Victor Russo

Harper: Today is Wednesday, May 18, 1994. I am Eric Harper with the Holocaust Oral History Project. With me today is Lanie Reich, operating the camera. Today we are interviewing Mr. Victor Russo. If we could begin please, by you stating your name, date, and place of birth. And if you could spell those things for us too, please.
RUSSO: My birthday is August 8, 1927. The city of Salonika, in Greece.

Harper: And state your full name for us, please?
RUSSO: H. Victor Russo.

Harper: Who made up your household when you were growing up?
RUSSO: There was my father, my mother, me, and two younger sisters.

Harper: Can you tell me your parents’ names?
RUSSO: My father’s name was Yakov, and my mother’s name was Buena [spells out].

Harper: And how about your sisters?
RUSSO: I had a sister who was born in approximately 1933, and her name was Estrella. And I had another little sister, born around 1941 or ’42. Her name was Bella.

Harper: What was your native language?
RUSSO: We spoke Greek in the street and Ladino, Spanish, at home and in the neighborhood.

Harper: And you were fluent in both?
RUSSO: I spoke both of them very good. I spoke bad Ladino, actually, then Greek.

Harper: I’m sorry, you spoke . . .?
RUSSO: I spoke the Ladino language because my mother, that’s all she spoke to us.

Harper: Do you know how long your family had been living in Greece?
RUSSO: As far as I know, since 1492. The ancestors, they came over here from Spain. I couldn’t tell you what generation I had, probably the sixth or the seventh generation.

Harper: Do you remember your grandparents at all?
RUSSO: I only remember my father’s father, my grandfather; his name was Isaac. The other three, I don’t remember them.

Harper: Do you know where they grew up or where they lived?
RUSSO: They lived in the city of Salonika.

Harper: What was your family’s means of support?
RUSSO: My father worked in the railroad station as a warehouseman, and my mother was a chair maker. She used to make chairs.

Harper: Did she work in a factory?
RUSSO: No, she worked in a small shop.

Harper: Would you say your family was middle-class, or lower middle-class?
RUSSO: We were poor, very poor. Not poor poor, but we were poor.

Harper: For that time, what did that mean? What was being poor?
RUSSO: We had plenty to eat, and we had practically everything we needed, but we were not rich. We could not afford trips or luxury items, just enough to survive, because this was during the Depression time, in the early ’30s. Then, later on, it was pretty good for a few years, and then the war came in 1941.

Harper: Was your family active in the Jewish community?
RUSSO: No, they were not. My mother was very religious; we kept kosher at our home. But we didn’t go to services all the time. We went to services maybe a dozen times a year. I don’t remember my father going with us because I don’t think he knew how to read. I was the only one who went to school and knew to read a little Hebrew.

Harper: So your father was not a religious man?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: Did you have a religious upbringing?
RUSSO: Yes. We were brought up religious, with kosher things. We’d observe all the holidays, like the normal holidays we had during the year. I used to go to synagogue, like I said, between ten and 20 times a year. This was just about it.

Harper: Did you keep the Sabbath in your house?
RUSSO: Yes and no. My dad used to work on Saturdays, so he didn’t observe the Sabbath because he had to work. In those days, you had to work six days a week to make a living.

Harper: Did that bother your mother?
RUSSO: That I don’t know, if it bothered my mother or not.

Harper: Can you tell me about your neighborhood?
RUSSO: The Jewish people in the city of Salonika, they lived in Jewish ghetto-type sections. The one that I used to live in was Baron Hirsch. This was the name of the neighborhood.

Harper: Can you spell that, please?
RUSSO: [Spells out Baron] Baron Hirsch. The person, Hirsch, must’ve been Ashkenazisch [Baron Maurice de Hirsch was a German Jewish financier and philanthropist].

Harper: So that was the name of the neighborhood?
RUSSO: This was the name of our neighborhood. There were approximately seven Jewish neighborhoods in the city of Salonika. This is where I lived during the ’30s, but before that I used to live in a neighborhood we called Agia Paraskevi, which meant something like “Holy Friday Section.” This was the name, Agia Paraskevi. It was way on top of the hills. That’s where I was born [and lived] for my first five or six years.

Harper: So you were born there, and then you moved?
RUSSO: Then we moved because Baron Hirsch was close to my dad’s job, maybe half a mile, and where I used to live was maybe five or six miles.

Harper: Do you remember the name of your street?
RUSSO: No. When I was a little boy there, growing up in this neighborhood for approximately ten years, I don’t even remember reading a street name. There was just one main street. We had everything in a little street; it was approximately three blocks long. And we had everything you can name in the street, so we kept pretty much to ourselves.

Harper: Where was the synagogue?
RUSSO: The synagogue was about a block away from where I lived. As a matter of fact, the synagogue is still there, but it’s not used as a synagogue anymore.

Harper: Do you know what it’s called?
RUSSO: No.

ER: But that was the one that you went to?
RUSSO: That’s the one I went to, the one that I was bar mitzvahed at later on. It was made out of marble. It was a pretty good-sized synagogue. It could hold about 600 or 800 people during the holidays. People used to [sit everywhere], on the doors, on the balcony, climb through the windows.

Harper: And it was Sephardic?
RUSSO: Yes. They were all Sephardic synagogues, as far as I know.

Harper: Do you have any idea how many people lived in your neighborhood, number one, and number two, do you have any idea the Jewish population of Salonika?
RUSSO: If I would take a wild guess, my neighborhood was approximately 3,000, and the city of Salonika, roughly, before 1940, it was approximately 60-65,000.

Harper: Jewish people?
RUSSO: Jewish people, yes. 60-65,000. I don’t know what happened afterwards because a lot of them jumped ship when the war started. I don’t know if you want to go that far now, but when the war started, the Germans were advancing. There were a lot of English ships there by the dock, and some of them went away. Some of them probably went to [what was] Palestine at the time, before it became Israel.

Harper: Yes, let’s save that sort of thing for later.
RUSSO: OK.

Harper: I just want to get about your family right now.
RUSSO: All right.

Harper: You said you lived in a ghetto. Were there any gentiles or regular Greeks living in it?
RUSSO: No. There were a few Greeks there, but they were the landlords. There were maybe a few of them. Two or three of them, they had grocery stores, but 98-99%, they were all Jewish.

Harper: Do you know what the Jewish-gentile relationships were like in the city of Salonika?
RUSSO: Nobody told me about it, when I was growing up, as a little boy. I was a few years old. We lived in this neighborhood where I was born, which was Agia Paraskevi. We lived on the other street, in the Greek neighborhood, and nobody told me anything about what was happening, but at nighttime, when the weather was hot, we’d sleep outside. Behind us was a tall building, and they used to throw rocks at us from that building, down there, which was about two or three floors. I didn’t realize what was happening until I was about ten or 12 years old. I realized we lived on the wrong side of the street. There were about six houses over there, with six different families, and all of them moved out because we were threatened with a lot of uncomfortable things. In other words, they made us move. So that’s when we moved by Baron Hirsch in ’31 or ’32. I was about four or five years old at the time. Like I said, I didn’t realize until I was about ten or 12 years old, then I put one and one together and figured out that we lived on the wrong side of the street.

Harper: Did your family, while you were growing up, did they consider themselves Greeks, or Jews, or outside from the Greeks?
RUSSO: We felt we were Jewish. When you live in the country of Greece, you still are a foreigner because you’re not Greek Orthodox.

Harper: So you felt like a foreigner?
RUSSO: Yes. There were remarks, a lot of whispers; you felt very uncomfortable.

Harper: But in your heart, did you feel like “Greece, this is where I belong. I’m a Greek”?
RUSSO: I was born over there, we paid taxes, we served in the army, in the war, and so on. We felt that we had the same rights, but somehow I had my doubts that we had the same rights because you looked into history and not too many Jewish people had high-positioned jobs, like we have in this country.

Harper: Tell me about your schooling.
RUSSO: I went in this Jewish school, which was run by the Jewish community. All the Jewish people, the majority of us, went to their own schools. In other words, each neighborhood had their own grade school. I went to this little grade school, and we went there from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. We learned Greek lessons, a variety of subjects, and in the afternoons we took two hours of Hebrew, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM.

Harper: It was only Jewish kids?
RUSSO: Yes, there were just Jewish kids there because the Jewish people had their own high school and their own grade school. We never went to the Christian Greek schools. There might have been a few Jewish people going to the Greek schools, I don’t know, but we went to our own schools.

Harper: And what grade did you go up to?
RUSSO: The grade was just like over here, from [grade] one until about you were 14, and I never made it through grade school. One year I was a pretty bad boy; I got stuck in the same grade twice for teasing the teacher, like a comedian. I got caught, and I paid the price. All of us do silly things when we are young. The following year, I went in the same grade, and when I was supposed to go to high school, which over there they call gymnasium — it’s high school. So anyway, I never made it into gymnasium. The war started and that was about it. All the schools were closed, so I never went to school again from the time I was about 14.

Harper: How did your parents react to your clowning around?
RUSSO: Well, I didn’t do this at home [laughs]! My dad probably would have beaten me up [laughs].

Harper: Were you interested in Judaism, growing up?
RUSSO: Yes, we were all Jewish people there, my friends that we had. There wasn’t very much in those days, like inter-dating. One of my friend’s sisters, Bella, was going with this Greek fellow, and there were a lot of whispers in the neighborhood [makes a mumbling whisper sound]. In those days — we’re talking about in the late ’30s or early ’40s — this was a no-no. Of course, now things have changed.

Harper: As far as the religion, were you interested in the religious aspects?
RUSSO: Not that much, no. At school we had to study. We learned about all the history, the past, learned about the Exodus from Egypt, and so on. Like I said, we observed all the holidays, and this was about it.

Harper: Can you tell me the political situation? What was going on in some of your earliest memories?
RUSSO: No, I don’t know anything. I had no knowledge of what went on in those days.

Harper: Had you ever heard of Hitler, or the Nazis?
RUSSO: No. When I was going to school the last year or two, we noticed there were a lot of strange kids coming from Germany. In our neighborhood there were a few of them; they went to our school. And we couldn’t understand. We couldn’t figure out why they came over there; they didn’t speak our language.

Harper: Were they Jews?
RUSSO: They were Jewish, yes, but the only language they spoke was German, so we couldn’t put one and one together and figure out what went on because we were very poor[ly] informed. We had no radios at the time, and we had no money to buy newspapers and read what went on in the other parts of the world. As a matter of fact, we were so misinformed that I didn’t even know so many Jews were everyplace else. I thought we were the only ones [Harper chuckles]! And there were millions of people living someplace else.

Harper: Before the war actually broke out, in the late ’30s, was anything happening? When did things start changing for you? Let’s put it that way.
RUSSO: We didn’t know anything about what went on in the other parts until the war started in 1941, and then the Greek army was forced to fight Italy. They went over the mountains of Albania. The only thing we heard was the propaganda that went on with the news, that the Greeks were advancing here, they were advancing there. I used to go to the railroad station every day to see all the wounded coming in and out, and so on. The soldiers went to the front. And the next thing you know there were advancing, they were doing this, they were doing that. All of a sudden the Germans stepped in and started coming in with airplanes, throwing bombs here, throwing bombs over there. The next thing you know the war was over, and the Germans occupied our section. I guess it was divided into two sections, two zones. The Italians were in the Athens section, and northern Greece, where Salonika is, a poor city, was occupied by Germany.

