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BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon, and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the Museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us. We are in our ninth season of First Person and our First Persontoday will be Mr. Marty Weiss, whom you shall meet shortly.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust, who share with us their firsthand 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 until August 27th. In June and July, we will also have First Person programs on Tuesdays as well as Wednesdays. The Museum’s website at www.USHMM.org provides a list of upcoming First Person guests. When you go to the website, just click on First Person and it takes you right there.
This 2008 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. Marty Weiss will share with us his First Person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 45 minutes.
If time allows, you will have an opportunity to ask Marty some questions. Before you are introduced to Marty, I have a couple of announcements and requests of you. First, we ask if it is at all possible, please stay seated with us through our one-hour program. That way it will minimize any interruptions for Marty as he’s speaking.
Secondly, if we do have a question-and-answer period and you have a question, I ask that you make your question as brief as possible. I will then repeat the question so everyone in the room, including Marty, hears it, and then he will respond to your question. I’d like to ask that if you have a cell phone or pager that has not yet been turned off, if you wouldn’t mind doing so now.
For those of you who may have passes today for the Permanent Exhibition, please know that they are good throughout the entire afternoon so you can stay with us through our one-hour program and still see the Permanent Exhibition.
In January, the United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum announced that it began providing information to Holocaust survivors and their families from the International Tracing Service, or ITS Archive. Located in Germany, the Archive was the largest, closed Holocaust archive in the world containing information on approximately 17.5 million victims of the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews.
After years of effort, the archive has been opened to the Museum. The ITS material is being transferred in digital form to the Museum in a series of installments, the first of which was received in August 2007. The ITS Archive includes new information about today’s First Person, Marty Weiss.
More information on the ITS collection can be found on the Museum’s website, or by visiting the Museum’s Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors that is located on the second floor of the Wexner Learning Center.
The Holocaust was a 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. Gypsies, the handicapped 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. 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.
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…
MARTIN WEISS:
I knew that democracy was a very important thing, only because we had other countries in the area like Poland or Hungary. In Poland, they had a dictatorship. In Hungary, they had a different system. None of them were very democratic, to say the least, but Czechoslovakia was.
Like I say, at an early age, by the time I was in third grade, they were teaching us how to vote for class president. It’s only years later I realized…I appreciated the fact that they were aware of that. I came from a family of nine children. I had a lot of older…I was like number seven so my older brothers and sisters were already grown up and my brothers were going away from home trying to make it on their own.
Frankly, when they worked at home—we had a farm and my father had a business—they worked hard but they didn’t get paid, so they wanted to go find something for themselves. So we were looking forward to a more modern society, if you will.
We were lucky where I lived—we had a summer resort so we had a lot of people from outside come on vacation, so we had a lot of influence from that area. My sister was old enough that she was going to school away from home. Because of that influence, it had some influence on me as I was growing up because all we looked forward to was trying to go into a modern world—a little more modern life.
To put it simply, I thought we were living fairly good. However, by 1938 when Hitler started making a lot of noise, everybody was very jittery. It was the kind of a thing where everybody knew something bad was happening but nobody could imagine what was to follow.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, if I could just ask you a couple more questions before we turn to that. I believe you said your family had been in Czechoslovakia for a couple of centuries and not only did you come from a family where there were nine children, but you also had a large extended family.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, very large. My father had several brothers, like about five, and they all had children. They all had anywhere from one to seven and also we were nine.
BILL BENSON:
So there were a lot of cousins and uncles and aunts?
MARTIN WEISS:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
Your father, was he a veteran?
MARTIN WEISS:
He was a veteran. Actually, he was a veteran of World War I, but he fought under Hungarians, because we were under the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to World War I.
BILL BENSON:
Right. I was struck by this: You said it a few moments ago and the words you used with me one time were “It was really nice living.”
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
I think you came from an Orthodox family but you lived comfortably with the Christian community around you.
MARTIN WEISS:
Oh, yes. All our neighbors were Russian, actually, or Russian speaking. It’s not the Russia like from Moscow, but they were what they call a Rus; in fact, they called the area Karpatska Rus. So they were primarily Greek Orthodox in religion, but we used to go to school together. We lived together and we never had any problem. We got along fairly well I’d say.
MARTIN WEISS:
Then, of course, all of that would change dramatically for you and your family once the Hungarians occupied your part of Czechoslovakia.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about those events.
MARTIN WEISS:
Like I said, when Hitler started on the move in 1938, early 1939, we were occupied in March of 1939, to be exact, by the Hungarians because they were allies of Germany. They sort of like took this part because that used to belong to them prior to World War I.
That was the reason they used, you know, that they were entitled to it. Hitler gave it to them because they were allies. As soon as they came in, at first my parents were not too upset by it because they said, “Well, they weren’t so bad. We could get by with the Hungarians.”
