Subject: Mrs Ohl (Hamburg)

born 1927

kidnapped as a student to Riga in 1941 (forced labour)

Interviewer: F. Hülck

Interviewer: From 1938 to 1941 until the deportation the situation must have gathered momentum dramatically.

Mrs Ohl: Oh yes, in summer you had to be indoors by 10 pm, or even earlier. In winter you had to be in before it got dark. People who did shift work when the war broke out, the Jews, that is, who did forced labour, had special passes. The Gestapo came into the house to check if you were home. You weren't allowed to have a radio or telephone any longer. It was 1940 or early 1941. I travelled to Münster to school every day until July 1941. I wasn't wearing the star then, but then it came shortly after that and I worked in a factory in Osnabrück, so I left school in Münster in July of 1941 and then worked in a factory until the deportation in December.

Interviewer: Were you expecting the deportation or did you have to leave suddenly?

Mrs Ohl: We were given 6 weeks' notice that we were to be deported to Riga in Latvia to a labour camp on a given date. So we knew beforehand. The transportation was made up of a thousand people from in and around Osnabrück. This transportation which took place on December 13, 1941 was made up of people from Emsland, Münster and district and Bielefeld and district and it went to Riga, as I said.

Interviewer: Could you describe how it was?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, I can. We were picked up a day beforehand and taken to a school. Straw had been laid down in the gymnasium and that was where we were to stay for the night. The children were told they had a school-free day because the heating was not working, which was a lie. The school was close to a train station and on the next day we were picked up and taken there under guard from the Gestapo. I forgot to mention that in our written notice it stated that we were allowed 50 kilos of large luggage per person which was picked up beforehand. It was picked up and the last carriage on the train was the luggage carriage, but when the train arrived in Riga the luggage carriage was gone and so we only had what we were carrying. The trip to Riga took three days. As the train trip continued we were shunted onto a siding more and more often. The war had already begun and hospital trains or soldiers on leave had priority and so the trip to Riga took three days under quite bad conditions, although in comparison to the later transportations we were lucky, because it was a normal passenger train. It was very cold and so on, but it wasn't that bad in comparison to the later transportations when people were crammed onto cattle trains. If there had been room to stretch on the cattle trains it would have been alright, but cattle trains aren't heated either. So we travelled under very bad conditions and arrived after three days.

Interviewer: The parents must have explained the deportation to the children somehow - what it was, and why.

Mrs Ohl: We grew up with it, we knew. We were sent there and that was that. The Gestapo bolted the doors and the apartments were sealed. Afterwards they were probably emptied out and I suppose the things were distributed amongst people who had been bombed out, I don't know. We never found out.

Interviewer: You went to school in Münster for about 2 or 3 years, didn't you?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, it was from February '39 till the summer of '41.

Interviewer: Was that a Jewish school?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, of course.

Interviewer: That wasn't a grammar school, was it?

Mrs Ohl: No, it wasn't permitted, not even before 1938. It was a Jewish school and part of the Max Heindorf Foundation. The teacher was also the rabbi. He and his wife and baby and his siblings all died in Auschwitz. The other teacher and his wife who taught the first and second grade - he and his wife lived in Münster and she was also my English teacher - died and I don't think anyone from the whole school except me survived. Shortly before school finished I took my confirmation there. We were four girls and I was the only one who was an only child. The other three had siblings. Neither those three girls, nor their siblings, nor their parents survived. I was the only one who survived.

Interviewer: In the years before this you said you heard of families leaving Germany.

Mrs Ohl: Oh, yes, right in the beginning there were many who left to go abroad. They emigrated. Business people or others. My parents both had their old parents and they didn't want to leave and my father always said, "I am a public servant for life, I fought at the front, nothing will happen to me." Then the war broke out and that was the end of all that anyway.

Interviewer: So was it all very hard to comprehend?

Mrs Ohl: Yes we couldn't comprehend it or perhaps we didn't want to believe it, I don't know. It is difficult to fathom in retrospect.

Interviewer: So then you ended up in Riga?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, we arrived in Riga, in the ghetto. We had to walk one and a half hours from the freight rail centre to the ghetto, which was in the old part of town. Today it would be called a slum. Forty thousand Jews from Latvia had been rounded up and brought here and since the Jews from the so-called "Reich" were deported there or were supposed to be deported there, thirty-six thousand of the forty thousand Jews were shot in the woods and then we came into the small apartments which had been abandoned in a hurry. Food was still on the table and everything had been ransacked. The winter of '41, '42 was a cold winter. That was also the winter of the catastrophe in Stalingrad. Everything was frozen. We arrived and as I said, our large luggage never arrived.

Interviewer: How did life, if you can call it that, continue?

Mrs Ohl: Shortly after this was the so-called appeal. We all had to come out and the old people and the handicapped were selected and told they were to go to a place called Dünamünde, which is in Latvia. There was a fish factory where the Düna flows into the Baltic and they were supposed to go and work there. They never even went to Dünamünde, but instead they were also shot in the woods near Riga. The next day trucks arrived back carrying their clothes. They had had to strip off completely beforehand and lay their clothes down and then the people in the ghetto had to sort them.