Harper: During the fighting, were there any bombs dropped in Salonika?
RUSSO: As a matter of fact, a bomb fell on top of me. The sirens went off one day, and I heard the sirens, and so I ran into the shelter on the edge of the railroad station. It was a pretty good shelter, could hold about 500 people. Next thing we knew, we had all this shaking and moving, everything was going this way, and a bomb fell on top of us. Luckily, either the bomb didn’t explode or the sand kept it from going deeper. And that’s the last time I went over there, too. Yes, they did drop bombs.

Harper: So when the bombing happened, about how old were you?
RUSSO: I must’ve been about 14 or 15. That’s the only experience that I had with a bomb.

Harper: What sorts of other fighting did you witness?
RUSSO: I didn’t witness anything.

Harper: Just the bomb?
RUSSO: Just the one bomb. Next thing you know, the Germans came in.

Harper: So the Germans invaded?
RUSSO: Invaded, yes. They came in. We all of us went to this big highway, like a freeway, and we see all those tanks coming in, and that’s when the occupation started. I was about 14 or 15 years old at the time. It was the summertime of ’41. We didn’t think too much about it. We said, “Well, another occupation.” Before that, the Turks were over there for a long time. Before I was born, they were over there for hundreds of years.

Harper: What did your parents think about it? Did they talk to you about the German invasion?
RUSSO: Nothing.

Harper: Was your family over there? Anybody in the town that was concerned?
RUSSO: No, nobody said anything about it; they just occupied us. Next think you know they were rationing everything. We used to get a couple of slices of cornbread a day. Everything was in the black market; we couldn’t buy anything. The only thing you could get was by exchanging things — blankets, pillowcases, and things like that — for things to eat.

Harper: Tell me more about the occupation.
RUSSO: 1942, a year after they came in, they took all the men in this plaza.

Harper: Wait. I’m sorry. Can I interrupt you before you start that? Immediately after the Germans came in . . .
RUSSO: Yes.

Harper: Besides the rationing, how did life change? Your daily life.
RUSSO: There was no work; everybody was unemployed. The economy was pretty bad. You couldn’t find any jobs. Everything was at a standstill.

Harper: Was that because you were Jewish?
RUSSO: No. The whole economy, as far as I know, went down the drain.

Harper: So you just sat around?
RUSSO: Yes. My dad still worked at the railroad, but he had another job. He used to work on incoming trains. He used to be able to scratch a few drachmas over there, enough for us to buy a few things. But from 1941 to 1943, everything changed completely. It was just the opposite of what it had been before 1940. From 1933 or ’34 until 1940, you could get everything in the stores, then after 1941 when the Germans invaded, all the stores were empty. There was nothing in the grocery stores; you couldn’t get anything.

Harper: Was there starvation?
RUSSO: Yes, you could call it so. We just didn’t have anything to eat. In my house, there was absolutely nothing there to eat. We didn’t have anything; the shelves, they were all empty. We didn’t have — you get up in the morning and get milk and juice and breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. There was nothing.

Harper: How did your family manage?
RUSSO: We used to starve to death, all of us. We didn’t have anything to eat.

Harper: This was . . .
RUSSO: This was right after the Germans came in. It was okay for the first few months, until the end of ’41, beginning of ’42, then afterward it was downhill.

Harper: And when you say you were starving, how long between meals did you go?
RUSSO: I never remember sitting down the way we used to eat before 1940, the family together and eat regular meals. We used to have lunch, then dinner around 7:30 PM or so, with different things to eat — fish and meats and spanikopita and all that stuff. We didn’t have anything because there was nothing there to make the stuff. There was no cheese, there was no oil, there was no flour. There was absolutely nothing, zero.

Harper: So you ate whatever you could find?
RUSSO: Yes, it was terrible.

Harper: Did people die?
RUSSO: There were a few of them who died. I don’t know if it was a connection between the starvation or if they died because of some kind of disease they did not know what it was. We had no medical coverage. We used to have a place — they used to call them the [sounds like “bi-kor-kho-lay”], you know what the [bi-kor-kho-lay] is? The [bi-kor-kho-lay] is just like welfare, to treat the sick. You used to go to the school that I went. It was like a mailbox there. You could put your card in there and the doctor used to come in. A lot of times the doctor wouldn’t come in when he was supposed to come, maybe because he had too many patients to visit, so a lot of times the guy died before the doctor came in. One of my little sisters died.

Harper: Which one?
RUSSO: Bella. She died in 1942.

Harper: How old was she?
RUSSO: She was maybe a year old, or two? I don’t know what she had. Never saw a doctor, nothing. At that time, my dad wasn’t home. Like I was trying to tell you before, in 1942 they took all the men, [from] the ages of 18 to about 50 or 55, to this big plaza, and they gave them a pep talk — I don’t know what because I didn’t go; I was not 18 — and they took them all to labor camps.

Harper: In Greece?
RUSSO: In Greece. Outside the cities, about 100 miles away. I was left alone with my two sisters then, and one of them died afterwards. I built myself up a little wagon. Over there in Greece they call them [sounds like “karosaki”], which is a little wagon with two wheels, one on each side, and one little wheel on the front, and two springs, and I used to carry freight. I used to go by the railroad station, pick up customers. They used to come in at different hours of the night or the day. I used to take them to the places where they wanted to go, and that’s the way we survived because there was no income coming from anyplace.

Harper: How about your mother? Where was she?
RUSSO: She was home with us. My dad was in the labor camp there for six or eight months, whatever, and I was left alone with my mother and my two sisters. Of course, at that time there was no business in the chair business. My mom used to be able to make ten or 12 chairs a day. There was no reason to stay in business, so naturally I was the only breadwinner there for about a year, year and a half, although I was a little kid myself. But I was tough.

Harper: When your father was taken away, were you scared?
RUSSO: No. They came back later on. We had no idea where they went. They said they were going to do this work. What kind of work he did, I don’t know. Several thousand men went to those places. The only thing I heard was that the partisans, the Greek underground, used to come in. There was a Greek underground there after the Germans invaded Greece. So the underground used to come in during the night to ask if they wanted to join them. But for some reason, a lot of men didn’t trust them. Maybe some of them joined; mostly they didn’t. So after whatever they did, they were done, they came back. They came back at the end of 1942, and all of a sudden, in the beginning of 1943, they start telling us that they were going to move us to Poland.

Harper: Can I interrupt you there?
RUSSO: OK.

Harper: After your father came back . . .
RUSSO: He came back, yes.

Harper: What did he say?
RUSSO: He said that they had to work on the railroad tracks and they did all kinds of labor and that, and that’s all he told me. My father and I, we didn’t communicate that well. I was a lot closer with my mother than my father. I respected my father. He was my father, and I used to go with him in a lot of places, but with my mother you could communicate more. She was more like a quiet, gentle person. So I had no idea. The only think I knew was they worked those places for six or eight months, five months, whatever, and they came back at the end of 1942.

Harper: Did you hear your parents talking, or did anybody have any idea about what was going on, what was going to happen? Or what was happening to the Jews of Europe?
RUSSO: No. We had no idea. We had no idea about anything. None.

Harper: Among the Jews, were you resentful towards the Germans for invading?
RUSSO: We were not too crazy about them, but what could you do? This was a war, and they won the war.

Harper: Do you remember any specific laws aimed at Jews?
RUSSO: No. They left us alone there for about a year and a half. They didn’t bother us. The main problem started in the beginning of 1943. It happened quick. Do you want to go farther than 1943?

Harper: Before the trouble began, is there anything before that you may want to tell?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: So in other words, they left you alone basically?
RUSSO: Yes. They didn’t bother us at all. We knew they were there. We could see them in the streets.

Harper: There were troops in the streets?
RUSSO: I used to live about three blocks from the railroad station, and we could see them coming and going, but we didn’t have very much to do. We did see one time they brought in several thousand English prisoners, and there were a lot of guards there, guarding them. I don’t know what they did with them, if they put them in a train to take them someplace else, or what. So we had no idea. They didn’t bother us at all, nothing. There was no restriction for anything.

Harper: They closed the schools though?
RUSSO: The schools were all closed, yes. Didn’t go to school anymore.

Harper: Do you know if they closed the non-Jewish schools?
RUSSO: That I don’t know. Like I said, the Jewish people there kept pretty much to themselves, so we had no idea what went on like ten, 20, 30 blocks from where we lived. Could be possible, you know? There were a lot of them that were open, the Greek schools. But the neighborhood where I was, and the one neighborhood next to us, which was Régie Vardar, that’s where the high school was. And I know that was closed also, because my dad’s sister, Estrella, used to live over there, and we used to go over there several times a year. As a matter of fact, when the Germans came in, we went over there and stayed with them for about a week.

Harper: Why?
RUSSO: Because we lived close to the railroad station, and close to the docks. The English and the Greek army, they blew up all the oil, tanks, and so on, and there was a lot of smoke and noise and so on, so we left. Because when the airplanes came in, the first thing they wanted to hit was the railroad, the railroad stations, the oil refineries, and so on. We lived so close to those places, so we moved a couple of miles further.

Harper: Then what happened?
RUSSO: We stayed over there, and then we came back. A week or two later, we just back came home again.

Harper: So why don’t you tell me how and when things started changing, what exactly started happened, in as much detail as you can remember.
RUSSO: Happened about what?

Harper: What happened next.
RUSSO: Oh. After my dad came back, then in the beginning of 1943, it was around February, they told us that we had to wear the Jewish star. Then they started building up the fence, that ghetto fence, and from the fence to my house was maybe ten feet, because we lived in the last house from that neighborhood. And then they had guards at the door, Jewish guards. We couldn’t go out, nobody could go in, and the Jewish people, they were not allowed to work. I couldn’t tell you very much because we were the first ones to be moved. We were over there in the ghetto maybe a month, a month and a half. From the time they closed up the walls on us until the time they moved us, it was less than two months.

Harper: When they made you wear the star, and when they put up the fence, what did you think? What did your family think? Were you scared?
RUSSO: We started getting kind of suspicious when they told us they were going to move us to another place with other Jewish people. The rabbis, the elder rabbis over there in Greece, told them to go along whatever they tell us, because a lot of them were going to become — what do you call this? Rebellious, resist about all this stuff. But the elder rabbis didn’t want bloodshed over there. Chances are, they had a feeling that we didn’t have a chance. So anyway, we just went along with whatever they told us to do. Naturally, I was a little kid then, I went along with the family. So all of us left in the middle of March. We went in the ghetto for about a month and a half, then they put us in those boxcars, which was only about two or three blocks from my place, and next thing you know, they took us to this destination. They called it Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Harper: Before that, the two months you were in the ghetto . . .
RUSSO: We couldn’t go anyplace. You stayed pretty much inside. We used to gather rations like cornbread, horse meat, very little to eat. We couldn’t go outside those walls for about a month, a month and a half. Couldn’t go out and work like I did before, when I had that little wagon to move freight, because in order for me to do this I had to go outside the other entrance going into the railroad station, and they wouldn’t let you out. And then you had to wear the Jewish star.

Harper: What did it say on it?
RUSSO: Nothing, just . . .

Harper: Just a yellow star?
RUSSO: Just a yellow star.

Harper: And you had to sew it on your clothes?
RUSSO: Yes. All of us had to wear one, yes. It was just a yellow star we had to wear, a long, big one. I just wore this about a month, month and a half.

