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We had gone to a birthday party on June the 14th, so some friends
of ours who came home, must have been about midnight, somewhere
around midnight. Four o'clock in the morning, we heard a banging
on the door, and I thought those were our friends coming back to
continue the celebration. I said "Come on, go on home, it's
enough already. You know, 4 o'clock, got to work tomorrow." The
knocking persisted, I opened the door, and two plain clothes men
with guns came in to the room, "You're under arrest." "Under
arrest? What for? I didn't do anything." No questions asked. They
didn't push us around at that point. I was, I got dressed, they
took us to a police station in the neighborhood where we were. I
got into a room perhaps as large as this one right here. There
must have been two or three hundred people in there, and we
didn't know what was going on. "What are you, what are you here
for?" "I don't know, I didn't do anything." We didn't know
anything. Nothing. We had absolutely no idea what was going to
happen. All we knew, we were under arrest. Around 7 o'clock or 6
o'clock in the morning, they loaded us all on trucks, and they
took us to a remote train station in a place called Fuhlsbeuttel.
It's a name, it's in a a suburb of Hamburg. The trucks were
supported by a police--well, those are Storm Trooper cars, not
really police cars, the private police had nothing to do with it.
They had a car in front of the truck, a car in back of the truck,
and one on each side with bloodhounds. To be facetious, they
wanted to be sure nobody gets lost, you know. They took us to the
train station, and we were loaded, we were loaded into regular
trains, not boxcars, as what happened later, we went in a regular
train, and then, several hours of train ride. We didn't where we,
we had no idea what was happening, and you can imagine the
anxiety of some older people...I was just a young fellow, but
there were some older people--started crying, we didn't know,
what did we do? When we got to Berlin, they loaded us back on
trucks again, no that is not correct. We went to a town called
Oranienburg, which is a suburb of Berlin. How far outside of
Berlin, I don't know. The train stopped, they shoved us all out
of the train, and we began to march towards the camp.
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