved or you didn’t achieve and that was it. So I remember, even as a little boy I understood that.
BILL BENSON:
You told me that you actually had rights and you were aware of your rights.
MARTIN WEISS:
Oh yeah, we were aware. Like if somebody, if a police came in and they were trying to search the house or something, my father wouldn’t let them. He stood on his rights. So, we were not dissimilar to the United States at that time.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us a little bit about your – the size of your family, both your immediate family and your extended family and a little bit about your parents.
MARTIN WEISS:
Well we had, first of all, life and families were a little different. Well, not different but yet they were. We were a family of nine children, so we also had some . . . My father was in business plus also we had land that we cultivated; farmed it. But basically for our own needs. But we lived fairly good.
Like I said, life was – we were looking forward to a different world, to be more modern, to go to school for the first time because until then people didn’t go to school too much. After World War I when Czechoslovakia was established, the Czech government really went through a lot of trouble to try to educate the people, even with force sometimes because a lot of people, the peasants, didn’t want their kids to go to school. They said they don’t need school and the government actually threatened them with a fine if they didn’t let their kids go to school, so.
BILL BENSON:
And your family had lived in this part of the world for a very long time hadn’t they?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes. I don’t know exactly how long, because years ago when I was growing up we were not concerned, “this is where we belong, this is where we were . . .” so I don’t know how . . . I know my grandfather had lived there. He had property there. So I have no idea how many generations we went back or anything like this. But nevertheless, this was home. And in Europe you didn’t move, unlike the United States, when you grew up in a certain town this is where you were. Basically people stayed in the same area.
BILL BENSON:
Life changed dramatically of course for you and your family once the Hungarians occupied your part of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Tell us what led to that and what those changes were that you experienced so quickly.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, in 1939 when Hitler marched into Prague, the Hungarians were allies of the Nazis or the Germans. So consequently they got a piece of the Carpathians where we lived, in the Carpathians. They got that because they were allies so the Germans took Prague and basically the Czech Republic. And the rest of it went to Hungary; the Hungarian troops occupied that.
As soon as they came in, right away we were very troubled because we knew they were allies of the Nazis and they’re not going to behave much differently. And it turned out we were right because later on – everything the Nazis did like the Nuremberg Laws and all different things that they practiced in Germany in the 1930s, the Hungarians were instituting the same things where we were.
So all of the sudden there were no civil rights. I was like nine years old and believe it or not, at that time I remember actually understanding what was taking place and being very aware of what was happening. And once we were occupied, it took about a year or so for things to get a little more crystallized and by 1940 they started, they had a mobilization because they were at war. And so everybody, from like 20 to 45 was inducted into the service. However, Jews, because we were politically undesirable, and besides they had anti-Jewish laws, they were not inducted into the army, but they were inducted, they made up what were called labor battalions. So all the men, the young men of military age from 20 to 45 were inducted into what they called labor battalions. And my older brothers, two older brothers, were in that group, but so was everybody else at that age if you were Jewish.
Now what they used those people for – they wore civilian clothes and they were under army jurisdiction, but they were not in the army. Now you ask yourself what they were doing? Well they were cutting down forests so the partisans couldn’t hide, they were digging minefields on the Russian front, burying the dead and all kinds of dirty details like this. And consequently a lot of them, thousands of them died from typhoid on the Russian front actually. My two brothers were there throughout the war. But they were just one example, but everybody I know, I mean a lot of people, they were all involved in that. Most of them ended up in there. Some of them were in Hungary itself. But a good amount of them ended up there.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you said to me on another occasion that whatever you had done legally was now illegal. Say a bit more about that.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right. Well, like I said we were in business. Everything was illegal. Like, my father was actually in the meat business and what happened they were giving out quotas because most of the cattle was going to the army and so they gave the businesses like a quota. You could have like one steer a week or two steers a week, whatever. And because we were Jewish, my father wouldn’t get a quota.
But the non-Jewish person, which was really a nasty man, he got most of the quota, so we had to do everything at night. We couldn’t even make a living, we couldn’t do anything. So we had to do, by the way we didn’t have electricity, we worked with lanterns. So after dark it was, you couldn’t do much. So we used to literally slaughter the animals at night. Like one or two o’clock in the morning. And I had a big brother, he was pretty healthy and strong – he would do all the work and I would hold the candles. Believe it or not, by candlelight. And by morning we had to make sure everything disappeared because we never knew when the police would come and search. So life was made very difficult.