Harper: Do you remember how big it was?
RUSSO: I don’t know. Most of the time I didn’t even wear it because I had it on my jacket, and most of the time I didn’t wear the jacket, so I used to leave it in the house that I had.

Harper: So you’d go outside without it?
RUSSO: We used to go outside in the ghetto. I used to have a lot of friends. Used to go to school, used to talk, things like that. We didn’t have very much to do because it was still February, a little chilly, and then after about the 15th of March, they just moved us.

Harper: Before they moved you, what did you talk about with your friends about the situation?
RUSSO: Nobody knew anything about it. The only thing we knew was that we were just going to go to this new place.

Harper: So there were these rumors of a new place?
RUSSO: Yes, we were going to go to this new place.

Harper: Were you scared?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: Just, “Okay, we’re going to go to this new place”?
RUSSO: So we’re going to go to this new place. Didn’t worry about it. We didn’t have anything to do there anyway, so we figured maybe the other place was going to be better, which it wasn’t.

Harper: Right. So can you describe the process of — I want to know everything. How they told you, where to assemble. Did you get into trucks?
RUSSO: They told us to get ready, they were going to move us out that particular morning.

Harper: Who said this exactly?
RUSSO: The fellow who was in charge over there. I don’t know who it was that was in charge. A man was in charge.

Harper: A Jewish man?
RUSSO: Yes. They were Jewish people that were in charge. They were just like kapos, whatever. They told all of us that we had to stand on this main street, and they were going to move us out to the railroad station at a certain time. So all of us picked up a few things. We left everything at home except a few belongings, like a suitcase. It was just the four of us — my dad, my mom, me, and my sister — because one of them already passed away. So [pauses, perhaps trying to restrain tears] they just marched us out.

Harper: You marched to the train?
RUSSO: Marched to the train.

Harper: About how long was that?
RUSSO: From where I lived to the train?

Harper: Yes.
RUSSO: About three or four blocks. We lived right across from the railroad station. So they put us in those trains. They locked the doors from the outside, the boxcars.

Harper: What time of day? Were there people watching?
RUSSO: I suppose there were some people watching. We lived at the end part of town, and the one side was a railroad station, then was the ocean, then to the right was the garbage dump, so there was not too much going on after — a lot went on to the right of us, but we just marched [down] one long street, and there might have been a few people watching us, but we didn’t pay any attention, we just marched with our few belongings. We went to these boxcars, they locked the doors from the outside, and this was about it. We had to get out every now and then to go to the bathroom, so it took us approximately five or six days on that train.

Harper: What was the trip like?
RUSSO: That was terrible. Everybody was squeezed like sardines in that train. They put maybe 80-100 people in each boxcar. So anyway, people were lying this way, one on top of the other, sitting down. There was no place you could put your baggage. We had everything with us. Some people laid on a little bundle of something, on their suitcase or a bag or whatever they had. They squeezed us — I think there was enough room in there maybe for about 20 people; they had about 100 in this boxcar.

Harper: Did they give you any food or water?
RUSSO: No, I don’t remember getting anything. Maybe we did, I just don’t remember. We must have gotten something, or we took something with us. The only thing I remember is two or three times a day the train used to stop. We used to go outside and [go to] the bathroom in the bushes. It wasn’t like going into a port, ladies here, men there. You had to go in the bushes. Can you imagine all those people getting out and going to the bathroom? And a lot of them had little pots with them. You could do it in the train, quiet, and then throw the stuff out the window, open and the pot would go by [laughs]. It sounds kind of funny now, but that’s the way it was. It wasn’t. It was a tragedy, actually.

Harper: Did anybody die on the train?
RUSSO: No, as far as I know. There was about 12, 15 cars, maybe 20. I was in the one that I was, and we just — I don’t think anybody talked with anybody.

Harper: Everybody was scared?
RUSSO: Everybody was scared, I suppose, afraid. What was coming next? In some boxcars they had pregnant women, little kids, grandpa, young boys. All of us just squeezed onto that train. There was a few thousand of us, and we stayed on that train until March 20th or 21st.

Harper: Were you with your family in this?
RUSSO: Yes, I was with my family.

Harper: Did you know anyone else in the car?
RUSSO: I’m sure I did, but I didn’t — when you’re 14 or 15 years old, you don’t feel like talking to a lot of people unless it’s somebody that you went to school with. A lot of my friends might have been in another boxcar with their families. So anyway, it was kind of a rocky trip, you might say. We were rocky. You could hear [imitates rhythmic thumping sound of train wheels] blum, blum, blum going from country to country. Chances are we must have had to pass several countries because the next country we passed by was Yugoslavia. I know we must have passed Hungary. So anyway, we passed several countries.

Harper: Did you have any idea where you were going?
RUSSO: No. No, we had no idea.

Harper: Do you at all remember . . .
RUSSO: We couldn’t see anything. We were inside the boxcar; it was dark. Somebody once in a while opened up a little window. You could see a little light to see if it was night or day, but other than that . . .

Harper: What do you remember most vividly from the train trip?
RUSSO: Not very much. The only thing I can tell you is, like I said, it was a pretty miserable trip. We had no idea where we were going, and when we arrived at the destination it was chaos, when we arrived in this little station over there.

Harper: Do you want to take a break, or do you want to continue?
RUSSO: Yes. We can take a break, yes.

[Recording pauses then resumes]

Harper: Do you want to tell us a little more about Salonika?
RUSSO: Yes. Ready?

Harper: Yes.
RUSSO: Anyway, the city of Salonika consisted of approximately seven or eight Jewish neighborhoods. The neighborhood behind where I used to live, which was Baron Hirsch, it used to be the name of the place was Las Barrancas del Senor Jacob. Then farther down, closer to town, used to be Régie Vardar. This was a pretty good-sized neighborhood, with a high school in there. Then up in the hills by the Greek cemeteries used to be Agia Paraskevi. Then farther, closer to town, close to the Jewish cemetery, where the soccer stadium is, there was a neighborhood close by there. We used to call it Los Tres Chorros. Farther down to the right was a neighborhood where the streetcar used to go. We called it “Ciento Cincuenta y Uno,” which is “151.” And then there was another neighborhood close by, close to the ocean. It was called [El Number Sesh?].

Then there was this tiny little neighborhood, I understand, where they built up this new railroad station, and it used to be a terrible place to live, like the homeless people. There were several Jewish families living over there during the war because they were so poor they couldn’t afford any shelter. So this is just about it, about the . . .

Harper: Was there a rich neighborhood where the Jews lived?
RUSSO: There were a lot of rich Jewish people living downtown in those big buildings, the big high-rise buildings right in the middle of town, I would say maybe a couple of thousand that were pretty rich. We didn’t have anything to do with them. They didn’t associate with us because they had their own synagogues and friends and so on, like living in another world.

Harper: [inaudible]
RUSSO: So anyway, this is just about the city where I was. Now, going back, when we arrived in this place called Auschwitz-Birkenau, we were awakened by this noise from the outside. They opened up all the doors and there was a turmoil outside, a lot of noise, a lot of confusion. They were standing, maybe a couple of dozen soldiers with dogs, and they were yelling in German, “Raus!” [Out!] and so on. Women and children and older people are supposed — this is what they told everybody — to go to the left, and they were going to get free transportation with trucks, so they didn’t have to walk. Then they picked up the healthy men, and they put them to the right.

There was approximately 420 of us. I was sort of confused. I was so close to my mother that I wanted to go with them, my mother and my sister. And then, I don’t know what made me do it, all of a sudden I made my decision to go with the guys, and so I went to the right. So I [went] marching because I wanted to be brave. I didn’t want to go right because I thought we were all going to the same place, except they were going to go by truck and we were going to walk. I figured, “I’ll walk. I’m not afraid to walk.” Anyway, we walked to this place — it was about two or three miles — and we saw all those big buildings. It was dark. They took us all into this big building, a big warehouse, in the basement. They stripped us all the clothes off.

Harper: Wait. Did you say you arrived at nighttime?
RUSSO: Yes, we arrived during the night. I don’t know what time it was, closer to early in the morning.

Harper: I’m sorry to interrupt you again, but how did you understand the commands?
RUSSO: We didn’t understand; we just followed wherever, and so we went. We understood a few words because they occupied Greece for two years, and so we understood a few words. So anyway, they took all the clothing out, they shaved us our heads, and next thing you know they tattooed these numbers. My father was 109707, and my number is 109708.

Harper: Can we get a close-up of that?

[pause, sounds of motion]

RUSSO: And the “D” underneath is “political prisoner.” I don’t know what kind of politics we had, but that’s what they did.

Harper: They gave everybody that?
RUSSO: Not everybody has that.

Harper: But in your group?
RUSSO: Yes. My father’s number was 109707 and mine was 109708. They went alphabetic. Our name started with an R. So I got this number here approximately the 21st of March, 1943.

Reich: And that was the number of a political prisoner?
RUSSO: That’s what this little “D” stands for. That’s what they told us. The Germans had that too, but under codes, and they had green on it [their uniforms] because they were criminals. I don’t know what they did. But each one of us had a different sign over there. Anyway, after they fumigated us, then all of a sudden they put us this uniform on, a prisoner’s uniform. Everybody was in shock, and I knew we were in for a lot of trouble.

After we stood over there a few hours, they took us to this block. They put us in this Block Number 9, and the first person we met over there was a Jewish person from Belgrade. I don’t know what his name was. He spoke to us in Ladino Spanish because none of us spoke any German. He tried to explain to us the rules and so on, to do this and to do that, we were prisoners now, and so on. He’d been over there about a year or two. And he told us to be careful with the blankets. The blankets were just fumigated, not to cover us over our head, just to pull it up to the neck.

So anyway, to make a long story short, one of the prisoners which lived behind us — I don’t recall his name; he was about 40 years old, and he had about three or four daughters — he covered himself up, and all of a sudden a soldier came in and all of us had to get off the beds and stand in the hallway by the beds. This guy was getting dizzy, so next thing you know the soldier took a big board from the bed — all the beds had boards underneath — he smacked him over the head with the board. That’s the last time we saw him. We were only over there not even five hours, we already lost one. So the following day we got up in the morning, around whenever it was, 6:00 or 7:00 AM — we must’ve had very little sleep — and we see all those guards there, all the wire, the electrical wires.

We were just talking with friends for about a couple of weeks. So we knew we were into a lot of trouble. There was no way out of this place. After about a week or two being over there in quarantine, they took us outside the camp [to] this [site] called Birkenau. There was some work there to be done outside the camps; it was like a swamp, so we had to drain the swamps. They told us not to drink that water. That’s when I saw that chimney. That chimney was huge, and I knew right away what was happening to those people because it doesn’t take a — by then I was sad because — I was 16 years old for about three weeks. By then I was 17. My birthday actually comes at the beginning of April. [But he says at the start of the oral history that his birthday is in August?] So we saw that chimney. We can see a few women over there, in Birkenau, working on loading trains with whatever it was on those trains, whatever they were doing, trucks and so on.