But as soon as they occupied our area, right away they started acting just like the Germans did because they were using the model of Germany. The army was behaving brutally. Maybe not immediately, but by 1940/1941 they were duplicating what the Germans were doing. They were just as badly behaved.
BILL BENSON:
You told me a story that you remember a small contingent of Czech soldiers held off a massive Hungarian army. Say a little bit about that.
MARTIN WEISS:
We had a small Panzer division, about 300 men, I think, from what I remember. But they had very good tanks and very good Panzers. They were, actually, at least as good as the Germans were, because in those days, believe it or not, a lot of the countries like Poland or Hungary, they had equipment from World War I.
But Czechoslovakia, for some reason, was very up to date in that they were a small country but militarily, their equipment was as good as the Germans. However, when Prague fell, when the Nazis came into Prague and took that over, those 300 were trapped in our area, and they only had one small road to escape back to their home.
So the government told them to pack up and evacuate and go home because the fighting was over for them. But for about three weeks—I remember we used to laugh at it—300 men kept out 14,000 Hungarian troops outside of our town. They were fighting there.
Only after they got orders to leave, they left, but for about three weeks they kept back 14,000 soldiers with these 300 men. It sounds very heroic, but I realized when the Hungarians came into town when the Czechs pulled out, and they came on bicycles—14,000 men on bicycles.
BILL BENSON:
You remember seeing that, don’t you?
MARTIN WEISS:
They had tanks from World War I. Even to me as a kid, they looked small. They looked like a baby’s crib. Incredible! Even at that time, it made a very big impression on me.
BILL BENSON:
So now the Hungarians have occupied where you live. Tell us what happened to you and your family at that point.
MARTIN WEISS:
After occupation, all our liberties went out the window. Again, things were not so bad in the beginning. I had one brother, as a matter of fact, who was inducted into the army immediately.
BILL BENSON:
Into the Hungarian army.
MARTIN WEISS:
Into the Hungarian army, right. I had another brother who was in the Czech army just about the same time. He came home just around when the Hungarians came in. He came home on furlough but he never went back because the Czech government ceased to exist.
So anyway, the next in line was my oldest brother, was in the Czech army. My other brother was inducted into the Hungarian army right in the beginning and he was used as a chauffeur for a colonel to Poland. But after about a few months of that, the Hungarian government decided that all the Jews would be inducted into the service but not into the army, because by now we were politically undesirable.
They created what they called labor battalions. By that, I mean they were under military rule, under military law; however, they were used for slave labor. They wore civilian clothes. They were not allowed to touch a weapon, of course; they didn’t have any.
They used them for cutting down forests so the partisans couldn’t hide in the forests. Eventually, both of my brothers ended up in the Ukraine. They used them for picking mine fields, burying the dead, all those types of jobs. They were put into situations where a lot of people died just from typhoid and different things that happened on a front level.
Like I said, my second brother, he was in the Hungarian army but they threw him out and put him also into the labor battalion because the Jews were undesirable. We were non-citizens by now.
BILL BENSON:
Was your father able to continue his farm for a while?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, we were allowed to keep our farm. A lot of people, their businesses were taken away. Oddly enough, my father’s business, somehow they overlooked us and we kept our business.
BILL BENSON:
How was he able to make ends meet under those circumstances?
MARTIN WEISS:
Well, we did. All of us, from the time I was like this big, we all worked from morning until night. We had a certain amount of land; we cultivated our own land. We did business. But we were always…from time I was like…when the war broke out, I was like nine years old and right then and there, I started helping.
I had another brother, he was about seven years older than I was and he did most of the work but I was his helper, if you will, so we all chipped in, the girls too. My sister, by the way, was thrown out of school because she was Jewish so she couldn’t continue school, and so on. So life was ever changing for the worse.
BILL BENSON:
You said to me that over time things that you had done that were legal now were all illegal.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right, everything you did, like doing business was illegal. My father was not allowed to… he didn’t get a quota for his business. They took away your livelihood. If you had a job, you lost it and so on. Like I said, my sister was going to school and they threw her out of school because she was Jewish.
The teachers all lost their jobs, and so on. It just went right down. They were copying all the rules and laws that were instituted in Germany. The Hungarians were using them.
BILL BENSON:
You lived in a fairly rural area.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
You said that you got to a point where you did whatever it took to survive, and that most of what was done took place at night. Will you say a bit more about that?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, we did a lot of things at night. My father was in the meat business, so we had to go buy everything, because like I said, they didn’t give us a quota so we had to go do everything at night. We had to buy the cattle or the sheep or calves, whatever—and we had to slaughter them at night.
We had no electricity, by the way. We lived in a rural area. We used candles or kerosene lamps. So we used a lantern and we had to do it during the night so that none of our neighbors would notice it, because we didn’t know who we could trust. You never knew who would give you up to the police.
I was, like I say, you know, a kid—10 or 11 years old—by that time. I used to hold the candles or lantern and my brother did all the work just by that light during the night. By morning, all this had to disappear because there were always police trying to catch you at something.