On the other hand, at the same time I have to say, we were pretty lucky. We were doing pretty good yet because we were able to feed our family, we grew our own food, so we really in some ways we were pretty lucky in that respect. But as time went on, things were getting tighter and tighter.
By like 1941, starting ’41, especially ’42, we kept on hearing different stories that were taking place in Poland and the Ukraine of mass killings from the Einzatsgruppen, which was, they were SS units that would go from town to town and would literally take people to the fields and just kill them. And to us at that time, I know this sounds like . . . now that we’ve heard about it, we television, we see things, at that time to us that was like – we’d heard it, we believed it, but I remember none of us could quite comprehend that it’s for real. Okay, even though we believed it.
Now getting back to the labor battalions, like I said there were thousands of them in the Ukraine and in that part of Europe. Every so often one of them would come back and they would tell us stories about the massacres. And one of them, actually was a second of cousin of mine. He was there and he recognized one of the men there that was committing some of these atrocities and he, believe it or not, he was one of our neighbors. The very same man that I mentioned, he was getting all the quotas, he had a pork store.
And that he committed a lot of these atrocities himself and how mean they were. The reason I mention this is to show you that when somebody is mean, you can pick them out anyplace. It doesn’t have to be German, it could be . . . And believe me, the Germans didn’t do this by themselves. Wherever they went they had lots of help, okay? I don’t care if they went in the Ukraine, they had lots of help from the locals. They went to Lithuania; they had lots of help. Without them they couldn’t have done it. Latvia, you take Ukraine, they had more an abundance of help from all those places. So to put the blame just on them would be almost unfair. But people were capable of doing it.
Anyway, those people, like I said, we kept on hearing these stories over and over again. Then we kept on hearing that in Warsaw, they were putting women and children, just about anybody, put them on trucks and they would pipe in the exhaust into the back of the truck and literally drive around the city until they died. I mean you’re hearing this; it was beyond our imagination that it was for real. And always we believed it, we heard it, but we could not quite understand it; that the Germans are capable of doing this because they were the most educated people in the world at the time.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you and your family would remain living under these conditions as they got worse and worse until 1944. You said you were able to have food and described a little bit about that. Your father was able to sell meat though, provide it to the police. Say a little bit about that.
MARTIN WEISS:
Corruption goes everywhere. Yeah, we were not supposed to be, but we had, like I said, even though this fellow that I mentioned – he was our competitor, not only that, they had an army station there, so we got a contract to supply the army with meat, but we were not allowed to sell them because we were Jewish. They were afraid we would poison them. So we used his – we shared the profit with him. We did all the work. Okay, so we shared the profit with him, but we used his letterhead or his sales slip that it came from him rather than from us. And we did business like this for a long time.
And not only that, in those days we didn’t have telephones to be honest, there was a cook . . . oh, then they had the police. The police were unlike in the United States. They were not married. They were like a state police, they were not allowed to be married, they were strictly like a state police. They had sharp uniforms with feathers in their heads and all kinds of stuff. And they had a cook, and the cook used to . . . they sent some detectives to spy on us or try in catch us at something. She would actually come from across town to warn us to be careful. But in the meantime we supplied them. Of course we gave them the stuff for practically nothing.
BILL BENSON:
So they’re trying catch you while at the same time you’re supplying them? Interesting.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right. Right. Yeah.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you said that by 1944 you, the sense, you knew sooner or later that you were going to be picked up. People were starting to be deported and you just felt that it was inevitable. Why was that?
MARTIN WEISS:
Well, because by that time we knew we were going to be arrested sooner or later because every so often we heard rumors what they’re gonna do us. As a matter of fact, like about ’42 . . . yeah about ’42, they took certain individual families from our area throughout the state. But not everybody, just certain families under the pretext they were not full Hungarian citizens because they couldn’t prove they lived there prior to World War I, basically what it was. And they took those people, put them on a train in boxcars, and shipped them out to the Ukraine, again, near the Russian front.
Now the Russian front was, even for a German soldier, if he did something wrong and when they threatened him they threatened him to ship him to the Russian front. That’s how terrible it was.