We went to this swamp for a couple of days, and after a couple of times they took us on another block. Our quarantine was over, two weeks. They put us in Block Number 14 [pauses]. Anyway, Block 14 had three floors, and there were a lot of nationalities over there, not just Jewish people only. There were different nationalities. They were there from different countries, from Poland and Hungary. We didn’t understand what they were saying, and I would say that about half of them were from the Christian faith. We used to help them out with the beds, and they used to give us cookies because they had relatives on the outside. They used to get mail and parcels, things like that, and we didn’t. So they used to give us different things to eat. Although we didn’t understand each other, we got along because they were prisoners just like us. They had the same clothing.

Then after being over there about — they took us to this job outside the camp. It was a big warehouse where all the belongings came in. The people [who] came in with every transport used to bring in things. It was like a Goodwill place, you might call it, sort out coats and shoes and things like that. So my job was to work in this place where they used to have leather. Walked over there on this big yard, and at one time — you know those things you see on the highway, to straighten out and level the asphalt? What do you call those things? This big wheel?

Harper: Steamrollers?
RUSSO: Like a steamroller. We had to be our own motor, and it was two of us that used to push this thing back and forth, leveling out the cement. So after doing this for a few days, they took us to this place where they had leather. We had to cut each section of leather separately. After we worked there a little bit, then one night, going to the camp, all of a sudden a piece of leather fell from somebody on that march, and a soldier saw it. The following day, he came in to our group — everybody was scared to death — he came into this group of ours. There was maybe about ten of us. One of them was a German Jew. He was maybe 35-42, something in that order. He went to us. He wanted to know. We knew who it was, but we didn’t say anything.

Anyway, we came in. We didn’t speak. This soldier came in with a big strap like you see in the movies, came in with this big strap, and he told us to pull the pants down. I played it cool. I went on the end of the line. I figured maybe a miracle was going to happen, nothing is going to happen to me. He’s going to get tired, that soldier, whoever he was. So the first three or four guys had to bend down on this table or chair, and he whacked them about 20-25 times.

After [that], the rest of us — there were about six of us — they took us out. The guard says, “What’s it going to be now?” So we went along. They took us to this place across from this building, where they softened the leather. He told us to jump in that pool. The pool was about ten feet deep. So we jumped with the clothing, with the shoes, and this soldier took a big garden hose like you see the firemen have, with a lot of pressure — he was trying to drown us with this hose that he had! After about half an hour — we went up and down, up and down — after a while he told us to come out, and I said, “God, I hope this is about it for the punishment.” And we were not even guilty of anything; we were just innocent. Because we didn’t want to spill the beans about one of our fellow prisoners — although he was not one of the Greek people, but he was Jewish; he was wearing a Jewish star like we did although he only spoke German. So the terrible [thing] about this pool was we had to walk around two or three days with wet clothing.

Anyway, we got over this and after about — we saw different crazy things going on. We marched through the door every day with music, with an orchestra. The two most barbaric things that I saw in that camp, and I’m not making this up, one morning we were going to work, it was warm, around July, and they told us to turn the heads toward the left. They had this man they caught. He’d run away. They stripped him naked, and they put him on this platform standing up like this, and they tied him up just like you’ve seen in the pictures, tied him up [like] Jesus. They cut him open, not when we were there, but they’d cut him open before. We could see all his everything sticking out, just like you’d be in a surgery room, like an autopsy. This was a complete shock to us. We couldn’t figure out how could a human being, regardless of what the man did, do this? The soldiers to do this to a person? He maybe tried to run away, whatever he did.

The second thing I experienced was, we were standing in an appell [roll call]. Apell means they were going to count us one night, and the appell took a little longer than usual. We found out later on that they’d hanged seven Christian people. Also they ran away. So this was the second thing.

The third thing was, we were in this block, and we see this Jewish man — he was only there about two or three months — he was yelling and crying. We went upstairs — he was staying on the last floor — and he was speaking in Yiddish to us. We didn’t know what it was [that he was saying]. Then we took the jacket off, and we saw all those marks on the back. He was full of marks, covered up, blood, scars, everything, and we couldn’t speak to him to ask him, “Where did this happen?”

So anyway, by accident they were asking some volunteers to empty the garbage on Sundays, and we, a lot of young people from Greece — there was about 50 or 80 of us, young guys from my neighborhood that grew up together — we went to empty the garbage in Auschwitz camp. Of course, there were no horses. I was the one in the front, the first one, guiding this long bar where the horses are supposed to go.

So there was five of us. I was in the front, there was one on each side and two in the back, and on the way to the garbage dump, we saw what happened to this man who we saw the week earlier with the marks. It was a Strafkommando [punishment company]. They are outside the Auschwitz camp — it was like a cage about a block long — and soldiers standing with big whips, and every time somebody went by they used to smack them. Whatever they did, I don’t know, they just salute him, or they caught them stealing something — so that’s why he must have been in that cage, that man that we noticed.

Harper: Can I interrupt you? I’d like to go back and get some more detail if that’s okay?
RUSSO: On what?

Harper: I just wanted to get things straight. You were taken to a first barrack . . .
RUSSO: Number 9, 214.

Harper: And you were just with Greek people then?
RUSSO: We were all people from Greece in the first one.

Harper: And how long were you in that barrack?
RUSSO: Two blocks. It was a big building. It was Block 9. I was there two weeks.

Harper: And during that two-week period, what did you do?
RUSSO: We didn’t do anything; we were in quarantine.

Harper: Okay. Then you were . . .
RUSSO: Besides we were going to Birkenau for a couple of little trips, to clean up the swamp. But when we went to the other block — this was Number 14 that I was there for maybe six or seven months, eight months — this was an international block. They had everybody there, all nationalities.

Harper: And did you hear any talk about the gas chambers in the time . . .?
RUSSO: Yes. We found out about that the first week we were over there. They told us we were never going to see those people again.

Harper: And was that the last time you saw your mother and your sister?
RUSSO: The last time I saw them was when we arrived on the train. Never saw them again.

Harper: So you assumed that they were taken directly to the gas chambers?
RUSSO: Yes. I suppose they got killed the same day. It all depends on how many people were put. This was the last time I saw them, that morning, before we arrived in our destination, because they went to the other side.

Harper: In the international block . . .
RUSSO: Well, it was different nationalities in all the blocks, I suppose.

Harper: Did you notice the Christian prisoners being treated differently than the Jewish prisoners?
RUSSO: No. Except, like I said, they used to get care packages.

Harper: They were allowed to get mail?
RUSSO: Yes, right. They were allowed to get different things from their families. Because they had people on the outside.

Harper: In that block, were there any Gypsies?
RUSSO: I didn’t see any Gypsies in my block. I’m sure there must have been some Gypsies there because we used to see them walking in the camp. There were quite a few Gypsies there.

Harper: Do you remember seeing any homosexual prisoners?
RUSSO: That I don’t know. There might have been some, but I don’t know if they were or not. Maybe there were some in Dachau.

Harper: But you didn’t see any?
RUSSO: Didn’t see any, no.

Harper: Was there a difference between Greek Jews and the other Jews? Did you notice them being treated differently at all?
RUSSO: No, we didn’t have very much in common because we didn’t speak their language. In the first year we didn’t speak at all. They only spoke Yiddish and [the language of] the country they were coming from.

Harper: Was there any difference between the non-Yiddish-speaking Jews? Were they treated differently by other Jews?
RUSSO: I didn’t notice in the beginning, but later on I noticed it was a little different between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic. We were a little different; the customs, they were different.

Harper: I’d like you to explain that, but you can do it chronologically. You can tell me later on if you’d like, or you can tell me now.
RUSSO: No, I can tell you later on.

Harper: Okay. I want to hear that. I’m sorry, why don’t you go back to where I interrupted you?
RUSSO: Oh, with this . . .?

Harper: I’m just trying to understand the chronology, from block to block.
RUSSO: In those camps, everybody kept pretty much to themselves because they were very sad about what went on. They didn’t have any clubs [where] you can go and play cards and this and that. It was just plain going to work, coming home, having whatever you used to get to eat, then the following day.

But I can tell you one thing, Auschwitz compared to the other camps that I was, it was very clean. Very clean. We used to wash ourselves, they had fountains going, and there was a guard at the door, a prisoner. They were checking. You could not walk with the wooden shoes and make a noise waking everybody else. As soon as you get to the door, on each floor, you had to put your shoes back later on. Then you had to take your shirt out and wash yourself. They used to give us a haircut practically every week. We used to get a loaf of bread a week — every Wednesday, I think it was —we used to get besides the meals we used to get. And then, like I said, we used to get some things from the other prisoners who had relatives in the outside. So I was over there in that block for about six, seven, eight months, until sometime at the end of October.

Harper: Were you with your father?
RUSSO: My father was in the same block, yes.

Harper: And this was 14, is that right? Cell Block 14?
RUSSO: Yes, he was in Block 14.

Harper: So you worked in the . . .
RUSSO: But my father worked someplace else. He didn’t work with me; he was in another group. But we used to see each other every day, coming back.

Harper: I want to also understand your work. You said you first cleared the swamp.
RUSSO: Yes, we worked on the swamp for a couple of days, and then after we went to work in this big place, like a big warehouse, to sort out different things. And we worked on the highway, fixing up the highways. I was in that place very long. Most of the time I was working in this big building where you used to get all the goods coming in from the prisoners.

Harper: When you say goods from the prisoners, what do you mean?
RUSSO: I mean if somebody would come in with — there was a group that used to bring in suitcases, or bags, or clothing. When we used to come into the camp, they used to strip us all the clothing. So there was a group over there, maybe 50 people, and they used to tear down jackets to see if there was gold or money in there. We used to turn shoe soles to see if there was anything hidden in the soles.

Harper: Did you ever find anything?
RUSSO: No. Because a lot of people came in from Poland, or different nationalities, and they used to hide money inside the canvas. I didn’t find any.

Harper: Do you know what you did with all these things?
RUSSO: I don’t know. We sorted them out. I don’t know what we did with them.

Harper: Put them in different piles?
RUSSO: Yes, we used to sort them out. Shoes here. And there was a lot of books. I don’t know what we did with those, probably burned them all up. Things people used to bring with them.

Harper: And you said you worked with leather for a while?
RUSSO: Yes, I worked in this place where we got caught. They used to get all kinds of leather. We used to sort out the different pieces and different shapes. What they did with the stuff, I don’t know. So I worked in this place with — it was about 10 or 12 of us. That’s when the people got the straps because one of the prisoners took this leather. He was trying to smuggle it into the camp to sell on the black market for something else.

Harper: Were you aware of any black market?
RUSSO: I’m sure it was there. I mean, it was not a black market where you traded money. It was trading this for a slice of bread, a cigarette for a little margarine. Small stuff.

Harper: Did you participate?
RUSSO: No. My dad used to sell his food for smokes — I know he did — but I didn’t do it. And then I used to work on this garbage place where I used to empty the garbage on Sunday, a few of us. We used to get extra bonuses [for it]. So it wasn’t too bad; we didn’t starve. So after about — is there anything you wanted to ask me about Auschwitz, or should I go on?

Harper: Yes. I’m trying to understand the layout at this time, of the camp. You were in Block 14, in Birkenau?
RUSSO: No, in Auschwitz.

Harper: You were in Auschwitz.
RUSSO: Auschwitz.

Harper: Okay.
RUSSO: Block 9 was where I was in quarantine. And Block 10, we found out later on, that’s where they experimented on men and women. Because the windows were all locked up, we were puzzled at first. All the other places had windows, and these windows had boards. We used to see a lot of nurses and people go there, in and out all day. We found out later on that they used to experiment on men and women, or men only in Block 10, but we didn’t have any proof. But I think something went on in that place that wasn’t kosher.

