English transcript

Can you tell us about the brothel that was in your Auschwitz camp?

The brothel was a barracks, just like a house.

In our barracks you did house, as an average, 200 inmates.

So that was about the same size.

In the brothel they had so many cubicles, I never counted how many cubicles,

where one in each one was a girl, and the only inmates who had access to it,

there was a guard standing right at the door constantly,

but the only inmates that were those convicts who were the trustees running the camp,

like the kapos, the hoerbeiter, and the block elster,

they would get every so often a ticket to go in the hoerhaus.

Now how the girls were picked, if they were drafted or volunteered,

I never found out, I think either way they wound up in there,

and maybe some gave them a chance to survive,

was better than going in the woods and cutting trees or so on,

like some women did, or working in fields.

Actually a few houses down where I live now,

there's a woman who worked in Auschwitz in a munition factory in Blechhammer,

which was maybe 50 kilometers from where I worked.

She worked making shells and ammunition anyhow.

Were you ever in the brothel?

Oh yeah, I was in there twice.

Once I made a delivery of towels and sheets and stuff that I don't remember why I was picked.

I was just walking past the lonely place where one kapo said to me,

take it to the brothel.

So then when I came to the door, the madam had me take it all the way,

all the length of the building where her room was.

So I made a delivery and then another time I was in the camp picking up dead bodies

and a girl had committed suicide.

And so I carried her out to put her on a flatbed to take her to Birkenau.

Birkenau was Auschwitz too,

where the gas chambers and crematorium was.

I did talk to two French girls just for a minute.

When I went to pick up the dead girl, there were two French girls.

But when they started talking to me, the madam came and chased them out right away.

They scampered away.

And so then the madam said to me,

when I returned the blanket that I had wrapped up,

because all the guys were standing around that were in the camp

going to look at that naked girl I was going to carry out.

So I wrapped her in a blanket and they were mad at me about that naturally.

But when I put her on the thing, I turned her upside down

and took the blanket and returned it.

And she said, oh, you are really reliable.

I let you in for free sometimes, but I never had the occasion to go.

So the madam told you?

I wouldn't have passed the guard anyhow.

But she said, you have a chance.

So the women they brought in, if they thought they could be used in the brothel or?

Well, they used them for all kinds of other work too.

Seamstresses.

And I had a friend who survived and she was a woodcutter.

They farmed out to some guy who was cutting wood.

And every day they went in the woods cutting it.

So some worked on fields.

After all, the ashes of dead bodies grow nice cabbages.

It's good fertilizer.

Yeah, you never seen cabbages that size.

They couldn't make money in the market here selling,

unless they sell them by the pound.

But a head of cabbage like that a whole family can eat.

They were huge.

Was there a difference for you as a person to see a woman,

for example, this girl you carried,

was that a difference for you being a man to see the women suffer like they did?

I didn't really see too many women.

Now this one had committed suicide.

She was basically a newcomer because you could see she was still in good shape.

But I had very, very little contact with women until after the liberation

when a lot of women came through Worcester

and I would tell them where to go and give them direction

because after all, nobody had a map.

But till then I had met very few women that were inside.

The camps?

Yeah, in the camps.

Like those two French girls and the madam.

Basically, I didn't talk to any woman.

And there were in the factory,

not at least in my section of the factory, were there any women working.

I know some did office work like accounting and so on, but not where I was.