Anyway, they took those people and shipped them out in those boxcars. And most people were poor. They had poor clothing, hardly any shoes, they didn’t have any luggage, they put stuff in sheets, believe it or like a tablecloth, on their back. And they dropped them off in the Ukraine in the forest. And it just so happened during the war years, the winters were very very cold, especially in eastern Europe it’s very very cold. But they dropped them off and they would let them loose. And they had a problem. They were not clothed well, they had no food, the Ukrainians were very very antisemitic to say the least. Plus, even the one that you could trust you couldn’t trust him.
So they were wandering around. Trying to give you a little illustration – try to imagine being in a war zone. The German soldiers were going around nuts all over the place because they were at war. The Hungarians the same thing so they would have sentries on every bridge, every crossroad. And these poor people would go trudge through the snow in different places trying to go some place and find a place to go. Wherever they were coming across a road or a bridge they would have encountered sentries and to have a little fun they would go . . . like in Europe a lot of Jewish men wore beards because they were Orthodox and the one thing they don’t do in those days they didn’t shave. They would take a match and light the beard and another guy would take a knife and cut the beard just to humiliate them.
And this went on. We used to hear these stories all the time, over and over. And then we heard stories. There was a river called the Dniester River that was loaded with bodies of these people. What were they doing when they were caught on that bridge or tried to cross the bridge, they would take them – and this by the way were Hungarian soldiers, not even German, Hungarian – they would take the children, tear them out of their mothers’ hands and throw them into the river. And then only the mother would plead and only then they would throw the mother in. But thousands and thousands of people they threw in. And by the way, the same was true in Budapest towards the end of the war. The Danube River was loaded with bodies throughout.
So the reason I’m saying this, I know it sounds very crass, but to show you that people, when they have the upper hand and they find somebody that they could just look down to like you’re not a person, they do it, and that’s all there is to it.
BILL BENSON:
Sometimes you said Marty, some of these folks who would be shipped and just dumped off at the end of the train, some would make it back and your family played a role with them.
MARTIN WEISS:
Occasionally those people that were dropped off in Ukraine, occasionally some people did make it back, they trudged back. And there was this old lady in our town, on the edge of town, she was very poor actually, but she had a broken down barn and she used to shelter them. And to show you again, we lived in our community, we lived neighborly; our neighbors were good people, they didn’t hurt us or anything like this, but we tried to send some food over to them. So, I had two younger sisters, so my mother would make up some food, some sandwiches and stuff and send it over because this lady, like I said, was very poor but she sheltered them. And that was by the way, very risky to do because if they caught you, first thing they would do is shoot you or shoot your whole family or if nothing else they would throw you into a prison and you would never see daylight again.
But anyway, so my mother used to use my little sisters to take the food up to them. And why? Because if one of us, a little bigger ones, somebody would get suspicious and we were afraid somebody would report us to the police. The curious thing is, and I hate to say this, our neighbors were all Russian okay? Now they’re called Ukrainian but at that time they were called Russian. They were good neighbors; we lived along, we went to school together and we could not trust our own neighbors. We were afraid they’ll give us up to the police that we did something.
And that is sadly to say for me, all my life I felt very bad about that only because I figured if it was turned the other way around we would have done anything to help them, never mind to give them up to the police. So maybe I’m judging them by my standards or whatever.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, did your family ever consider trying to go into hiding?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, we tried to. Yeah, okay, but for the same reason we didn’t. Because first of all, the climate was very cold, there was no place to hide, only in the forest, a large family, and who do you leave behind? You know, it’s very hard to split up, especially when we’re used to taking care of each other. God forbid that we should be split up. So it wasn’t that simple.
BILL BENSON:
In 1944 your family was forced into a ghetto at Munkacs. You would not be there for very long. Tell us what happened then.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, we were . . . actually it was Easter time ’44. We were picked up. We knew we were gonna be picked up and they locked us up in a ghetto. And it was a brick factory in Munkacs which was a big city. And they collected all the Jewish people from the whole area. They had a couple of big brickyards. And while we were there, again, we were under Hungarian jurisdiction. The Hungarian police was guarding us. Again, as soon as we got there we found out we were really in big trouble, although there was nothing much you could do.