Harper: Right. What sorts of rumors did you hear?
RUSSO: We heard that they used to experiment on men by doing surgery for — I know one of them is in Los Angeles, and I think he’s one of them who went through the experiment. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s one of them because he couldn’t have any children. He must’ve had surgery over there. He and another couple of ladies. I don’t know whether they did this Block 10 or in Birkenau. I have no idea. Maybe they had one of those medical buildings there, too. But I knew that something was going on in that Number 10 Block. The only people that I used to see there was people in white uniforms, for the two weeks that I was there.

Harper: Did you have to go through selections?
RUSSO: Selection about what?

Harper: I’ve heard other survivors say that they had to line up, and sometimes some were selected to go to the gas chambers.
RUSSO: No, not while we were over there. You had to watch, while you were in the camp, for example, just in case you were injured. That’s what I was told. I used to have a lot of infections on my foot from banging my foot with my wooden shoe — we wore wooden sandals — and a lot of people used to say that if you — let’s say if a truck was going to the gas chambers or to gas you, and the truck limit was, let’s say 50 people, and there were only at about, let’s say 40, then they would go around the blocks to see if there were any people there, freeloaders, just lying in bed, sick [when] they weren’t sick, or somebody they were “worthless.” That’s what I was told.

So I was hiding with this infection in my block one day, and I was scared to death, just [from] what I’d heard. I didn’t see anybody come in, but the way I was told that they had to fill up the truck, and they were looking for a full truck — they weren’t going to go over there for 35 or 40 — when they say 50, it’s going to be possible an innocent person might be going over there. And you had no power to defend yourself or complain.

Harper: When did you get your infection?
RUSSO: I got it somewhere in between. I had this big sore on this foot, right over here — I think it was this foot — from banging the wooden sandal that I had.

Harper: Was it . . .?
RUSSO: It started kind of little, then it got swollen, and I was afraid to go to the hospital.

Harper: So it was a serious infection?
RUSSO: Yes. Over here you would consider going to the hospital to treat you for a few days, but over there — I have no idea how that thing got well. Evidently mine was [inaudible], and then I got well. I couldn’t have gotten any rest because we had to walk several miles each day going back and forth to work.

Harper: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt.
RUSSO: That’s okay.

Harper: Let’s pick up where you left off. Do you remember where that was? You were explaining to me how you saw the man being whipped.
RUSSO: In the Strafkommando, yes. We saw that. That was happening on the way to the garbage dump. And I was told, by rumors, that at one time, before they had the gas chambers, about a year or two or three years before I was there, they used to line up people on that garbage dump. They used to build up trenches. They used to shoot a lot of people and leave them there and cover them with garbage. But that I didn’t see. That’s what I was told by prisoners who had been there before. I don’t know. We didn’t see anything because all we saw was this big mountain of garbage.

Harper: Were you able to see the smoke from the smokestack all the time, from the crematorium?
RUSSO: No. We did see the chimney. When I was over there, outside the camp in the swamp, we could see the chimney, but I don’t remember if I saw any smoke. That was during the daytime. I didn’t see any smoke because the chimney was about 12 blocks from where I was standing. We just put one and one together and figured it out, what was happening to all those people that used to come in with the train. Because even this fellow, he was from Yugoslavia, he told us just not to think about it. Then we told other guys, who came in with the second and third and fourth groups, what was happening. They could not believe it. “Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” We said, “Yes.”

There were other people who came in after us. They had maybe one or two transports every week or two from Salonika to clear out. The Jewish people, once they could get away, they went to the Italian zone. They were safer over there. I understand between 10-15,000, they went to the Italian zone because the Italians didn’t bother them as much. But approximately 40,000 of us, in the city of Salonika, we had to go through the ghetto. So that’s all I know about this garbage dump. If that’s the truth, who knows it? But I’m sure that it must be the truth because somebody wouldn’t make up a story like that. Before they had the gas chambers they didn’t have any other way to kill those people except put them in the top of those trenches and shoot them. They used to fall down right on top of the others. That’s why they had to cover them up with garbage. So anyway, anything you wanted to ask me about Auschwitz? I was there approximately eight months.

Harper: And the whole time you were there you were in Auschwitz, not Birkenau?
RUSSO: No. I was all the time in Auschwitz. I was in this Block 14 over there from approximately the beginning of April until sometime at the end of October or the beginning of November.

Harper: Yes, I want to ask a few questions about Auschwitz. Before we started the interview, you said you are kind of a joker.
RUSSO: Yes, I used to . . .

Harper: What did you joke about?
RUSSO: Well, I used to make the kids cheer up, a few small talks, little small jokes. A lot of kids, they were my age, a year older, and the ones they were behind me, we used to go to school together, to play together, and they thought that I should have been more serious. Look at it, we were marching with soldiers on both sides, the orchestra on the other side, and I used to tell them a small joke, to be careful about this. It’s hard to explain to you. I used to speak to them in Ladino. I used to tell them a few little things just to make them — not all the time, now and then — to make them cheer up a little bit, forget about all the troubles we had.

Harper: What did you talk about with people?
RUSSO: You mean what we talk inside the camps?

Harper: Yes.
RUSSO: Very little. Everybody was kind of sad, you know? Kind of down. We didn’t talk about girls. We just talked about food, what we’d like to do when we got out. Everybody was sad; we were just innocent victims. We didn’t do any crime, we didn’t steal anything, and all of a sudden we wind up wearing striped clothes, living in those camps, and force us to go to work, things you don’t want to do. We couldn’t figure out how one human being could do this to another person.

Harper: Did you make any friends with any non-Greeks?
RUSSO: No. I didn’t have any friends over there at all. We used to keep pretty much to ourselves, little groups of people that we had, friends that I grew up with that we used to know, because in the neighborhoods that I described to you before, everybody knew everybody. So you could be there with your — I would say there was at least 50 of us with fathers and sons. The kids were like teenagers, 16, 18. The fathers were in their late 30s or early 40s, like my dad. He was 43. So it was fathers and sons. We used to just keep a straight profile. We didn’t get in any problems. We figured there was no way out of this place because we saw two evidence, what happened to the man, they cut him open, and those other seven people that were hanged, they left them there with the stools for several days.

Harper: Were you aware of any resistance movement in Auschwitz?
RUSSO: No. We had no idea what went on in our — no, we didn’t know anything. We just kept too much to ourselves, just do whatever we were told to do and this was about it.

Harper: Did you notice any religious observance?
RUSSO: No. I didn’t see anybody over there praying, nothing.

Harper: Nobody ever talked about religion?
RUSSO: No. Nobody talked about anything.

Harper: I didn’t ask you about what you ate.
RUSSO: Not very much, to be honest with you. We used to get something for lunch there. They used to bring those big kettles of soup, and some potatoes and carrots. There was very little meat. We used to get one of those. Then we used to get something at night, but I don’t remember if we got any breakfast. I would say we got about two meals a day.

[Long pause, some indistinct whispering in the background]

Reich: We still have 20 minutes left on this tape.
Harper: OK.

Harper: So you were in Auschwitz for about eight months?
RUSSO: About eight months, yes.

Harper: And then what happened?
RUSSO: And then from there they told us they were going to move us to Warsaw. So anyway, they put us in this train. I think it was in the end of October, the beginning of November, I’m not too sure, because when we got there it was cold, in Warsaw, Poland. We arrived over there, I think the beginning of November or the end of October, and it was this place they called the Warsaw Ghetto. We never heard from the Warsaw Ghetto before; we had no idea where [was] the Warsaw Ghetto. So there was a camp inside the ghetto, ten blocks, from one to ten. I was in the Block Number 10. There were approximately 4,000 prisoners inside the camp. They told us that this was the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. That place was huge. It was approximately ten blocks wide and about 15 blocks long, and they had a big wall around it. Our job was to demolish this ghetto. They dynamited all the walls, and we had to clean up all the bricks and load them up into a trailer.

Harper: So there was no one in the ghetto?
RUSSO: No. The ghetto was empty. It was just walls, skeletons of walls. Some buildings, they had a floor, and some buildings they didn’t. And some of them only had walls. Some of them had one floor. We understood that the Germans bombarded it, that ghetto. They told us there was an uprising over there, it was resistance fighters, they fought with the Germans. So they gave us to do this job. We loaded up the trailers full of bricks. Then after being over there a couple of months — it was cold like the dickens. The frozen bricks. We used to build up fires behind buildings so nobody could see us. We had guards, but the guards were Slovaks, Slovak guards. They did not have the same uniforms that the Germans did. We used to load up these trailers. We used to take the bricks to the railroad station.

I worked in there for about three months, and then there was a typhoid epidemic. That place was dirty, filthy, cold, miserable. So anyway, I was infected with the disease, typhoid, and they put me in this block — I don’t know which block it was; it must’ve been Number 6 or 7 — with all of us sick. There was a bucket there by the door to urinate. I don’t know if I can use that word or not. So we used to get up — none of us had any clothes on — and every day we looked outside the window. They must’ve had between ten and 20 and 30 bodies outside that window. Every day!

Harper: Bodies from your group?
RUSSO: No. Warsaw had maybe, I would say about 500 or 600 Greek Jews and the rest were Ashkenazi. They were all nationalities. They were all Jewish. But the kapos we had, they were Germans. Then the guards, they were either Ukrainians or they were Slovaks, because they spoke with a Slavic [accent?] and they had a different uniform and different hats on. Anyway, after surviving that miserable typhoid epidemic, one night the guy next to me died. A couple of guys came in. They took him away. We had nothing in there. We had no medicine, no food, no soup for about a week. I was very skinny then. When I got out of that place around January or February, I couldn’t even stand on my own feet.

Then after we got done with tearing down all the buildings —but there was a lot of good Polacks outside the camp; they used to throw bread from the big buildings, from the balconies. There were a lot of people that used to say thanks, like waving. We couldn’t see them because they didn’t want to be seen. They used to hide because they didn’t want the Germans to see them, whatever. There were a lot of good Christian, good people there in Poland. They used to throw bread. It was pretty far from the building, inside the ghetto wall, to throw that stuff. You almost have to have a good target. So anyway, after we got done with the ghetto we built up another camp for us, a better camp.

Harper: I need to interrupt you right there.
RUSSO: Yes?

Harper: Did you come across any people that had been hiding in the ghetto at all?
RUSSO: I didn’t, but there were other prisoners who saw skeletons there, I was told. I didn’t come into contact with anybody. The only thing that I found in this place, it was a handkerchief. I think I may still have that handkerchief. That handkerchief is about 51 years old.

Harper: So let me just get this straight: you were demolishing the ghetto, just taking down the walls?
RUSSO: We demolished everything, everything!

Harper: Blowing up the buildings?
RUSSO: Blew up, dynamited all the buildings, all the buildings. We leveled the whole thing. Took us about five or six months. By around April or May, all of it was gone.

Harper: And you were with, not just Greeks, but other Jews?
RUSSO: They were all Jewish, but different nationalities.

Harper: Right.
RUSSO: There was a fellow there, he was my vorarbeiter [foreman] He was a big husky guy. I don’t know what his name was; we used to call him “Vorarbeiter.” He was from Poland. I used to smuggle things for him from outside the camp because I had this long coat, and I was little. Like vodka, eggs, bread, salami, inside the coat.