BILL BENSON:
As early as 1941, Jews were being picked up in the area where you lived.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
You told me that they would literally be taken to the Russian Front and dropped off. Will you say something about that?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, this is something that you don’t see in history books or anything. Like I said, we were considered, by the way, Hungarian citizens and so on. But the Hungarian government decided, when the Germans were picking up Jews and sending them off to Poland or to Ukraine from Holland or Germany, the Hungarians started doing the same thing.
But they did it on the pretext that they were not full citizens. If they didn’t live there, let’s say, like my parents, for a long time, maybe 100 years, that they were not citizens. So they randomly picked up Jewish families from different places. They would give them a couple of hours—they had to pack.
Most of them were very poor. They hardly had any luggage but they took bed sheets and put utensils and clothes, whatever they could carry. They were only allowed to carry a certain amount. This was as early as 1941, early 1942. By that time, we heard rumors that Ukraine…because you have to remember now, the Germans were ready.
They occupied the Ukraine and they were towards Russia, so they were deep into the eastern part of Europe. We kept on hearing of atrocities in that part of the world. But they picked out these people randomly and transported them near the Russian Front, actually.
What was so bad about it is that the winters during World War II were extremely cold. I remember every winter was like freezing. Zero degrees was a given, even where we lived, and this was even east of us. They took those people in the boxcars and they took them out to the Ukraine in the middle of a field, like in a forest. They would drop them off.
Mind you, the snow was very high and it was very cold and these people were let loose to wander. But as they were wandering, wherever went, they ran into a lot of problems. The Ukrainians were very antisemitic, to put it simply. A lot of them were pro-German and a lot of them were anti-German so they had both sides.
The German troops were all over the place and so were Hungarian troops, like on the crossroads. Any little bridge had a sentry. They made it so rough on them wherever they went. They would pick on them. They would take them and, like, take a knife and…because a lot of Orthodox Jews used to have a beard, they used to take a knife and just to have fun, just for fun, they would shoot somebody or sometimes they would take a match and light their beard.
We used to hear all the stories of all the things that were happening to them. But they also had a disadvantage because the population in Ukraine was also very antisemitic and not only would they not help them, but they would actually let the dogs loose on them.
So every so often a family or so would make a backtrack and they would come back to our area. Again, they were on the run so they had to be hidden. So I remember, they would come to town and there was this very poor, old lady. She had like an old barn and she would put them up for the night.
My mother would make up sandwiches and stuff to send to them. We had to be so careful to feed those people. My mother would send my two little sisters to carry the sandwiches so nobody would get suspicious. So this just gives you an idea of how threatening everything was.
By the way, helping somebody was a very simple ticket to either go to prison or whatever, but it wouldn’t be good so everybody had to be very, very careful.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you and your family would remain under these conditions, although they would get continuously worse, until 1944. Those conditions, as they got worse, for example, your father in order to survive and have food for the family, had a black-market operation going, giving meat to the police. Tell us about that.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, that’s just a little funny thing. Everything that we did was illegal, actually. But what happened is we supplied the police with the meat for their kitchen. They had a cook. By the way, we had no phones there, and they were like on one end of the town and we were on the other.
Every so often, when the detectives came into town trying to catch us at something, the cook would walk all the way from there to our house and tell us to be careful because they were trying to catch us at something.
So we had this thing going…. It was one of those things because the police were getting their meat at a cut-rate price. My father would give them everything at a cut-rate price so they sort of left us alone. They turned a blind eye. The cook would be the one that kept us informed.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, you told me that by 1944, your family felt that you were going to be arrested sooner or later. It was inevitable in your mind.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, by that time already, it was clear as day, because we already knew that all the people in Germany were emptied out, all the Jewish people that is. They were sent to the Ukraine. There was no bigger fear than to go to the Ukraine or Poland, because we kept on hearing of all the atrocities that were taking place.
You may not have ever heard of it… that the SS had what they called Einsatzgruppen, which would go from town to town, in Poland or the Ukraine, and literally empty out all the Jews from town, take them out to the fields and just shoot them.
But before they did that, they had to dig their graves, like a mass grave, first. We used to hear these stories. No matter how much we heard, we could not quite comprehend it because to us, Germany was a civilized country. No matter how much we heard, we just could not quite comprehend, if you will. So it was very hard… Yet we knew and we heard…
Oh, and the reason we heard a lot that was very reliable was because a lot of the people that were on those work battalions, like my brothers, and I had cousins there, some of them came back and told us of the atrocities that were going on, not only what the Germans were doing but also the Hungarians.
There was a river there called the Dniester River. A lot of these people that I mentioned, they were picked up from our area, they were taken out there, some of those were caught there and the Hungarians troops, just for fun, would do all those things I mentioned to you before—lighting a match to a beard.