We would sleep outside or they had those – where they kept the bricks – they were not shelters, they were ringed in, they had boards that you could see holes, the light came in, so still in Europe sometimes in May it could be very cold. It was raining a lot. But anyway, we were there and certain things would happen. I remember there was one man who was a little mentally sick or something. And an SS man would walk in and with his pistol he would go and say, “Dance!” And the man was feeble-minded you know but he would start shooting at him you know around his feet. So he would dance. Just to have fun. And when you see this as a human being – it’s very hard to imagine that other human beings could do this. Especially when the person you could see was mentally sick. So little things like this.
But anyway it was very dehumanizing. What they would do with us while we were there, they would have bricks. We would line up like a whole line of men and would take the bricks two at a time and hand them over like a chain and stack the bricks on the other side of the yard. And the next morning we would have to take the same bricks and put them over – they told us that “only work makes you free” and the fact they had that over every camp, “arbeit macht frei” in other words “work makes you free”, they tried to instill into us that all we have to do is work and we’ll live, you know. And this is the way they started.
And but anyway, we were there a short time, like about four or five weeks, about five weeks I think. And one day they pulled up a train with boxcars and immediately they had us board those trains, the boxcars.
Now at that time, you have to remember, we went as Hungarians. We were occupied by Hungary. In two months they picked up just about 600,000 Jewish people from Hungary and shipped them out to Auschwitz. In two months, okay? All this was done, not by the Nazis, not by the Germans, it was done by the Hungarians, by the Hungarian police. The reason I think it’s important to note is that, like I say, usually the blame always lies with the Germans but I want to show you that people were willingly, I mean they were doing it. And what happened is when the Germans asked for the Jews from Hungary, they didn’t think they were going to give them up, because in Hungary, even though they were antisemitic, the Jews were citizens. In other words they were considered regular citizens. But then they came to them. They said, “Oh sure, we’ll help you.” So the Germans, they didn’t have to pick us up. They just said, “Take them.”
So in two months they managed to arrest 600,000 people and ship them out. Now there was 125 to 135 people per boxcar. You have to remember young, old . . . I had one uncle, he had tuberculosis. He had TB and he was in a sanitarium. They even picked him up on a stretcher and brought him in. They wouldn’t leave him behind. And shipped him to . . . well he died just before the shipping, but the point is that they would not leave anybody behind. And it was that kind of a situation.
And what happened is that – they put us on a train. Again they put us on a train with 125-135 per boxcar with these bundles. No toilet facilities, no water, no food. And for three days and nights we were on a train.
Finally we did get to Poland. And then frankly, we got very frightened because we heard of all the things that were happening in Poland. And the reason we saw through the crack of the door the names of the cities and we also heard the Polish language spoken outside. So people knew we were in big for trouble.
But we never heard of Auschwitz until we got there. When we got to Auschwitz, it was during the night like about twelve . . . I don’t know, sometime, it was late at night, twelve o’clock at night. Anyway, they opened the doors and there were floodlights surrounding us. And you got off the train. If you ever saw bedlam, or if you could imagine hell, that must have been it. Because everyone was trying to hold on to their children; they tried to hold on to each other. And in the meantime, people in those striped clothes that you see in the museum, which prisoners wore, which was the first time we saw them, walking around with big sticks screaming and shouting “Schnell Schnell." “Get out!” and “Move, move fast!” And so everybody was trying to hold on and everybody was scared out of their wits. And the floodlights, like I said, were shining in your eyes.
But in the meantime, they had guards, with their finger on the trigger, I should say, and German police dogs are surrounding us. And until this day I don’t know why because it was all enclosed in a yard with electrified fences. And nobody could run any place.
As soon as they got off they started separating us, men from women and so on. And then we had to go through a line. Everything had to move very very fast, high speeds. And these guys with the sticks were going around and forcing that. And the Gestapo was overseeing that. And they all, whether they were nasty or not, they had to act nasty. And some were, some were just acting that way. But never the less, they separated the men from the women. Then we had to go through a line, and the officer would stand there and go like this, left or right. If you went to left, you went to your death. If you went to right, you went to work. And so basically this was our initiation or our first experience in Auschwitz.