Harper: Where did you get these things?
RUSSO: I don’t know where he got them, but what he did was — we used to take three trailers of bricks. One of the prisoners used to get off the truck and unhook the trailer and leave the trailer behind, and we’d take two trailers to the station. That was awfully clever. And on the way back the trailer was empty, full of bags, but we didn’t get any. That vorarbeiter used to get, and the kapo, who was a little German, a little mumser [bastard], a little guy. Then we had the soldiers and a couple of other guys, they used to get the stuff, but they had to bring it in the camp. So they used to give it to us to carry it in.

Sometimes I used to carry ten, 15 pounds with the goods, probably worth a lot of dollars there, with the vodka and salami and all good stuff, like you were going to a deli. So I used to get it in the camp, and as soon as I came to the camp, this man used to come in, and I’d give it to him. For my reward — he didn’t need this, he didn’t want his ration — he used to give his ration to me. Because he already had all this. I mean, who in the world was going to eat all this junk food we used to get in? Nothing but water and potatoes. He used to give it to me, a favor for carrying. But if I would’ve gotten caught, God knows what would’ve happened to me.

One day we did get caught, on a different occasion. We were carrying inside that soup tank, but the tank was empty. I don’t know what happened. I was not the one who was carrying it. Whatever happened to those people who were carrying it, I don’t know, because it was full of goods inside that empty [tank]. I don’t know why the soldier made them open that soup barrel that we had. We used to get a barrel of soup in the lunchtime, and then we had to bring that, empty, in the camps. So for my reward for bringing all that stuff in, all the goodies, I used to get the potatoes and the soup and the bread, from this vorarbeiter. He was the first one who get kicked out of that group.

Harper: What do you mean by “kicked out?”
RUSSO: He was dismissed. After this, he was nobody. Instead of being the foreman, the vorarbeiter, he was a nobody just like us. He didn’t have the authority. Then he was like one of us, and I saw him later on and the guy was so skinny because he didn’t have all that good stuff to eat. So naturally I didn’t get any of his stuff because he was having it himself.

Harper: So you were sort of involved in the black market for a while?
RUSSO: I was involved in carrying the stuff for him because I had no other choice, but you’ve got to take chances in life to survive. I wasn’t doing it for profit; I was doing it for a favor for him and a favor for me. Both of us benefitted from this thing.

Harper: Did you do anything else like that?
RUSSO: No. It was just after we finished up that new camp in the ghetto. It was a better camp, made out of bricks. We built it because there was a lot of brick there. I have no idea why they made us build up this new camp, because the Russians were advancing. By then it was 1944, around May. We heard rumors that we were going to move again. So is there anything you wanted to ask me?

Harper: Yes. Did you live in this new camp?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: You don’t know why you built it?
RUSSO: I don’t know. I don’t even think we used it, the new camp. We went by there. Our camp was longer. There were two of them. There was the old camp, which was the thin wooden barracks, and the new camp. I don’t know if this camp was going to be for us, or — they looked like triplexes, made out of bricks and windows. Compared to the other one — we had nothing. We had no stoves, no tables. No, we had one table for 400 people. So I don’t know why we built this new camp; I have no idea. We never used it.

Harper: Were you hurt or wounded while you were at the Warsaw Ghetto?
RUSSO: No. It was miserable cold. Except I had this typhoid epidemic. It took me about a month to get over. Very few of us made it out of that room. Maybe I was too young and I had a better resistance.

Harper: What was your physical condition? Were you very thin?
RUSSO: Yes, I was very thin. I would say I weighed maybe between 90 and 100 pounds.

Harper: This may be a strange question, but did it feel eerie to be in a totally deserted part of the city. Was it strange? How did you feel about doing that?
RUSSO: You mean in the Warsaw Ghetto?

Harper: Yes.
RUSSO: No, we just did what we were supposed to do. We worked. We used to go through town, going to the railroad station a couple times a day, and there was people standing on the street, waiting for the streetcars. They used to look at us. A lot of them, they were wondering . . .

Harper: Were you still in your uniform?
RUSSO: No, I had civilian clothes.

Harper: Ahhh. OK.
RUSSO: Yes, we didn’t have any striped clothes then.

Harper: So why don’t you explain, how did they . . .?
Reich: Let’s get another tape before we go into this.

Harper: Let’s take a break. We need to change tape.

[First tape ends, then second tape begins]

Harper: Okay. You mentioned that you were in civilian clothes.
RUSSO: That’s right.

Harper: When did they give you civilian clothes?
RUSSO: When we arrived there. When we arrived over there, we had civilian clothes. They took the striped clothes away from us, and we got this new — we got a different outfit. It was probably worn out by somebody else. It didn’t fit us right. They didn’t look for the size. My coat was too long. But it was a filthy place. Like I said, the sanitation in the place was very bad. They only had two toilets, two buildings where people could go wash themselves. Most of the everything was floating, and it was hard to get in and out because the floor was always full of water. We only had a couple of showers there, and we were afraid to go to the showers. They had showers outside the camp, but we were afraid to go just in case gas was going to come out.

Harper: Really?
RUSSO: So anyway, it was a filthy place. It was dirty and cold, and I was kind of glad to get out of there, the way I was, after the typhoid epidemic. After about seven or eight months, after they built up these new buildings, the new blocks which we never used, approximately the end of May, they told us we were going to leave.

Harper: Let me stop you there. You said you saw civilians. You had contact with civilians?
RUSSO: No, we didn’t have any contact. We saw civilians on the street.

Harper: And they saw you?
RUSSO: Yes. We were sitting on top of the bricks on the way to the railroad station, and they used to look at us with — they’d give us a look over there, kind of suspicious, “Who are those people?” Because we had no Jewish stars, nothing. They thought we were homeless or prisoners or whatever, I don’t know. They were just waiting for the streetcars, people walking on the street. This was outside the ghetto.

Harper: So the guards never went with you?
RUSSO: The guards were with us.

Harper: Oh.
RUSSO: In front, on the track, we had two guards. Every time we went, we had the same guards coming back. They used to guard us all the time.

Harper: How then did you get the vodka and the . . .?
RUSSO: I don’t know. It was inside this empty trailer.

Harper: You just sort of slipped it in your . . .?
RUSSO: Well, on the way back we had to hook the empty trailer so that we can go back to the — from the train station, we used to hook the trailer, a couple of blocks from the railroad station where we unloaded the bricks. They used to have some things inside that open trailer, and there was bags or boxes or whatever. So on the way to the camp, those people used to give it to the prisoners to carry it in, the stuff. We never knew what was inside. We used to carry it in. But I know it was a bottle of schnapps, or vodka, wine, whatever. We didn’t even get to taste any of this stuff. We just did it for them for the things they used to give to us later on, for maybe two or three months.

It was good when that went on, but after the guy got caught, then there was no more carrying anything out, and there was no more going to the station because there were no more bricks to carry out after we finished up demolishing all the buildings and the streets, and we burned all the furniture. We just cleaned the whole mess up. We did it for several months — five, six, seven months — and after we got done, it was ready for us to move along.

They took us by foot from Warsaw. We had to walk approximately six or eight days. We walked every day about 20 miles a day, whatever, 25 miles a day. We had no food. We had no water. A lot of prisoners used to be too weak. They used to put them in a tractor, and they used to die along the way. It was awfully hard. And after about the third or fourth day we arrived in this bridge, and we saw that big water underneath, this small river. All of us went in there with the shoes and the pants, and we drank water. We drank enough water there, and then it started raining. We slept in the rain for a couple of nights. We must’ve lost about 100 prisoners along the way. And I would say they kept us without water and food for about five or six days. They put us in those boxcars again, and we arrived in Dachau. Dachau.

Harper: While you were walking, were you in your civilian clothes?
RUSSO: Yes. My number over there in Warsaw was 2988.

Harper: Where did they put that number?
RUSSO: They just gave it to us.

Harper: You had to remember it?
RUSSO: Yes. Neunundzwanzig achtundachtzig. This was my number.

Harper: And you had to line up every day and . . .?
RUSSO: Well, in case somebody wanted something, they used to call you the number. So this was my number, 2988. We didn’t have it; you had to memorize it. Then we arrived in Dachau . . .

Harper: Wait. I’m sorry. I need to interrupt you again. So you walked for about five days . . .
RUSSO: Five or six days.

EH Until you reached a town with a train?
RUSSO: We reached this — it must’ve been the German border, I guess. They put us in those boxcars. I don’t know why they didn’t put us in those boxcars before, but we must’ve marched at least six or seven days.

Harper: And this was through the countryside?
RUSSO: No, it was through the highway. You could see horses. You could see houses. It was a long line. There were six of us in each line. It was at the beginning of June or the end of May.

Harper: Were people shot by the guards?
RUSSO: I heard shots. Like I said, the line was too long [to see], but there were some people that got shot, a few of them. Then we arrived at this destination where the train was. They put us in those boxcars. Everybody was soaking wet. We must’ve been on this train for two or three days until we arrived in Dachau.

Harper: Do you know what month?
RUSSO: It was the beginning of June, 1944. And then they kept us in Dachau. We didn’t work in Dachau; they kept us in these quarantine blocks while we were over there, for a couple of weeks, a week or two maybe, and then they gave us a number. So that number that I had before, 2988, it was no good anymore. My new number was 88371. There must’ve been a lot of 88,000s before me, I guess [chuckles].

Harper: Why didn’t they use the number that is on your arm?
RUSSO: I don’t know. They gave me this achtundachtzig drei einsundsiebzig. This was my number. So after being over there a couple of weeks, they moved us to this little town, Mühldorf. It was inside the woods. They called it Mühldorf Waldlager. Wald is “the woods” in German. We had those little houses in the ground. We used to go down a stairway. The only thing sticking out was the roof. So we used to go down there. We slept about 40 of us, 20 on each side.

Harper: I’m confused here. Was this a sub-camp of Dachau?
RUSSO: Yes. It was in Mühldorf.

Harper: It was close to Dachau then?
RUSSO: Well, I don’t know how close it was, but we walked over there. We must’ve been close. I think we walked.

Harper: Were you with your father?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: What happened?
RUSSO: My father, when we got to Dachau, we got split. He went to another camp. I was with him until the beginning of June, and then he was sent to another camp and I was sent to Mühldorf.

Harper: Was that difficult for you, to be separated?
RUSSO: No. I did OK. We got split after being together about a year and a half or so.

Harper: Do you know where he went?
RUSSO: He went to another camp. I don’t remember the name. He died sometime in February.

Harper: Of ’45?
RUSSO: ’45.

Harper: Do you know how he died?
RUSSO: I don’t know.

Harper: So this camp that you went to, was it a factory? Or what was it?
RUSSO: We had to work in a cement factory several miles from the camp. We had to walk. There was a lot of people there, 24-hour shifts, working, and 12-hour shifts. There were people carrying cement bags and people carrying the mix. My job was to clear out the tracks. There was a little choo-choo train going by, just like you see in the zoo, and they had metal boxes. They used to go through this line, and a guy used to open up the trap and fill it up with cement to be carried for this building, a factory for airplanes. There was a lot of trains going by, those little trains, so we had to switch the tracks because you didn’t want a collision. Sometimes the little choo-choo train used to — I used to call them choo-choo trains — they used to tip a lot of cement onto the tracks, so you had to clear it out before there was an accident. I worked in there for quite a while in that cement [factory]. We used to march to the camps. Most of it had to do with cement.

