Athens, 2016
Once, seven guys fled the factory…
The first, yes, the first [concentration camp] where we were, and they took us to… Auschwitz was the first one. The last one was next to Mauthausen, Gusen, Gusen. Number one and number two were together. At first, I was in number one… and somewhere over there we would sleep for the night, we would stay there, and they would take us again by wagon to the nearby mountain, to the feet of the mountain. Of course, it was close by, but they didn’t want us to go on foot, because they would also have to walk, wardens, guards, they would all have to walk; it wasn’t like they took pity on us.
[…]
I said “I know how to do this, I know how to do that, I know…”, so I ended up making canons and aeroplanes. […] The factory was below the mountain. A train would get in to pick up the aeroplanes. […] There were rails so that the train could enter and load the aeroplanes – without the wings, it goes without saying. I also remember Messersmith, Messersmith [he means “Messerschmitt AG”].
[…]
That’s where I was set free, near Mauthausen, Gusen, Gusen number one and Gusen number two, the two camps with a tunnel; they kept telling us they would put us there as a last minute solution and would blow us up, they kept telling us that… but the Americans came, took care of me, they fattened me up, so to speak; I was emaciated, but I had never gotten sick, I had never sneezed – not like now, that I sneeze here, at home, every single day… There, I didn’t sneeze once. We wore a pair of pyjamas, if you are familiar with those clothes with the white and blue stripes, we ran to… naked, we ran from the… what’s-its-name, anyway, the room, we ran a long way to shower and we had to be clean for the factory in the morning, without any stains…
[…]
Once, seven guys fled the factory, Polish guys, that is, they ran away, because a train would get in the factory, an actual train, while only a wagon entered the other one, because the mountain was all dug up and underneath the… they got underneath, how, how, how, and ran away. However, by night the dogs had caught all of them, the dogs, woof, woof, woof, woof, we later found out they got them all. The dogs sometimes lose people when they go through brooks and rivers, they lose the scent and whatnot, but they got them all. A week later, coming back from the factory, they didn’t take us again to that place where we used to go to be counted, they counted us there again and again, they counted us there, five, ten, one here, one there, one German on each side and they walked ahead together, one could see the other, one counted for himself, the other guy doing the same, actually no one was ever absent. So, instead of taking us to that place where they used to count us, they took us further and further ahead, back to the baths where we would go to wash, like I told you before, stark naked, it didn’t matter if it snowed, on our way back again stark naked, you would get dry, you put your clothes on and that was that. Anyway, they took us a bit further off, around the block where we used to sleep. There, we saw seven gallows. Yes, when they brought out the seven guys, the man standing next to me, Isaac Cohen, told me: “You know what? Those who ran away are not from our group”. Not that I couldn’t see that, I could see it all right, but he realized it more quickly… Yes, indeed, their… faces from afar, we weren’t too close, they weren’t. After a couple of minutes, the Germans pushed the stool under their feet and they hanged them, they hanged them right there in front of us. Quite a sight.
Citation: “David Moshe”, Excerpts from his interview to Artemis Alcalay as part of the “Greek Jews Holocaust Survivors” project, Athens, 12 February 2016, https://greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art/en/profile/david-moshe/