And of course we never heard of the crematoriums. We never heard of anything like this. It wasn’t even in our vocabulary, it just didn’t exist. But anyway we went through we were picked – my father, some of my relatives, a lot of other people from my town. We went through the line. I was not that big. I was like just about 15 years old; I was actually small for my age. Turned out to be, I was the only one from the boys in my age to come through; from about 30-35 boys, all of them went first to their death the first night we came to Auschwitz. And the reason I attribute it to – I put on like two or three jackets because they told us about work – so I wanted to make myself look bigger and somehow I passed. And it was just a matter of luck actually.
And so we went through the showers. Or before we went there . . . Ok, we were separated and we were picked for work. And so they grouped us together and all the other people went to another side. And while we were standing there I noticed there was a little empty space between us and there was a group of people and I noticed my mother and my two little sisters on the other side. So I said to my father “You know, I’m going to run across this space and I’ll go with my mother because I’ll be able to get some food or something.” because my sisters were too young to be able to do it and this way I could be of help to them.
So my father said ok, so I tried to make a dash across the space. And this man with a stick in the striped uniform comes and grabs a hold of me and says, “Go back there, you can’t go there!” Like I said, very nasty. And I came back and I complained to my father, “Could you imagine? I found out he was a prisoner. He acts like that.” And, to make a long story short, we went through the showers, we came out on the other side, they cut all our hair off. With a grown man they even took a razor and shaved their body hair off. That’s to prevent them from having lice, they said. We came out on the other side. We also had these striped clothes; they gave us these striped clothes. And they took us to the barracks. And they were big barracks, almost like they were made for horses. They had like something in the middle to tie up the horses and stuff. Anyway, they were big barracks with bunks. They put in twelve people in a bunk, believe it or not, we had to sleep there.
We came out . . . oh, next morning . . . oh no, when we got to the barracks, before we went into the barracks it was already dawn was coming up. All of the sudden we saw these big flames coming out from under a bunch of pine trees. But the flames were shooting up very high into the sky. And we could also smell flesh burning. And then we saw the chimneys, the big five chimneys with black smoke coming out. And all of the sudden, at that time somebody found out what it was and told us what had happened.
And so by next morning, when we saw those fires and stuff we realized all our families were already going up in smoke by that time. I know this sounds terrible to say . . . but those fires under the trees, if you wonder what they were, the crematoriums were so overloaded, they were killing ten to twelve thousand people a day. That was the average, okay? Ten or twelve thousand people a day. So the capacity of the crematoriums couldn’t handle it so they had those pits. And they used - they’d literally burn the bodies in the pits. And that was our introduction into Auschwitz.
After that we just all went numb, okay? And while we were in Auschwitz, by the way it was late spring of ’44, it was so cold and miserable, and the reason I’m telling you this for a reason. I remember it was so cold. We were not allowed to stay in the barracks. We had to be outside in rainy, miserable, nasty weather. And we were shivering because those clothes were like pajamas believe it or not. And so 15 or 20 of us would get together in a bundle, in a bunch so we could keep each other a little warm. And that’s when we found out what it was all about.
From there on in, we just expected to be killed any minute of the day. Then we argued ourselves, “Well if they want to kill us they could have done it already. Why would they bother saving us and send us someplace else to be killed?” But your mind works . . . very funny thing. But at the time you think of all kind of things are rumors that you go by.
Again, I was lucky. I was not in Auschwitz too long. After about a week or ten days they put us on a train to go to another trip, we didn’t know where. But it turned out we were going westward this time. And the reason we had an idea where we were because we came into Austria and we recognized the Danube River. And we saw Vienna not far off. So we . . . even as a kid, even though I was never in Vienna, but I knew it was Vienna, you know. So we were sort of like said, “Okay. Now they’re gonna kill us someplace else.” So again we argued “Well, if they’re gonna kill us they could have done it there. Why take us someplace else.”
Anyway, we continued on our trip on the train and they pulled up alongside this huge mountain. It turned out to be a stone quarry. And we marched up from the train up to the top of the mountain. And this particular mountain, they had a sign on it, “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) and also the name of the camp, Mauthausen. Now to us it didn’t mean anything. But we came into the camp we realized it was very similar to Auschwitz but it was different.
Now here, the opposite was true. Instead of it being so cold, like it was in Poland, here it was the opposite. The sun was so hot and bright. Again, during the night we were in our barracks. In the morning we had to run out and we had to stay out all day in the hot sun on the top of the mountain. It was so hot that in the first few days I got some kind of an eye infection or something from the sun that I suffered throughout my whole time in the camp. Sometimes my eyes would get so glued together I couldn’t even open them. I had to use quite a bit of water just to open them up. It took awhile after I got liberated just to get it . . .
