Fritz Roer, holocaust survivor of Cologne, Germany. My family is generation upon generation living around the city of Cologne. My father passed away and my grandfather took over the plumbing business until I was old enough to take over. Before 1938 there was no difference in the people, after crystal night signs appeared in shops and laws prohibited contact between Jews and non-Jews. Everybody tried to get out of Germany. 1941 my family was deported to Lodz, Poland. We can take what we can carry, everything else we had to leave behind. We were deported by railway cars. The trains were starved. The ghetto conditions were horrible, fenced in with barbed wire, Nazi were all around it. The SS Stormtroopers brought Jews from all over Germany into this ghetto. Within a 10 foot by 10 foot room 30 people were sleeping everyone together. In the mornings the hay wagon would pick dead people from the streets, people were dying of hunger. People were taken off the streets and shipped away, after 10 days I was separated and shipped to a concentration camp, that was living hell. The soup was just hot water. The camp was run by Jewish so-called “policemen” which got the orders from the German gestapo guards outside. I was working on a man made lake, they could have filled the lake with blood from how many were killed there at that working place. When Hitler’s war stalled in Russia they had us working on a sewer. The ground was frozen like cement, the shovel literally froze to our hands. I knew how to lay pipes from my grandfather. If you got sick there they brought you to the so-called “hospital”, 5% came back and 95% we never saw again. Many never made it to the hospital because we could see the ambulance hose being connected to the exhaust pipe and fed in. We were in living hell from 1941-1943. Then I was sent with a group to the countryside, it was a lucky break because we could get potatoes in the field when the guards weren’t watching. "If a chicken crossed the road it was gone, see I'm talking about food a lot, that's all we ever thought about." After the harvest the camp was closed up. We were locked inside cattle cars. When the doors opened we saw horrible scenes of families being torn apart and complete confusion. On the other side of the track there is another train unloaded. We marched into the camp, there is a sign over the gate that says “if you work you will be released” which is baloney, no one was released from there at any time. The barracks were overseen by so-called “Kapos” who were prisoners but had a better standing. After one week 400 of us were loaded into army trucks and taken to a coal mine camp. We had to shovel coal onto the conveyor belt. What you were thinking about is only to get food. Only to get another slice of bread, or get other potato to eat. That was your whole motive to get going. We hoped someday to be liberated, that at some time we can get out. Whoever fell down he laid down. Everyone who was sick, 90 percent would be going straight to the gas chambers. January 1945 the Russian army came toward Germany and the SS, Stormtroopers evacuated Auschwitz. A death march started, everyone who fell behind the Stormtroopers shoot him. We loaded onto train wagons for days we traveled with no food or water, people were dying, half the train died and we covered ourselves at night with the bodies of dead people. In south Germany, Regensburg is the main crossing of the railways to all parts of Germany and Austria. American bombers were coming and bombing the crossing point. We prisoners were put there to fix the railways. When Americans came into Germany the Germans marched us toward Austria. Marching in April through the foothills of the Alps mountains for ten days. We started out with 500 and 180 was what survived. One day sitting in a town on the border of Germany and Austria the guards took off and a group of American soldiers drive in. They brought a truck with Red Cross food packages. Everyone went out of their mind, we were all skeletons.
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