They would take the children and literally bash them, babies, against rocks, while the mother was pleading, and they would throw them all into the river. So the river was floating full of bodies for a long, long time. So hearing these stories, like I said, we had no place to go. We could not trust anybody. Most of us couldn’t afford to…sometimes if you had extra money, you could bribe your way out of some place, but there was nowhere to go. It was the kind of a thing where you just waited to be picked up.
BILL BENSON:
Did you consider at any point trying to flee and hide? Was that an option?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, we were considering going to the mountains but, again, we lived in a very cold climate. I had, you know, my mother and my little sisters. Some of the adults, we could have probably survived maybe for a while. Again, but you could not trust anybody. This is peculiar. This is something I still have a hard time with.
The people where we lived, the Russians, hated Hungarians politically just like we did. We didn’t like them and they didn’t like them any more. Hungarians treated those people like subhuman, just like the Germans did. They looked at Slavs as being not as equal to a German in terms of intelligence or whatever.
So we had the same enemy, the same political point of view, if you will, but even though we were neighbors, we lived in the same area, somehow we could not trust them. We were always afraid that they would give us up to the police. Consequently, we ended up not going, because of my mother and little sisters. What do you do in a forest?
BILL BENSON:
With a family of eight—six kids still at home?
MARTIN WEISS:
Whom do you sacrifice? How do you split up the family? That was a big thing.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us the story you told me about the man from your town who did take his family into hiding.
MARTIN WEISS:
Actually, there was one man from a couple of towns over who was a very modern-type guy. He even had a motorcycle. In those days, that was unusual. He was probably around 50-ish or so because he had big children. He did decide…he took a bunch of people from his family.
I remember he had two sons and I think one or two daughters. They were all around 18 to 23 or somewhere around there. But he decided to go into hiding and he was quite a capable type of guy. They survived in the woods until, I think, somewhere around January of 1945 or somewhere around there.
Again, one of them went out to get food or something and somebody noticed them. They called the police and the police picked them up. This is just what I heard: They took all the people who were involved in that group, they took them out without clothes in the winter, and they dragged them with chains like dogs until they came to some stable.
They tied them up in the stable and just killed all of them. Those were the Hungarians who did that. One of the natives from the town was the one who reported them. I could never understand it because, like I said, they had the same enemy we did. It was just one of those things.
BILL BENSON:
Right. He reported him for just hiding in the woods with his family?
MARTIN WEISS:
Right, hiding in the woods, right.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, in 1944, your family was forced into the ghetto but you wouldn’t be there very long. Tell us about going to the ghetto and then what happened.
MARTIN WEISS:
By 1944, most of the people in Europe were already picked up. They already went to…like from Holland, from different places—Germany, the Czech Republic, they were gone already, but we were left. One of the reasons was because Germany, at the time, didn’t think the Hungarian government would give up the Jews because they considered them citizens.
But come 1944, so much so, they sent Adolf Eichmann to negotiate with the Hungarian government for the Jews and they were willing to give them some kind of bargaining position. But when he came to Hungary and he asked for them, and you know what the Hungarian government says? Surprisingly, they didn’t even argue.
They said, “Oh, you want them? Here, you can have them,” so in two months, they picked up 600,000 Jews from Hungary and shipped them out to Auschwitz. This was all done in two months by the Hungarians, not by the Germans. They did it all on their own.
The reason I point that out is because we always think of the Nazis, the Germans, and so on, and we don’t realize that other people are capable of dastardly acts just like the Germans were, that they were not alone. They were not supermen. They were just people that chose to do whatever they were doing.
BILL BENSON:
Taking the 600,000 Jews, you said to me that there were no Jews left. They got them all.
MARTIN WEISS:
No, no, everybody, right. I had an uncle who had TB and he was in a sanitarium. They even picked up him on a stretcher. They didn’t overlook anybody. It didn’t matter if it was a child, old man, or sick—everybody had to go.
BILL BENSON:
What happened to you when they picked you up?
MARTIN WEISS:
Well, once we were picked up, we were sent to the ghetto in Munkacs and over there, too, a couple of SS were in charge but it was the Hungarian police that were running the ghetto. Like I said, the SS were very present already. The ghetto was in a brick factory.
So what they were doing is having us line up every day from one end of the property to the other end and we had to pass bricks, two at a time, down the line and pile up the bricks on one end. The next morning we would have to do them back the other direction. They wanted to show us that idleness is not healthy, that you have to work.
BILL BENSON:
So it was complete make work.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right. We were there only, like I said, a very short time—about a month, five weeks, I think, if I remember. From there, one day we got orders that we were going on a transport and we had no idea where we were going. These boxcars pulled up—big train—I remember it was like 100, 120 cars.
They opened up the doors and shoved us into these trains. You have to remember, again, families, a lot of people had small children. In those days, most people had three to five kids and usually they were like younger and there were a lot of old people. At the time we went, there were 125 to 135 people in a boxcar—one boxcar, cattle car.