BILL BENSON:
From Mauthausen you would be sent to Melk.
MARTIN WEISS:
Mauthausen were sent to Melk. Melk was, again situated on a very nice, beautiful town. In fact, as a tourist you’d love it. They had a little, like churches in the hills, and beautiful scenery – like a picture postcard. They had castles. It was very nice but our camp was on the edge of the town.
There was – daily life in Melk was very simple, if you want to call it that. First of all, one thing became a problem. As soon as you came into the camp system, that you were always starving, always hungry. And believe it or not, the only thing you ever thought of, anything, you knew you were gonna die sooner or later, but one thing you want to do is have some food. That was the only thing that you could concentrate on.
In Melk it was very simple. We were used for labor, I mean for hard labor, which was building tunnels. That meant working with like air hammers inside a tunnel and shovels mixing cement and gravel and that kind of stuff.
BILL BENSON:
You said even picks to cut through the hard rock.
MARTIN WEISS:
Through the hard rock, right.
BILL BENSON:
In very weakened conditions.
MARTIN WEISS:
In very weakened conditions. Well in this case in the tunnel it was actually like a limestone, but it was very difficult work. We had to shovel the cement like above your head on the next level to move it up higher. Everything was done with plain manual labor. And sometimes you got an assignment; you were on a detail to go build a road. Sometimes it was building railroad tracks, depending on where you were.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you said the labor and the conditions were so awful that the death toll from each day was extraordinary.
MARTIN WEISS:
Extraordinary. During the winter months we had a death toll of about, somewhere around 70-75 a week out of a population of 12,000- 13,000. But the time that I was in Melk, every month we had a new inmates come in to replace the ones that died. Shows you, usually there were like about 3,000 inmates, new ones, just to keep the population level to a certain height because they needed the labor.
Things were not . . . the life in camp was very very simple. You worked just about all the time. In the morning you got a little piece of bread, a chunk of bread like this, like a little triangle of bread. But they gave you like a sugar beet, a broth. Actually the beets were used for cattle. It was a sugar beet and this what they used like a broth, like a sort of coffee. And you would get some of that. And for lunch they would bring out like garbage cans with sort of a dehydrated vegetable soup. Was very vile smelling. I remember even, as hungry as you were I remember the smell alone was enough to make you sick.
In the summer, they would have spinach with the sand and all, spinach soup every single day like for a month, two months. You have to remember, we were very poor conditions. I don’t have to tell what spinach does to you. People were just dropping dead like that just from dysentery. I mean, they just could not tolerate it.
We had to walk to the train, from the train. I have to skip some because I don’t want to take up too much time. But, just to give you an example how they went out of their way to make you miserable: If you were on an afternoon shift you came back from work . . . you left about 12 or one o’clock at noon and you came back about one o’clock in the morning and the lagercommandant would stand at the gate . . . By the way, we would leave to go to work or from work, they would count us, you would not believe it, at least 8-10 times before we would go out the gate. And the same on the way back. Make sure there was nobody missing. They didn’t care if how many people dropped dead, but they cared everybody had to be accounted for. So the lagercommandant would come up sometime during the night. Like the winters were very cold in Eastern Europe. In Austria too it is very cold in winter.
So we worked with cement. Cement comes in bags. So a lot of the guys, what they did they took the cement bags with the dust and all, put it under their jacket to act as a windbreaker. So the lagercommandant would come out one o’clock in the morning, stand at the gate, have the guards check every person going in through the gate, and whoever had the cement bag underneath – he would get 25 lashes with a bull whip. And these guys that were giving the lashes, by the way for some reason they were Spaniards. Don’t ask me why, but they were very well fed. They were well clothed. They had nice tailor-made – they had prison uniforms, but they were tailor-made, clean. And they doled out the lashes. Of course needless to tell you that once they got finished with this man chances are he didn’t survive too long. Just gives you an idea the cruelty and things that went on day in and day out.
