European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

One night, the Germans needed thirty people and came over to our shack.

The two officers had been entitled to bunk beds, so they were sleeping in a corner of the shack.

We slept on straw on the floor, and I managed to get into the group that was leaving.

I never knew anything about them afterwards, and maybe I shouldn’t have done this,

but I was afraid they would hand my documents to a guard. The guards were brutal there.

They used to come inside in the morning, screaming the word “Aufstehn”,

At first, we wondered what we were supposed to do – maybe get some coffee! –

then four or five of them came inside and started acting rough.

We immediately understood that we had to get up, even if we couldn’t understand the word.

They were really mean there, so I left and went to this other camp,

by a large river that had just been bombed, where we started to work.

I lost all contact with the two officers afterwards, since that place was basically a marshalling camp,

where 100-200 prisoners arrived by train every day.

I’ve been in four different German internment camps.

The last one I was in, where we were finally set free, was called Wickede and was in Westfalia, near Dortmund.

Normally people used to go to sleep immediately.

The camp I’ve been in for the longest period was in Hagen, again in Westfalia, near Dortmund, which was a very big city.

In Wickede, I had to get up at 5 in the morning, walk 2 km to the station,

travel by train for 70 km, then walk to the job I had,

and sometimes I would end up getting back at nine in the evening.