The only thing we had to open was like a crack in the door like this. When the train started moving, we came to a place, we had no idea where we were going, but we came to Poland. We knew we were in Poland because we heard the Polish language outside the train, plus we saw the signs of the cities on the top of the station.
BILL BENSON:
Looking out through this crack?
MARTIN WEISS:
Looking out through this crack. Again, from the time we left home we knew we were in trouble, but when we heard it was Poland, we knew it was terrible because we heard of the atrocities. But again, we tried to reason that the Germans are not barbarians; they’re not that bad.
By the way, when we were on the train we had no water, no facilities, nothing. They just locked us in there. By the time we came to a place, we found out later was Auschwitz, the train pulled into the camp. It was midnight or somewhere around there.
They opened the doors and everybody started screaming. It was like utter bedlam, like Dante’s Inferno. It was just incredible. We got out of the train and everybody ran with big sticks, trying to hit you and so on. Then we found out they were other prisoners. They had striped uniforms.
We got off the train and the first thing they did was separate us. Everybody tried to hold on to the family—the children. The first thing they did was separate the men from the women on two different sides. In the meantime, they had very bright floodlights like on a football field.
Surrounding us, there were guards with their finger on the trigger, every few feet, and also police dogs. In hindsight, I could never understand why because we were all in a barbed-wire area that was all surrounded…electrical barbed wire around us, but they still had the guards. So naturally, we were scared out of our wits.
Like I said, as soon as we got off the train, the first thing they did was separate the men from the women. My father, my uncles, my cousins, we all went on one side. Then there was an officer standing there. Later on, we found out his name was Mengele or Dr. Mengele.
He was standing there, tall with a sharp outfit—his uniform—and he would just go like this and like that as we passed. While we were on the train, we knew that the Germans said they wanted people to work. So I was, like, just about, almost 15—just about 15. Anyway, I put on about three jackets to look bigger and I walked through with my father and my brother and we all passed.
While we went into one…we were on one side after the selection, I noticed my mother and my two little sisters not far away, like a little empty space in between us. I said to my father, “I’m going to go run over there where they are because I’m a little older and I’ll be more capable of getting some food or something,” because my sisters were too young.
So my father says, “Okay,” so I started going to make a dash across this little space. As I tried to make that dash across the space, this fellow with a striped uniform, with a stick, grabbed a hold of me and said, “You can’t go there,” and he pushed me back.
I was so hurt. I came back and said to my father, “Could you imagine, he wouldn’t let me go over there. Why would he do that?” The next morning I found out the reason he did that is to save my life. From there, after we were selected, we were taken to a shower…to a place with a big barrack and we had to shed our clothes and they sheared everybody’s hair off.
With the women, they also cut all their hair off and so on. With the grown men, they even took a razor and even their body hair was shaved off—everything from top to bottom. We went into the showers, we came out the other side and all our clothes and shoes were left behind.
They gave us the striped uniforms that you see today in the movies, or whatever. And we got wooden shoes. Some of them didn’t even get a wooden shoe with a cover. They were like clogs, like you take to the shower, with a little canvas over the top. Some had like the Dutch shoes, you know those wooden shoes.
At any rate, we went through this, we came out on the other side. Believe it or not, my father was standing next to me and I didn’t even recognize him. That’s how odd we looked. But from there, they marched us to a barrack. When we came to the barrack, it was like early dawn.
We saw this big fire under a bunch of pine trees but the flames were very high, right into the trees. We found out the next morning what it was. And by the way, we saw crematoriums, which we never knew what they were or even heard the word “crematorium.”
There were big, big chimneys with black smoke coming out. But the flesh has a certain odor and we could smell flesh burning. Again, we had no idea what was going on, but then finally somebody told us what happened, that those people that came with us, they were already being exterminated.
The reason the people were in the open field using the fire is because the crematoriums’ capacity couldn’t burn all the corpses so they had to use outside pits, and that was the fire we saw. The reason I mention this is because you can imagine the influx of people every day with those trains.
Six-hundred-thousand people, they accomplished in two months. That means just if you take just the Hungarian Jews alone, ’til this day, it’s almost impossible to understand.
BILL BENSON:
And that included your mother and your sisters.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right, right. By the next morning, we knew that our families were wiped out, so that gave us a different perspective. Now here, we were in Auschwitz; I was lucky we weren’t there too long. While we were there, we were only allowed to go into the barrack at night and, of course, it was still very cold for some reason.
It was spring of the year but it was very cold. Now, we had to stand outside from morning until night. It was muddy, cold, drizzly. It was like…I can’t explain it, the climate. You would not believe that in the spring of the year, it could be that cold. We soon discovered that if 15 to 20 of us got together, our body heat would keep us a little warmer. We just couldn’t take the cold that much because all we had is…these clothes were like pajamas, literally.
BILL BENSON:
From there, you would be sent to do slave labor.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes. From there…again, I wasn’t there long. I was sent to Mauthausen, again, by train. And again, we had no idea where we were going. But when we came to Mauthausen, the train pulled up alongside this big mountain in Austria. Oh yes—we found out we were in Austria only because we passed over the Danube and we recognized the Danube and we saw Vienna far off.