And then when you get to the barracks many times, once a week, after all this, after all the ordeal, guess what you had to do? You had to stand in a line to get a haircut, once a week, okay? So sometimes you didn’t get finished with your haircut until four o’clock in the morning. That means you were dog-tired. You couldn’t even go to your bunk. And one of the things they did – your hair had to be cut close all the time – they took a razor and cut a strip right through from the front to back with a razor. It had to be shaved. Why? Because in case you escape, not that you had a chance to escape, you would be recognized immediately. So this just gives you an example of the humiliation and constant . . . And then again, and the food became a problem all the time, more and more. The later it came in the war, the worse the food became.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, by the spring of 1945 as the Allies are closing in, the Germans – they began to move you again - and they moved you to yet another place. And tell us about going to Gunskirchen.
MARTIN WEISS:
Again, once the war was . . . the Russians were coming in from Hungary and so on, they moved us back to Mauthausen and from there they had us go on a forced march all the way across Austria to an area of Linz, it’s called Gunskirchen. And we came to this new camp. And this particular new camp, you could see was in a forest. Again they put us in this camp. And there were quite a few people there already. And it was again, at night. We had to go in; everybody had to go inside the barrack. You’re probably all familiar with an army barrack? The size? Five thousand men in one barrack, okay? Five thousand for overnight.
So obviously we were standing up like this, cramped like sardines. And I remember I was younger so I used wiggle a little bit just to crouch a little bit so I could rest. But in the morning, god only knows how many people didn’t make it through the night. So this just gives you an idea. This is towards the end. By that time, by the way, the food was practically nil. The bread we got was mildew and sawdust; the bread was made out of sawdust, it was full of mildew, they couldn’t even cut it. You just got it like in crumbs. Like I said, full of mildew and we just ate that.
And by that time we were all about ready . . . just about finished. But I’m gonna tell you one thing. While I came into this camp, by the way when I was in Melk, I was with a cousin of mine. We were in the same barrack, but when we evacuated we were separated. He went to a different place than I went. I came to this camp, okay? Out of thousands of people, there were like about 12,000- 13,000 people in this one too, I ran into his brother, which was my cousin. He came with the Hungarian labor battalions. They didn’t know what to do with them so the Hungarians took them into Austria and they put them into this concentration camp.
So they were there a short time. They were still in good shape and they were young guys, 20-23 years old. And so I hooked up with him. But as soon as I came there I ran into him. That was a godsend at the time.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you said the Germans, as they moved you, one of their motivations was to; they wanted to be captured if it was going to end, by the Americans or the British.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right, that was the story we got. That was what we figured out. They were afraid to be captured by the Russians because they were very harsh on the Russians and it was payback time. And they knew it.
BILL BENSON:
So as a result of that you would be liberated by the Americans right? Tell us - today, May 5th, is the 64th anniversary of Marty’s liberation. This very day. Will you tell us about your liberation, Marty?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes. I really would like to close with this since we are running out of time. Like I mentioned I ran into this cousin of mine in this particular place. And he was in fairly good shape. His friends were; there were two other, there were three of them actually. When we found out we were liberated, we didn’t believe it. We were afraid to move out of the camp because we thought it was a trick. As you go out the gate they’ll mow us down with machine guns. So we stayed an extra night in the camp because we didn’t see Americans, we didn’t see any troops. And finally the next day we walked out.
First thing we did: went looking for food. I’m gonna skip just to give you a little idea what I’m trying to tell you. When we walked out looking for food we were in this open field and we saw this abandoned army truck and so we went over to the truck and the truck was locked. And so one of the guys, like I said, they were in pretty good shape; he just took his fist and went right through the glass. And there was this big tub of lard on the front seat. And all the glass just fell right into the lard. But we wanted the lard because it had something to do with food. We knew we couldn’t eat the lard, but it had something to do with food.
So we took the lard out on the grass and we just took our hand and skimmed off the glass with the lard and threw it away. But we saved the lard. We go to the back of the truck and we found a bunch of leather hides. And these hides were really prime property because after the war you couldn’t find shoes or clothes in Europe even if you had money. It just didn’t exist. So we got this idea, we’ll go to a shoemaker and we’ll have our . . . we needed shoes. Each one of us got a bunch of whatever we could carry; not much because we were in poor shape. But we rolled up the hides and we took them with us.
We started marching. Then we saw this farm house not far away. So we marched up to this farm house. Now mind you, by this stage of the game, let me tell you something, we were so full of hate for the Nazis, to us every German was a Nazi, every Nazi was a German, period. There was no distinction. We were angry. We were frustrated. We were hungry, more than anything else.
