“I was in Bergen-Belsen a few days and we could see there was no way to survive that camp. There was no work anymore. They wouldn’t actually gas you but they let you die. There was typhoid- we had lice. As it was I run into one German criminal who was in charge of one of the tents in my camp in Auschwitz III-Buna. And since he knew I was an electrician- I had to make him a heating plate one day so he could cook his own souphe said, ‘What are you doing here? You are an electrician.’

The next morning during roll call I was called out with another fellow, a Polish Jew, and we are told we should go to the place where you get rid of your lice with DDT and we were washed and told we should go to the barracks where there are tradesmen. There was a wooden cot, no straw, no nothing to sleep for us but we thought we were in a Hilton, because that was at least clean. We came to the electrician’s workshop in the morning…

We had to go every morning and check the whole camp and electrical work we had to do. We had to go to the dog kennel- the SS women had the dogs. And when they didn’t look I would steal the food from the dogs. The dogs had meat. One SS woman would come back and say, ‘Did you eat the meat?’ ‘No, I would never eat meat from the dog,’ I would say. And we would go to the different watchtowers. In those days they were already short on young soldiers so we had an old soldier, 60 years old, Wehrmacht, not an SS man. He would go with his gun behind us as we went from watchtower to watchtower that surrounded the camp. In some of the watchtowers again there were old German soldiers and since I tell you only the truth I have to tell you that in some of the watchtowers those fellows who were way up there alone would say, ‘Sit down and here you got some jam and here you got some bread.’ There were decent people left, there’s no doubt about it. And that German soldier who went around with us, he knew about that too. He saw it. So God bless him, I hope he survived….

Even after liberation 13,000 people died in that camp. We were asked by the British Army engineer to help him because we knew the wiring. So they sat me in a jeep- by that time I was down to around 80 lbs., my bones were sticking out and I could hardly sit in the jeep- just to show them where electrical power was and what had to be done. So that was my first job then and I had the satisfaction to see the camp burned down completely.”