So we knew were in Austria. So we pulled up alongside this mountain. We were disembarked and then we marched up to the top of the mountain and there was a big sign, “Mauthausen” so we knew we were there. We had never heard of that place.
Anyway, it turned out to be a huge, huge camp. Here, things were much different. Instead of the weather being so bad, here it was just the opposite. It was sunny, bright. Again, we had to go into the barracks at night just for sleep. Early in the morning, we would have to get out and stand outside from morning until night in the hot sun on top of the mountain.
To show you how the complete opposite has an effect on you too, I got some kind of eye infection and, believe it or not, I had it throughout the time I was in camp. Sometimes my eyes would shut and I couldn’t even open them up. It took me two or three years after the war to get it cleared up.
Being at Mauthausen, again, I wasn’t there long. We were shipped out to a sub-camp. I went to a place called Melk. There were a lot of others. There were about 30 or 40 sub-camps from Mauthausen. Each one had a job to do. The place I went to, we had to build tunnels under a mountain.
The reason for building the tunnels was when the Allies were bombing all the factories, they decided to put all the factories underground. Therefore, we had to work at high speed to build these tunnels. In less than a year, we built like seven tunnels, believe it or not.
BILL BENSON:
Now you’re 15 years old and you’re building tunnels. Just say a little bit about how hard that was.
MARTIN WEISS:
Well, hard is probably putting it mildly. We were worked… like they didn’t care how many people died. All they cared about was that everybody worked hard. We had to dig these tunnels and our death rate was so high, just out of exhaustion, not that anybody killed anybody, that every month, they had to have about 3,000 people replaced.
They would have a transport come in from Auschwitz with new recruits, if you will, every month to fill in the gap because the population in Melk was about 13,000 and they tried to keep it at 13,000 because of the labor force. So every month, they had about 3,000 new people come in, so that means 3,000 people died the month before, just to keep up the numbers.
While we were there, the work itself was very hard. The food, of course, which I haven’t touched on, that’s all we ever thought about and talked about was how hungry we were. In the morning, we got a chunk of bread which was half sawdust, but anyway a chunk of bread.
We had like a half a pint or so of beet broth, which was from sugar beet. For lunch, they would bring out food, depending upon where you worked, that was like a mixed, dehydrated vegetable soup, if you want to call it. The smell of it was alone to get you sick.
During the summer, we would get [(with the sand and all)], spinach soup. We were in very poor physical condition so you could imagine what a spinach soup did to the person. So we had a big loss of people. People were dying of dysentery. You just couldn’t tolerate it.
Then another part in the summer, we would get carrots with the carrot tops. Unlike American carrots, those were ordinary, natural-grown carrots and the tops are very bitter—very, very bitter. That were cooked all together and we used to get this. This is the kind of stuff we ate.
No matter what it was, we would eat it but you’d never get enough. We were always hungry. That’s all you would ever dream of. In fact, I’ll even go as far as saying I remember being next to someone and saying to them that, “You know, I would like to have a loaf of bread and just eat enough of it so I could leave a piece off.”
I shouldn’t eat it up like a pig, just the whole thing. I should have just enough left over that I could say I’m civilized. Then if they take me and shoot me, that’s okay.” I remember saying that, so it just gives you an idea of how hungry…
BILL BENSON:
In the meantime, the work that you were forced to do was all by hand with picks and axes.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right, yes, we had to work with mixed cement and gravel and we had to lift the pails high up in the tunnel and so on. Everything was just plain hard labor. There was very little machinery. It was just done by, literally, a pick and shovel. We used some dynamite to blow into the mountain and those air hammers.
Now you have to remember, I was like 15 years old and those air hammers and [all these] were made out of stainless steel and they were very, very heavy. You had to take them above your head and drill in through the [thing].
Can you imagine the noise in the tunnel, the whole idea? Plus, you were weak. Sometimes you wonder how you did it but you did it.
BILL BENSON:
Absolutely. You would move one more time, I think, from there to Gunskirchen.
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us just a little bit about that. By now the Allies are beginning to close in.
MARTIN WEISS:
Now we heard that the Russians are in Hungary and we heard all different things. That’s the only way… We didn’t get much news. We had no way of getting it, but somehow that we would hear, that the Russians were on the march and the Hungarians and Germans were retreating.
We got orders one day they were going to evacuate us back to Mauthausen, so when we came back to Mauthausen, we didn’t know what they’d do with us. Now, one thing, we were resigned that they were going to kill us. There was no way they were going to let us go.
We figured they wouldn’t want us to tell anybody what happened. Knowing them, we sort of were convinced that that’s what they were going to do. Anyway, they took us back to Mauthausen and we were resigned that they were going to kill us.
