Otto Herman

"A week before the liberation of the camp, my mother was infected with both types of typhus, typhoid and spotted fever. After the Americans liberated the camp, an American doctor and his team of medics walked through the camp and, in the piles of the living and the dead, determined who the medics and doctors should help and drew a cross on someone's forehead with black chalk. He drew a cross on my mother's forehead and went on, let's call it a round, a tour of the camp. When he made this tour of the camp on the third day in a row, and my mother was still moving on the pile, he turned to the medics and told them to give it a try. They tried it, and my mother was brought back to life..."

"There was a situation where, in early 1945, a German Nazi doctor in the camp did something very bad because he was condemned by his own people and deported to the front. The Nazis found out that my father was a doctor and they allowed him, in their own interest, to practice there twice a week, especially for them in that camp clinic, which of course he took advantage of to nationalize medicines and things like that for his fellow prisoners and then for his fellow prisoners in the next prison camp. This was the situation until the beginning of April 1945, when two persons, there is no other name for it, appeared at the camp gate in prison dress and immediately began to shout: 'Run away, run away, it's your doom!' It later turned out that they were prisoners from the next camp, where the Nazis had herded the prisoners into closed barracks and set the whole camp on fire. Allegedly, perhaps they were the only two who saved themselves and ran to warn them. So my dad took care of them and immediately informed his contact women in that women's camp and together they immediately went to the front lines to seek help from the Americans. Until they came to a farmhouse where it turned out there was a decent German man living who said, 'I'll hide you here in the barn and take you to the front line at night, no further, I'm afraid.' So that's what happened. Dad and two women went there, he showed them the front line, and the German came back. They crossed over, sought out the first officer, told him the situation, but he explained that they could not take immediate action for some unknown reason. Whereupon the father, aware that there was the imminent danger of killing and setting the whole camp on fire, quickly went back to the camp and began to organize the escape of all the healthy and sick, whom he took to a nearby forest and there left them to hide under the leaves. In this way it is said that several hundred prisoners were saved."