Interviewer: (No transcript)

Mrs Ohl: Yes, many of those in the ghetto worked for the armed forces. There was a lot of clothing for the forces, things people from the Reich had knitted and so on. If someone took clothing or food they were shot or hanged. Upstairs in the house where we lived was a family by the name of Salomon who were from Münster. They were friends of my parents from when we lived in Münster and their daughter went to school with me for a while. She was from the grammar school but had been sent back. Her mother took a pair of socks from the army and there were fences around the ghetto with guards and inside was a small prison and she was put in there. At first she was pardoned and then they came back for her. I was working in a paper factory at the time and had the early shift and I got back early because I had started early. The others weren't home and I came in and opened the window and opposite I saw a woman holding her hands in front of her face and as I looked out - the SS had appointed civil police officers, as they called them, from amongst our people who were responsible for order - I saw one of them. I knew him and he quickly gestured to me to close the window and go away from it and then I saw the Commandant with Mrs Salomon - our civil police officers always had to be present - going in the direction of the cemetery. There was an old Jewish cemetery with a wall around it and that was where the shootings took place. Then I heard a terrible scream and Selma was there, the daughter. She raced down the steps and wanted to go with her mother and the policeman caught her and suddenly he was left holding her coat in his hand and she was racing ahead, but then they brought her back. Then I heard the shots from the cemetery. This was in that film, too. That was one of many memories. In the centre of the ghetto there was a small square and we found it when we went back to Riga in 1992. The Russians had their military vehicles parked there. In the middle of this square there was a gallows where people were hanged and in winter..

Interviewer: By the SS?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, and in winter they hung there for days and the work commandos had to pass by and see it. In summer it was perhaps two or three days, depending. The camp Salaspils was 20 km away from Riga. It was still being built and many men were brought to Salaspils, among them my father. We heard that the conditions were terrible there and my father and almost all of the others died there. We don't know how. Typhoid or dysentery broke out. Many were also hanged or shot if they couldn't or wouldn't do what the SS demanded of them. In any case my father died there in April 1942, as was reported to us.

Interviewer: Was the news brought straight away at the time?

Mrs Ohl: Yes.

Interviewer: Or later?

Mrs Ohl: We were told and that was that.

Interviewer: So you were living in a stranger's apartment?

Frau Ohl: At first there were eight people in two small rooms. There were two elderly women who were part of the Dünamünde operation and my father and another young couple from Osnabrück who came with us. The husband was sent to Salaspils too. Then they weren't there anymore and I was there with my mother and the young woman whose husband was sent to Salaspils and a young man who had been at school with me. My mother had to clean locomotives at the freight rail centre where we had arrived. Before that they had to shovel snow on the Düna bridge in Riga. The snow was deep. The young woman was often sent away for a couple of weeks to cut peat and so there were various jobs. I was always a bit lucky in one way. I was in a factory where it was warm and dry and we weren't exposed to the elements. Later I worked in a rubber factory. Before that I did various jobs, at the airstrip and so on. Then in about '43 the ghetto was closed down and the retreat in the East was beginning. Then one day all the children disappeared. Those under the age of fourteen had been taken. It was said they had been sent somewhere and the parents were to follow. To this day we don't know if they were sent to Auschwitz. They were gone, disappeared. Usually the parents were working or busy doing something, but if one of them happened to be in the ghetto at the time, they went along with the children. The ones who had been working came home to find the children gone and in some cases the husband or wife as well. Then, as I said, the ghetto was closed down and we were sent to a concentration camp by the name of Kaiserwald near Riga. We were given convict clothing, and again we were fortunate - well the whole time I had been lucky enough to stay with my mother - to be employed by AEG (a large electrical company, translator). It got us out of the camp but we were still confined to barracks opposite the factory in a brick building and again we were lucky because it was connected to the remote heating system, so we didn't freeze in winter. We were housed there in bunks.[das Wort ‘Vischtelagen’ existiert nicht, vielleicht heißt es ‘Stellagen’, i.e. ‘stands’ oder ‘racks’] There were sacks of straw close together three high. We just had to go opposite to the AEG works and do our shifts, it was bearable.

Interviewer: What did you talk about with your mother and the others?

Mrs Ohl: Just about what we were doing.

Interviewer: Did you somehow try, not to suppress the situation, but to...

Frau Ohl: Oh yes, we did, certainly.

Interviewer: (No transcript)

Frau Ohl: Definitely. In the beginning we had Sundays off, but later we had to work Sundays as well. We were tired and we had hardly anything to eat. I don't know - we tried to make the best of it. I was young and my mother was quite young too.

Interviewer: In retrospect it's always ...

Mrs Ohl: Yes, in retrospect I ask myself sometimes how I survived. There is psychological damage which will remain for life. It's not possible to have a completely normal life. You may live outwardly like other people, but when you look a little deeper it really got under your skin, even after so many years.