I don’t want to give anybody the impression that everything was about Jewish people; it wasn’t. The killing in Auschwitz was about Jews. But the rest of it…and I was in Melk, they were Germans, they were political prisoners, there were criminals, there were a lot of Polish, and a lot of Russians. In fact, Russian POWs ended up in camp.
That was against the Geneva Convention rules, but they did. There were a lot of Greeks, Italians, you name it, they were there. But when we got back to Mauthausen, they separated us out—the Jews from the rest of the population. Instead of leaving us in the main camp, they took us on the side of the camp.
It was a very rough area, like with a lot of brush and thorny bushes and so on, and they just parked us there. By now, we were really really in bad shape. The food was almost nonexistent. If you were strong enough to get up on your feet, when they gave out the food, the bread that I was mentioning, now it was already more sawdust, but it was not even a piece you could cut.
It was just crumbles, like literally, crumbs with a lot of mildew in it. You would have you hold out your palm to get the bread in your palm. It was just half mildew but we ate it because there was nothing else. We got a little of that beet broth, if you were good enough to get into line and get it.
But a lot of people, if they were too weak, didn’t even get that. Now we figured they’re really going to kill us. Why would they separate us from the other population? So we figured we were doomed, but all of a sudden, one day we got orders to go on a march.
Later on, they coined it as a “forced march.” So we were told to go on a march, and it’s a funny thing, I was so weak and so literally beaten and then all of a sudden I got a good feeling. It just came to me. We started marching. By the way, while I was in Melk, I was with a cousin of mine. We worked together the whole time.
When we went on this march, he was separated from me and I ended up alone. We marched for about three days or so. We came on the other side of Austria to a new camp called Gunskirchen. Now this camp was the last camp. And when I came there…
By the way, on the road, on the march, whoever fell down, they shot them right on the spot, just like a dog. There was no thinking through about it. In fact, I’ll give you just one incident. I remember there was a potato on the ground. A couple of fellows saw the potato and jumped for the potato and started fighting over it. The guard just came, picked up his rifle, and shot a man right in the face just like that.
So that gives you an idea of how precarious life was. Anyway, we came to Gunskirchen. The reason I mentioned to you about my cousin, that we were separated, I came into Gunskirchen, as soon as I got there, who do you think I ran into, but his older brother. His older brother was in the Hungarian labor battalion.
They evacuated him from Hungary and he ended up in the same camp in this last camp I was in. That was like a Godsend because he was in fairly good shape. He still had his own clothes and he had pretty good shoes yet. We were like half dead already but they were still in pretty good shape.
So he was a big help to me. It’s amazing, here I left his brother in one place and out of nowhere I found him over there as soon as I got there—out of 15,000 people, to run into him. Here, too, the place was very, very crowded. They only had a few barracks there because it was like a last-minute thing, I think.
At night, we went into the barracks. They always kept us out during the day. When we went into the barracks, 5,000 people had to go into the barracks. So when we walked into the barracks, we had to stand up like sardines, literally. That’s how cramped we were.
But I was younger so I sort of wiggled to get into a little crouching position. That’s the only way you could spend the night there. In the morning, naturally, a lot of people would literally die during the night.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, it would be at Gunskirchen where you would be liberated.
MARTIN WEISS:
Right.
MARTIN WEISS:
Tell us about your liberation.
MARTIN WEISS:
Liberation… again, like I said, my cousin was there. He had about two or three other friends. We sort of formed a group and we started going, looking for, the first thing, food. The first day we were afraid to leave the camp. We thought it was a trap, that they were going to shoot us on the way out so we waited, believe it or not, another night before we dared walking out.
BILL BENSON:
And the SS are gone now?
MARTIN WEISS:
Now we made sure they were gone, right. As a matter of fact, to show you that our assumption about killing us wasn’t just an assumption, a Wehrmact officer was left in charge and what he did, he took a couple of people from the camp, a couple of elders, and went on a Jeep to greet Americans and he showed them the orders, that he had the orders to kill us, but he didn’t do it.
Anyway, we got out of camp and we started looking for food. This I have to tell you and you’ll see why. We came across this truck in a field—an army truck, abandoned, and we noticed tub of lard, a big tub of lard on the front seat in the cab. One of the guys, like I said, they were in fairly good shape yet and one of the guys took his fist and went right through glass.
BILL BENSON:
Through the windshield?
MARTIN WEISS:
Through the windshield on the side door, actually, and all the glass went into the lard. The reason we wanted the lard is it had something to do with food. We just took the glass with the palm of our hand and threw the stuff on the grass but we kept the lard.
We looked in the back of the truck and we found a bunch of hides. They were already refined. We were all excited because we knew we needed shoes and we knew after the war there wouldn’t be any shoes to be gotten anywhere, so we figured we’d take the hides, go to a shoemaker, and he’ll make us shoes.