Harper: Who were you with at this time? With Greek Jews?
RUSSO: Yes.

Harper: Primarily?
RUSSO: Some friends, yes. A few friends that I knew.

Harper: But mostly Greek Jews?
RUSSO: Most of it, yes. We used to march every day, five or six miles in the morning, five or six miles at night. We used to get a little black coffee in the morning and maybe some soup in the afternoon. At nighttime we used to get a few potatoes.

Harper: Were conditions better in this camp?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: How long were you in Dachau?
RUSSO: About a week or two. Auschwitz was the cleanest, and more human. It’s kind of hard to picture that, but for me, anyway, Dachau wasn’t too bad because I wasn’t there long enough. But the second one, Warsaw, was terrible, and the last one because we had to go underground, and it was cold. We went underneath, and they had a little straw inside. We used to sleep. And on Sunday we had to carry logs. 30 or 40 of us would carry one tree, on Sundays. It was terrible. By then, the whole time you were getting weak. Because like I said, it was a lot of fathers and sons, we had to drag the older people. Of course they weren’t old by today’s standards, but in those days, when you are 18 or 19 or 20 years old, somebody who is 44 [chuckles] or 45 looks old, and all the misery they had to go through. When you’re young, you’re wild; you don’t think about anything. But some of them they thought about the families they lost, and the bad life that they had to go through. They went to war for about 27 months, or two years, or whatever. So we had to drag all those old-timers home, and it was snowing.

Anyway, the food wasn’t that great, the hours were long, and you didn’t know what to expect. Until things started brightening up a bit around March. We could see airplanes coming. And then we found out we had to go into this little town, Mühldorf, outside the camp. How exciting it was [says this facetiously]. We had to dig out all the bombs that didn’t blow up on the railroad station. That’s all we needed, one of those bombs to blow up [chuckles]. There was a lot of us that went over there, about 1,000, so we had to straighten up the tracks. They had a man who was looking at the clocks . . .

Harper: On the bombs?
RUSSO: On the bombs.

Harper: So you had to go up to a bomb that was just sitting there?
RUSSO: It was a bomb sticking in the ground.

Harper: That didn’t explode?
RUSSO: Didn’t explode. So there was a German who tried to unscrew the wires. That’s all we needed. One false move and everybody would have been blown away [laughs]. There was a lot of them! They didn’t blow up.

Harper: Did you see one blow up?
RUSSO: No, they didn’t blow up. So every time that we used to do this job, it was another alarm, another air raid. The first thing we did, we used to go in the houses — there was nobody there — and we used to look for food.

Harper: So when the air raid siren would go, you would run into an empty house?
RUSSO: Into the empty houses. All of us went in looking for food.

Harper: Were there guards with you?
RUSSO: There was nobody, except one time [laughs] I ran through this house — it was scary. How the guy didn’t shoot me I don’t know. It was two doors, one door here, another door over there, and I was fast. I was maybe 18 years old at the time; I was very fast, skinny. And I opened up this door to see. Just as I came in the kitchen, another door opened on the other side [laughs], and I came face to face with this guy with a gun. So anyway, it was a young guy in his early 20s, and he had a swastika here. I didn’t think. I went by him, through the door that he came in, and he went through the door that I came in. That’s the last time I saw that guy. I looked back to see if he was following me. He could’ve shot me! By a miracle the guy didn’t pull the trigger. I went by him by about ten inches away. So he thought I was running for the air raid and had to hide. And I was wearing civilian clothes. Maybe he thought that I was not a prisoner.

Harper: So they gave you civilian clothes again?
RUSSO: No, we had the same clothing we brought in from Warsaw.

Harper: So you never changed back?
RUSSO: No, never changed. Maybe we got another outfit — we must have exchanged it along the way somewhere — but we wore civilian clothes again.

Harper: I see.
RUSSO: Yes.

Harper: So when the air raid sirens would go — what I’m trying to understand is, was there a place you were supposed to go to?
RUSSO: We used to work on the tracks, on the train. Every time the air raids came, the soldiers who used to guard us, they used to run!

Harper: Oh, so . . .
RUSSO: So everybody used to run. The soldiers we had, they were old-timers, the retired. They had all the good guys, the younger guys, in the war, in the front, and they kept those retired soldiers guarding us. Anyway, the soldiers left, we left. So we used to go and look for things.

Harper: Did anyone escape?
RUSSO: No. Later on they did, like a week or two later. I ran away too, later on. Then after we got done with this job, we had to work someplace else. We used to go on a train, and we used to open up trenches for the sewer pipes. I worked over there for a couple of weeks.

Harper: Was that at another camp?
RUSSO: No, it was the same camp. We used to take a different direction, and we would wind up walking more than working because from the place the train used to stop until the place where we had to go to work — because each one of us had to do a section every day, and there were several hundred of us, so each day we had to walk farther. We spent more time walking than working. One day we’d get there about 7:00 AM, the following day 7:30 AM. Next thing you know, a lot of the time we used to go over there, and it was only about two hours time and we had to go back. Good thing we didn’t have to do that job very long. Then they told us they were going to move us to someplace. They didn’t tell us where. So they put us into those boxcars again, the train kept going and going, and all of a sudden, one day they soldiers told us that the war was over. So everybody ran. I had my two feet then. Everybody ran. Now this was about the 25th or 26th of April. We went running in the fields, and were having something to eat, cucumbers or — I know I’m not going to have any beets anymore because everybody got sick from those beets [laughs].

Harper: You ran off with a group of . . .?
RUSSO: A lot of friends, all of us ran. Then about an hour after, another group of soldiers came in with black uniforms. They started shooting at us; they brought us back. Now this was around the 26th or 27th of the month. They put us back in the boxcar and said no, the war wasn’t over. They put us in the boxcars, and they locked the doors from the outside, and there we go again, on the train. All of a sudden, one day, the following day, I heard shooting. That’s when I got it in my leg. I was sitting like this, and they shot my leg off. It was on the 28th of April.

Harper: Who shot your leg?
RUSSO: They shot with a machine gun. The guy next to me got it over here, and somebody kicked me over here. They opened up the door from the outside, and they looked at me like a laundry basket. The leg was hanging out by two or three nerves and a piece of skin, and it smelled like barbequed meat. A couple of the prisoners, two or three, took me from the boxcar. They took me to the railroad station that was a block away, and the only thing I can see is this guy comes in with a couple of clippers, like this, and cut my leg off. A couple of prisoners held me down, and they put a bandage around me.

They tied up my hand, they tied up my leg, and they put me in the last boxcar with at least 15 or 20 dead people. They put me over there way in the corner, and the only thing I could hear is — now I had one leg, I couldn’t run [chuckles], and I was bleeding. And I hadn’t had a meal for three days. A day or two later, it was getting colder, and colder, and colder, and all of a sudden I heard noise outside. A couple of guys were talking in Ladino Spanish, and I yelled because they thought the whole boxcar was full of dead people. That’s what I think. I yelled from the inside the best that I could, yelled as much as I can, and a couple of the guys opened the door, they picked me up, and they put me in this ambulance, and they took me [sniffles] to this little makeshift hospital. They put me on the floor over there, and it was May 1st. So anyway, I woke up the following day in this little room, and no leg.

Harper: Who were those guys?
RUSSO: A couple of friends. I don’t know.

Harper: They were prisoners?
RUSSO: Yes. They spoke Ladino. They took me in this — when they cut my leg off, and the following day put me in this little room. And that’s when the war ended, on May 1st, 1945.

Harper: This was a hospital?
RUSSO: It was like a small gasthaus [inn]. In Germany, they have a lot of gasthauses. I think what it was is a small gasthaus [that] they made it as an emergency hospital for one day or two days or three days, because I was there a couple of weeks. There was maybe four of us in this small room for one person. There must’ve been a lot of people injured. I was over there for a couple of weeks, and then the German people who owned this building, they must have wanted this building to go back to them. They put me and another guy — he had one leg — they took me to this big German hospital, me and the other friend. His name was Tischler Israel. I think he lost his leg over there. Where, I don’t know. He was from Poland. We arrived in this hospital about the middle of May, and it was a German amputee hospital. They kept me over there for a couple of weeks, and then they took me from there to another displaced [persons] hospital which the Germans converted from a monastery to a hospital during the war because it was in such an isolated area. When the war ended, naturally there were no German soldiers there, so they made a displaced person hospital for the time being.

Harper: Did you see any soldiers or any Red Cross? Who was administering all this? Who was taking you? Who was helping you? German doctors?
RUSSO: I don’t know. I think a lot of Jewish people that were involved then. Like in this hospital where I was, they called them [sounds like santertilia], temporary hospital. The administrators there were Jewish, but the doctors, they were all Germans. There were people with a lot of problems, epilepsy and different diseases, TB, and different problems people had. One guy had a hole in his cheek, and another guy had a bad heart. There were several of us with — one guy had no toes — two of them had no hand, one hand was amputated. It was run by the Jewish organizations, I think. I was over there for — they gave us a room on one of the floors for us to be there to recuperate, for therapy, so we wouldn’t have to run in the other displaced person camps. I was over there until May 1st, 1948.

Harper: In that hospital?
RUSSO: In that hospital. I didn’t require any medical, but I did require more surgery because in order to wear an artificial leg, you had to have a certain amount of flesh to move around. I had too much bone sticking out, so they took me to the orthopedic clinic in Munich and they did more surgery on me, in 1946.

Harper: How did you communicate with people?
RUSSO: I spoke a little German by then. I spoke German. I spoke a little Yiddish. That hospital, there was about 300-400 people there. As a matter of fact, David Ben-Gurion came over there.

Harper: Really?
RUSSO: In 1946 or ’47. They brought an orchestra with him, and they sang. At that time he was not the president; Israel didn’t become a state until a year or two later. So after the hospital closed up, I moved to this little town in Weilheim, in the Alps, by Berchesgaden, Germany. I had to go to school there, to a person who did tailoring. So I had to become a tailor.

Harper: Who sent you to this school?
RUSSO: It was not a school. In Germany, there is no school [for that]. You have to go to an apprentice.

Harper: Who sent you?
RUSSO: I went there. I went over there because there was a lot of Jewish people in this little town. I used to go there every couple weeks to go to the movie, visit some of my friends. There was about 12 or 15 of my friends from the camps. There was approximately 1,000 Jewish people there. They had a kosher kitchen. They had a synagogue. So I met this fellow — his name was Kideleyvich, and he was a tailor — and he taught me a little tailor job.

Harper: Where was he from?
RUSSO: He was from Poland. He was married, and his wife’s name was Sonja. She was a heavyset gal. So anyway, in 1951 I was granted a visa to come to America.

Harper: What was the name of the town you apprenticed in?
RUSSO: The town that I learned? Weilheim in Oberbayern.

Harper: There was a little international Jewish community?
RUSSO: There was a lot of nationalities there, Croats and Pollacks and French and Hungarians, but there were also about 1,000 Jewish people in that little town, maybe even more. We had a Jewish community center, and we had concerts. So after all the people left — when I left, there was only about three or four Jewish people left. They had a mikvah. So anyway, in 1951, I came here in America, on December 24th, 1951.