Interviewer: So we were up to 1943.

Mrs Ohl: Yes.

Interviewer: What happened then?

Mrs Ohl: The Russians were already approaching and then we were loaded onto a big ship in Riga's harbour. There weren't only prisoners, there was a lot they took with them from the works and so on. Then we came to Studthof near Gdansk to a terrible camp. The voyage by ship from from Riga to Gdansk was a catastrophe. We were below water level with the sand and the captain had instructions to close the portholes in case of torpedo attack and that meant we couldn't get out. It was horrible. We all had seasickness and then after three days we arrived in Gdansk harbour and were loaded onto overloaded barges and we nearly capsized and then up the river to the camp in Studthof. It was a terrible camp, quite awful. Up till then it had been bearable, but Studthof was atrocious.

Interviewer: Which military units accompanied you? It was a prisoner transportation, wasn't it?

Mrs Ohl: SS mostly, also armed forces, some from AEG. Those in charge were armed forces, but outside the barbed wire were SS guards and we had female SS guards. They were worse than the men. Again we were lucky to have a soldier in charge of us at AEG who requested us by name in Studthof and took us out and so we went to Thorn which used to belong to West Prussia but today is part of Poland. We had to repair cables there which came from the front and were sent back to the front and we had to... We had an awful camp Commandant and whoever couldn't do the work got twenty-five strokes which he administered himself. I was fortunate because it didn't happen to me or my mother, but the cables, coming from the front, were so twisted that it took time to unravel them. But then later the Russians came and we were marched off and, in January 1945, were still marching from Thorn to Bromberg, which was sixty kilometres away and suddenly the SS were gone along with their belongings, as well as the guards and the female SS officers. I think a hospital train went out to the so-called "Reich", and so they were gone, and three days later we were freed by the Russians, on January 25, 1945.

Interviewer: What happened to you in Thorn then as the war was finally ending?

Mrs Ohl: We were marched off, as I said, and then we were nearby Bromberg in a small village. The SS had disappeared suddenly and three days later the Russians came.

Interviewer: What happened then?

Mrs Ohl: It was January and the war wasn't yet over, well for us it was but the capitulation wasn't until May and meanwhile there had been various releases from the concentration camps where the people had been forcibly brought and there were some who had been hidden in Russia and so on. A small committee had been formed in Bromberg and we had come to Bromberg and had a small apartment where Germans had fled who had been bombed out and had been stuck there and then had fled again. That is where we waited for the war to end. We had to work there, since we had to earn a living somehow. My mother and I worked in the Russian military hospital. My mother helped in the pharmacy and I was in the kitchen. We were quite alright. We enjoyed the freedom, of course, and then the capitulation came and we waited a while, because the train lines had all been destroyed. It would have been very difficult and as it turned out, it was difficult. It took longer to return than it took to get there, but under other conditions, of course. We were helped and it was July by the time. Oh, first we came to Berlin where a committee had been formed. We were returning emigrants, so we didn't have any papers or anything at all. Meanwhile the zones had been formed, the English, or British Zone as it was called, American and Russian Zones. We had to pass through the Russian Zone to the English Zone so that we had the papers and then in July, 1945 we returned to Osnabrück.

Interviewer: How was the journey, since you had no papers or anything?

Mrs Ohl: We had something - we got provisional papers in Bromberg which were in Polish and that had to suffice and it was sufficient.

Interviewer: How did the Russians behave?

Mrs Ohl: They were always quite alright to us.

Interviewer: You were German, was it understood that you had been interned as a prisoner?

Mrs Ohl: Yes, we were still in our prison camps. I forgot to mention that our hair had been shaved - not cut, but shaved - and it had grown again. This was called "Mecki" (crewcut, translator). There were also some who could speak Russian. There were Jews from Eastern European countries, above all many Czech Jews and Czech is similar to Russian. The writing is Latin, but the spoken language is similar and they were able make themselves understood. A lot of Russians could speak Yiddish and some understood German and so it wasn't a problem.

Interviewer: Suddenly you were free again. Is it possible to describe such a feeling?

Mrs Ohl: It can't be described and it was very hard to take in. You just can't believe it, you are still in your own world. Perhaps I did notice, because we had always been in convoys and were never by ourselves and were never allowed to go on the footpath, we always had to walk on the road. The Germans from the Ruhr valley and so on there who had been evacuated from the West because of the bombardments were put into the houses of Polish people who had been forced out to make way for them, and so they were now prisoners and were made to walk in groups along the roadway and that affected us and made us aware of the fact that we were free.

There is nobody left at all. I'm standing in front of the Max-Heindorf Foundation in Münster on Kanonengraben. Nothing is there. Where our schoolroom was has been rebuilt, there is nothing. The synagogue is in the same place, but I don't remember it. I wasn't even five when we moved away and I don't know anything about the old synagogue. I wonder if it is still there?