Each one of us took several hides, whatever we could carry. Now we’re looking for more food, for something else with food. We saw this farmhouse and we went to this farmhouse. You have to remember, by now, when it came to hate, believe me, we had it. I remember feeling like, to me, every German was a Nazi and every Nazi deserved to be killed.
It was just that simple. That was how your mind worked. We were really very, very angry, really just plain angry. When we came to the house, instead of barging in and acting like uncivilized…and believe me, we were not civilized. We really felt like animals or less than that.
But oddly enough, it’s funny, I started speaking only about a couple of years ago and this came to my mind. That’s the reason I like to include this. We came to the door… and these guys, like I said, were in fairly good shape yet. A lady opened the door a crack.
BILL BENSON:
A German lady.
MARTIN WEISS:
A German lady, yes, and we told her what we’d like, we told her we’d like some eggs and some flour. And she obliged.
She gave us the eggs and the flour. We never pushed in the door and never talked nasty to her. We took the eggs and the flour, and she had a barn and outside of the barn, there was a kettle for heating up water, with wood underneath. We got some water and one of the guys took the lard, the flour, and the eggs, mixed it up and made dumplings.
We cooked the dumplings in this kettle outside the barn. We never went into her house. After we finished eating, to my amazement, we didn’t even have a conversation, one of them suggested, “You know what we should do? Take some hides and give them to her.”
Without much conversation, each one of us contributed towards it and we took it to the door and gave it to the lady in payment. The reason I always like to include this is because at that time I would not have considered myself a human being.
For years I forgot all about it. Then I remembered I always like to include it only for one reason: In spite of the way we were and the way we were treated, we still acted like decent human beings.
BILL BENSON:
Marty, we’re going to close up in just one moment.
MARTIN WEISS:
The reason I want to bring this up is to show you that even in the worst of times, if you bring up your children properly…and it shows you that all of us had basically the same upbringing. As Bill mentioned before, we were raised Jewish Orthodox, we were religious, but we lived by the code. And I’m just amazed that even under those conditions, it didn’t leave us.
BILL BENSON:
If you’ll stick with us for just a few more moments. Before we wrap up our program, I’m going to turn back to Marty for some closing words because we’re not going to have time for questions and answers today, although Marty will be available afterwards by the podium if any of you would like to ask him a question. Marty, where did you lose your father?
MARTIN WEISS:
I lost my father in Melk.
BILL BENSON:
At Melk? Almost at the end of the war.
MARTIN WEISS:
Actually, just about three or four months.
BILL BENSON:
Three or four months before the end of the war. Liberation day for you, Marty, was May 5th, 1945, 63 years ago, the day before yesterday. Is May 5th something that still feels significant to you?
MARTIN WEISS:
Yes, to me personally it does. I still remember it all the time.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us before we close, Marty, how many of your family members survived?
MARTIN WEISS:
Let’s see, I had one sister come back.
BILL BENSON:
And she had been an older sister.
MARTIN WEISS:
She was an older sister. She survived. And I had two brothers—they were in Hungarian labor battalions—they survived. That’s three and myself. Yes, that’s it.
BILL BENSON:
If we had the time, of course, now Marty is 16 years old. He’s virtually completely alone, has to then try to start a new life. I wish he could share with you what happened to him as he returned to Czechoslovakia, what he experienced there, and then eventually, of course, in 1946 making his way to the United States and then serving in the United States army in Korea.
Marty, I’d like to thank you and everybody in our audience for being here today. I’d like to remind all of you that we do a First Person program every Wednesday until August 27th. We hope that you can come back and join us. We’ll do First Person on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in June and July.
Our next First Person will be next Wednesday, May 14th when our First Person will be Rabbi Jacob Wiener. Rabbi Wiener is from Germany. He was arrested on Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass.” He was imprisoned for eight days by the Nazis and then in 1939, Rabbi Wiener fled to Canada before coming to the United States.
Please, come back and join us if you can for another First Person program. It’s our tradition at First Person that our First Person gets the last word. With that, I’d like to turn to Marty to close our program and to remind you that Marty will be available to meet you and answer any questions you have when he steps down off the stage. Marty?
MARTIN WEISS:
I would just like to read this: The six million murdered in the most brutal way, one and a half million of them children, is an abstraction. I think of them as individuals, like my three sisters, cousins, and many kids my age and younger. Just think of the contributions they might have made to the world.
They don’t have markers or gravestones. Instead, we have the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., not only as a tribute to them but also for millions more that lost their lives because of prejudice and hate. How does hate start in a society?
It’s really very simple. You dehumanize the person or a population and the public joins in with fervor like a mob. Not to remember them would be like dying twice. Therefore, as human beings, it’s our duty not to forget and do something about it. If not, we have no right to call ourselves civilized.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is used for education and improving mankind. That, I think, is a great tribute to our society and it also serves as a living memorial. I would also like to point out that 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 but they also destroy themselves, as we saw with the Nazis.
We see it today in the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, it is vital that we reverse this trend by education with people like you. Thank you very much.