We came up to the farm house and to my amazement today . . . and by the way I forgot about this all together, about three or four years ago as I started to speak, it sort of hit me, this incident just came back to me. We came to the farm house. These big guys that were in good shape, they knocked on the door, we didn’t barge in, a German house on a farm, the lady opened the door a crack. She was afraid to even open the door. And she asked us what we want. We ask her to give us some eggs and some flour and she obliged. And some water of course.
And she had a barn outside in the backyard and she had one of those kettles that you know like you see in the cowboy movies? Where you boil water, whatever. We made a fire and we got some water going. One of the guys took those, the flour, the lard and the eggs, mixed it up and made dumplings. That was our first meal.
And in fact, one of the guys was attached to us, he was an older guy. Older, he was like in his low fifties, but he was an old man, you know, which was unusual too. Somebody over fifty didn’t live. A day or two later he died because he ate too much. It didn’t agree with him. But anyway, after we finished eating, one of the fellows suggested, we should take some of these hides, each one should take off a couple and give it to the lady . . .
BILL BENSON:
These incredibly precious hides . . .
MARTIN WEISS:
Right. Not only that, we were incredibly angry.
BILL BENSON:
Right, but you paid her.
MARTIN WEISS:
And full of hate, okay? And what amazed me; none of us said a word. We just took, contributed to the bundle and went back to the door and gave it to the lady. And you know what amazed me? I forgot about it entirely. A few years ago; like three or four years ago I think, somehow or another I remembered that particular incident.
So now I always like to close with that because I really am amazed today that we behaved so
BIL BENNSON:
Humanly, so civilized.
MARTIN WEISS:
So normal. Because believe me, we didn’t feel normal. We felt really full of hate and venom. I mean, just if somebody would’ve said “Here’s a gun, this guys was a Nazi. Shoot him.” I don’t think I would have hesitated so much. But we treated that lady . . . we never barge in, we never took advantage, and we actually gave her payment for what she gave us.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, let me just say a couple things to close before turning back to you. May I do that?
MARTIN WEISS:
Sure.
BILL BENSON:
I wish we had several more hours with you. Not only to hear more about, more detail about what Marty’s told us, but also what he experienced and went through after liberation. After that to try to find family members, and make it to the United States eventually and build a new life here. But we don’t have the time for that so I want to thank all of you for being here. I’d like to remind you all that we do a First Person every Wednesday with one exception I think between now and August 26th, as well as Tuesdays through the end of July. We’d like to welcome you back to our First Person program if you could join us this year or next year.
We will have another First Person program tomorrow, May 6th, when our First Person will be Mrs. Inge Katzenstein who is from Germany. Mrs. Katzenstein and her family fled Germany following Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass” to Kenya. They struggled to rebuild a life in Kenya until 1947. Then, during the Mau Mau uprising, made their way to the United States. So please, if your schedule permits, come back another time.
It’s our tradition at First Person, that our First Person has the last word. And so with that, I’d like to turn back to Marty to close today’s First Person Program.
MARTIN WEISS:
In closing I would just like to close with this. Six million murdered in the most brutal way, one and a half million of them children, is an abstraction. The only time six million means something, when it is multiplied by one, one, and one and so on. Just think the contributions they might have made to the world. They were denied their lives. We can’t allow to deny their deaths as well.
They don’t have markers or gravestones. Instead we have the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Not only is it a tribute to them, but it serves as an educational tool to teach us tolerance and good citizenship. We must also remember millions more that lost their lives because of prejudice and hate.
How does hate start in a society? It is really very simple. You dehumanize the person or the population and the public joins in with fervor, just like a mob. Not to remember them would be like dying twice. Therefore, as human beings it is our duty not to forget and to do something about it. If not, we have no right to call ourselves civilized. I would also like to point out in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Germany was one of the most democratic and educated countries in the world. They had the best known composers, scientists, and philosophers. Yet they were capable of committing the worst crimes and atrocities in history by dehumanizing its victims. To me, the answer is simple: You teach children prejudice and hate, not only do they bring carnage to millions of people; they also destroy themselves as we saw with the Nazis and we see today in the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, it is vital that we reverse this trend with education. Thank you very much.
Museum