Harper: You didn’t want to go back to Greece?
RUSSO: No. There was a fellow who came in from Greece when I was in santertilia, in this hospital, in 1945. I didn’t want any part of it. I was very upset. I’d lost my leg a couple of months earlier, and I knew my dad had passed away [choking up], so there was no reason for me to go back. It was going to bring a lot of bad memories. I’ve been here in town for almost 42-1/2 years.

Harper: So you came directly to Portland?
RUSSO: I came to New York, and from New York I came to Portland. I stayed in New York for three days, and then I came to Portland.

Harper: Why did you come here?
RUSSO: Because that’s where they sent me.

Harper: Oh, they sent you here?
RUSSO: Yes. You had to go where they sent you. You can’t just go. To me, it didn’t make any difference where I was going because I had no idea where was what, so they sent me over here and I came over here. I was 25 years old when I came here.

Harper: And you got a job?
RUSSO: Yes. I went to work in this tailor factory for a while, but it didn’t work out too good. Then I worked in this neighbor’s warehouse — it was a wholesale — for a while. The place burned down. Then I worked for another guy doing warehouse work. I did it for about 28 years. I started as a shipping clerk and worked myself up until 1980 or ’81. 1980, I think.

Harper: And you got married?
RUSSO: Oh, I got married quite a while before then. I got married in 1961.

Harper: Where did you meet your wife?
RUSSO: I met my wife near Kesser Israel.

Harper: So when you came here, you became an active member of the Jewish community?
RUSSO: I used to live in that area, where the Shaarie Torah was, and Neveh Zedek and that Ahavath Achim, in that area where that urban renewal place is. I lived over there for a few years, and then I met my wife in 1961. She used to live not too far away from Kesser Israel, on Second and Mead, and we got married in December. I’ve got two daughters.

Harper: Did you have a Jewish wedding?
RUSSO: Yes.

Harper: And did you raise your children Jewish?
RUSSO: Yes. One of my daughters is 31, and the other one is 29. The younger one is married. And my wife died in July of 1974.

Harper: You’re active in the Jewish community now?
RUSSO: Yes. I don’t know what you mean about being active. I go to services . . .

Harper: Yes, that’s what I meant. You’re involved.
RUSSO: Yes. I go to Shaarie Torah now and then. I’ve been going to Kesser Israel for 14 years. I was a member with Ahavath Achim from 1952 to 1960, and I’ve been going to Shaarie Torah for the past 32 years. My kids were brought up in the Sunday schools and confirmation and so on.

Harper: What are your daughters’ names?
RUSSO: My oldest one is Joan, and my youngest daughter, Pam, she’s married. She’s got a little boy. And that’s just about it. I have a small family.

Harper: I want to try to understand what it’s like to be a survivor living in this country. Did you know friends that were survivors?
RUSSO: I know a few of them, yes. It’s very hard to talk about those things every day. You don’t want to talk about those things. But personally, probably a lot of survivors feel the same way as I do, that when you hear people, they don’t believe you. If somebody will be talking to you, or to another person, you just ignore it, but to a person who has been through — and you have to listen to all that stuff. It’s very aggravating because you don’t know what to do. To punch that guy in the mouth? Or just ignore him? Because there are a lot of people stirring up trouble. I don’t know what their problem is. I mean, what reason would I have to lie? I’m not getting anything, and I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me. Whatever happened, it happened. That happened a long time ago.

But there’s a lot of people out there with a lot bad memories from all those things. Talk about is one thing, and going through is a different thing. It’s not that easy. Because if you get sent to the penitentiary over there, or to jail, where the judge says, “You’re going to be getting six months for doing this” or “You did this. You’re going to get three years” — but when you were in those camps, you don’t know from nothing, you don’t have any information about anything, you don’t have any newspapers, no radio, nobody’s going to tell you, you don’t even know if you’re going to be living tomorrow. That’s the hardest thing. We had no idea when the war was going to end. You just take it day to day. But the word “survivor” means you don’t just give up.

Some people made it, and some people — I knew a case, I didn’t know it until a few years ago, that one survivor killed himself after the war, about a week later. He couldn’t take it anymore to find out this is gone, that is gone [stifles a sob]. This is kind of a sad story. After going through that for two and a half years in those camps, all of a sudden you’re free to go home, or do something else, and enjoy life, the guy just kills himself. Committing suicide. Whatever his reason was, I don’t know. He must’ve had a purpose, but it’s kind of sad. I wouldn’t want to do it. I made it through, I might as well enjoy life because life is very precious. Although I lost my leg, and then I lost my eye, still, life is life. What are you going to do? Things happen along the way. You get sick. Certain things you have to get along without. But you do the best you can.

Harper: Did you tell your wife your story?
RUSSO: She knew a little bit. Yes. She knew. We were married for 12-1/2 years.

Harper: How about your children? Did you tell them?
RUSSO: My children know a little bit, yes.

Harper: Do they know the full story?
RUSSO: Not all of it. Probably you know more than they do. This is why I was going to ask you for the tape. I’m sure all the survivors have got pretty much the same stories, except different places. I had no idea [that] there was over 200 camps in Germany and in Poland. It could be possible that you might be living next to a camp that was only ten or 20 miles away from you, and you didn’t know what they did or how life was over there. Each one of us got a different little experience. It was pretty much the same, but in a different way. Different working conditions. And some of them were better [able] to take it than others. You had to be pretty damn lucky to make it through these things, and tough. You had to be a little bit tough and a little bit crazy not to think about it. Not crazy to be completely insane, but — because a person in their right mind wouldn’t be able to go through all this misery that went on. All the filth and the starvation, and you looked — this is why I don’t want to go in those places [where] they have all those pictures. Brings back a lot of bad memories [stifles a sob]. Because I used to see those pictures all the time in person [sniffles]. If I can make it for another 11-1/2 months, I’ll have survived for 50 years.

Harper: Do you have a message to people who may be watching this tape in the future?
RUSSO: I don’t know what kind of message I’d give because people nowadays are more informed. The only thing it takes is one crazy guy to stir up the world. Nowadays we’ve got all the information and all the organizations. You have to stop some of those things before it gets out of hand. Just don’t ignore it. This or that, every little thing counts, because you never know. Everything starts little. Next thing you know it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, so you have to watch it. Of course, like I said, people have more education and are more informed nowadays, with all the satellites and all the news we get from everywhere. In those days, in Europe, these people, they were very easy to spot because all of them lived close together, they felt more comfortable, but nowadays, you live in America, for example, we are all spread out. We are not all in one area — you know, “I got you.” So it’s very hard nowadays to get — unless there’s a lot of people. Ignorant like we were, the rabbi tells us to do this and that, and we did it. Nowadays you ask questions. Because this guy is saying this, you don’t have to do it.

America has been very good for me. Several times I could’ve been gone, About half a dozen times I got banged up — the back of my neck — [indicating another place he was injured] I’ve got a scar over here. So you have to take life the way it is.

Harper: Is there anything from your story that you left out, that you . . .?
RUSSO: It’s very, very hard to put all this together or to answer all your questions in two or three hours. It could be possible there are some things that I left out. I don’t know because after all, 51 years is a long time. I just did the best I could.

Harper: If you remember anything you are more than welcome to come back and tell us.
RUSSO: I covered pretty much the whole story. I don’t think I left very much out.

Harper: Do you want to stop, or can we ask you a few more questions? I’m finished with the interview, but Lanie might have some questions.
RUSSO: That’s okay. She can ask me questions if she wants to.

Reich: Okay.
RUSSO: If you want to stop for a few minutes, fine.

Harper: Whatever you feel like doing.
RUSSO: That’s fine. If she has more questions, I’ll be glad to answer it.

Reich: I was interested in . . .
RUSSO: I’m [crying?]. Can you turn the camera off for a second?

Reich: Yes.
RUSSO: It’s very [inaudible] that you explain because there’s a lot of times I like to forget about all those problems, but some of those things keep coming back to you, regardless if you want. So anyway, you want to ask me questions about what?

Reich: I wanted to ask you about Israel, if you remember when Israel became a country, what you felt about it?
RUSSO: I don’t remember very much about Israel. I think I just got out of the hospital at the time because I don’t remember when Israel became [a country]. I think it became in May, 1948. I just came out of the hospital, and everybody was jumping in joy because finally, after all those years, people believing — under other governments — all of a sudden, they’ve got a country they can go to. That’s very important because, before, somebody was born in Romania or Poland, and still, to them, you’re considered, like in Germany, even the German Jews, nowadays, they’re considered foreigners. That’s the same thing in Greece, to tell you about two different countries. Although you were born in Greece and then you fought for the country and did whatever you had to do, you still are not considered Greek; you are a foreigner to them. And that’s very tragic. At least the state of Israel is something you can fall back [on]. Although I’m not there, I’m happy for the people that went there. There’s a lot of friends of mine that went over there. I remember going to this little town, Landsberg, in Germany. They went and joined a kibbutz in 1946, 48 years ago.

Reich: Did you think about going there ever?
RUSSO: No, I didn’t go over there, but they did. There was maybe about 100, 150, 200 of them went. A lot of them, they’re old people now, just like me, in their late 60s or early 70s. And a lot of them could possibly not even be alive anymore. They already fought in three different wars. 1948, and — there was another war there in 19 — before 1967, there was another war there about the Suez Canal. For a tiny country, they fought a lot of wars. At least there’s a place for them to go. If you’re going to fight for somebody, you might as well fight for your own cause. [Pauses.]

Reich: Well, that’s it for me.
RUSSO: That’s it? Okay. Like I say, I’ve never been to Israel; I don’t know how life in Israel [is]. But someday I would like to go over there to visit, maybe for a couple of weeks. I’m sure it must be a great place to live. Could be possible I might even have relatives over there because my mother’s brother, [sounds like “Sabitai Soror”], maybe he went over there before the Germans came in. I don’t know. I have no idea. I might have some cousins over there. I come from a large family, about 30 of us. In those days my mother’s sister had about six or seven kids, my father’s sister had seven kids, and so on. There was about 30 of us. Though I wouldn’t even know them, it could be possible that they are over there. It could be possible that they are even over here. Who knows?

Harper: Have you ever contacted the Red Cross to try to . . .?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: To get in touch with anybody?
RUSSO: No.

Harper: So you do you think everyone from your family was . . .?
RUSSO: Yes, pretty much. Could be possible I might have some cousins, the ones that were my age or two or three years older than I am, a year younger than I am, it could be possible. One of my cousins was with me in Warsaw, on the bricks. This was back in 1944. I don’t know if he made it or not. He was my aunt’s son. I have no idea. I forgot his last name. I remember pretty good things about everybody, but I forgot, slipped out my mind, his last name. I just don’t remember.

Harper: Is there one person that stands out in your memory? Either for their kindness, or cruelty, or just anything?
RUSSO: I sometimes remember when I first came over here there was a couple of German Jews that helped me out to establish a pension, because without them I would — his name was Isaac [Wessermann?] and David Mitchell. They helped me out. They were good people. Without them it probably would’ve taken me a lot longer to establish myself because I used to get a pension in Germany, when I lived there, for my disability. Then, when I came here, they discontinued that, and they helped me, established [me] with an attorney and so on. So they are quite a help for all those years that I’ve been here. Of course, both of them are gone. That’s the only two people that did make a difference for me, with their help.

Harper: Thank you very much.
RUSSO: My pleasure.