Daniel Chanoch read in German by Katharina Stemberger

The next stop was Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, which was located on a hill above the town. The children used their last reserves of strength to climb the hill. They were together again but they were surrounded by lots of other people. On the hill, there was a type of fortress that had been built by prisoners from Dachau concentration camp in 1938 after the Anschluss [Note: The annexation of Austria to Germany in 1938]. Over the next few years, Mauthausen concentration camp evolved to become one of the most feared camps in the whole concentration camp system – it was the only concentration camp in level three (Stufe III), the category with the toughest conditions.

Everyone was ordered to assemble on the Appellplatz in the centre of the concentration camp. They had to stand around in freezing temperatures for a long time. Later, they were given a sort of soup and taken to the ‘lower camp’ on some green fields at the foot of the ‘fortress’. [Note: The ‘lower camp’ referred to here was the ‘Sanitary Camp’ (Sanitätslager) or ‘Russian Camp’ (Russenlager) at Mauthausen concentration camp. At that time in particular, it was an extremely overcrowded death camp for prisoners who were not able to work. These prisoners were more or less left alone there and died in their hundreds every day. The ‘Sanitary Camp’ was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence, which, unlike that of the ‘upper camp’, was not electrified] There the children were assigned to various barracks. They were extremely cold and exhausted from their journey in wind-battered railway cars and the hours of standing at attention for roll call in the ‘upper camp’. So, once again, they worked as a group to maintain their body temperature. They clustered together so that those in the middle of the group could warm up before moving to the outside edge. This was an extremely effective method and an example of the group’s strong bond. There’s no doubt that they would not have survived if they hadn’t worked together in this way. An evening roll call was held every evening before the prisoners went into the barracks and the bodies of those who had frozen to death were included in the count.

During the day, there was no employment for the prisoners, there was just roll call after roll call, which took place in the cold and the rain. Once a day, they were given a sludgy soup and a piece of bread that mostly consisted of sawdust. In the barracks, the prisoners all lay together on the ground like sardines in a tin: top to toe. During the night, the Kapo went round with sticks and hit anyone who’d moved out of their row. This meant that it was not possible to go to the toilet at night.

This camp was one of the worst that Danny had to survive. Guard dogs were kept in kennels around the camp and anyone who attempted to escape was attacked by the dogs and torn to pieces. Years later, Danny was asked by the UK’s Scotland Yard to identify the terrible man who had been responsible for these kennels. The man denied any involvement and Danny never found out what happened to him.

The abuse of children by the Kapos or other prisoner functionaries is something that remained in his memory from that time. This was something that happened in secret. There were children who disappeared in the night. These children had access to the Kapos and could therefore help their friends gain (small) advantages and alleviate their suffering. The children didn’t talk about this with one another. It was a taboo subject – nobody talked about it and nobody asked any questions. Because of their young age, some of the children didn’t even always understand what was happening. When these children came back to the barracks in the morning and spent the day with their friends though, there was a sense that something had happened that had hurt the children.

Despite all the pain and awkwardness in this situation, Danny also saw how the group stuck together and its members ‘helped’ their friends as much as possible. Their identification with the group and their sense of mutual responsibility, which was expressed in this situation and in other ways, have remained until this day. Even after more than seven decades, the subject is never spoken aloud or mentioned or discussed between the men of the group who took care of and looked after each other.

The children were in this hell for around two months. Their next destination was a nearby camp, one of many in the large Mauthausen complex, which was referred to as the Zeltlager (tent camp). The children were probably moved due to the overcrowding of the main camp. If Mauthausen was an inferno, then there is no word in the human dictionary to describe that tent camp. There were large tents that were supposed to accommodate huge numbers of prisoners. The ground had not been prepared to accommodate this many people. And the rain, mud and snow just made things worse. The camp did not meet even the most basic requirements for human habitation. There were no toilets and no taps either. Disorder and chaos reigned.

During this period, the camp was subjected to an Allied bombing attack. The majority of the aircraft involved were British Mosquito bombers, a fact that Danny learned from British pilots after the war. The bombing raid targeted the camp’s watchtowers. Bodies and human bones were scattered all about, on the ground and on the fences. This was what they saw, this was the reality. In this camp, there were also prisoners who were rumoured to collect human body parts and cook them into a soup. The children from Kaunas were appalled by what they heard and steered clear of the stew even though they were painfully hungry and the weather was extremely cold. Although they were undernourished, weak, smaller in size and younger in age than the other prisoners, the children of the group were brave enough to overturn the cooking pots, spilling the contents.

This made them some enemies, who then confronted them and attempted to steal the few blankets that they had between them. Losing your blanket could spell death in these conditions. But the children, who already had some experience of what it took to survive, developed some smart tactics for dealing with the strongest prisoners – and they paid off. One night, when Danny and Shloima were huddling together under a worn blanket, one of the older prisoners came along and snatched it off them. Danny ran after the man, Shloima called the rest of the group, and they all gave chase until he threw the blanket to the ground and ran for his life.

At the end of April 1945, when it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, the children were given the order to begin another march to the west. As before, their destination was unknown. The march took them past towns and villages, through typically Austrian, green, mountainous, idyllic countryside. The cold was still as bitter as before, there was no food, it rained, and still the Germans guarded their ‘human treasure’. The group of children was supervised by female SS guards of around 16 years of age. These girls had a bread roll or an apple in one hand and a gun in the other to shoot anyone who tried to escape. Danny recalls that not only were they not given anything to eat, but also anyone who attempted to escape was stabbed to death by local farmers wielding pitchforks. A few days later, the group reached a new location – the concentration camp in Gunskirchen, part of the Mauthausen camp network. Concentration camps and forced labour camps were built across Austria to accommodate the increasing numbers of forced labourers and prisoners.

Gunskirchen, the greatest terror of everyone, was one of these camps. The camp was located in the heart of a forest and had a small number of barracks and thousands of prisoners. The barracks were so overcrowded that there was no space to lie down. It was impossible to live in the conditions there. The children climbed onto the rafters under the roof and perched there to escape the cold. The food that was doled out to the people in the camp was a soup that Danny describes as “sweet”. The reason for this is that the soup was poisoned and was intended to continue the work of the death machine. Thousands of prisoners died in this infernal place. Their souls left the camp and their bodies were piled up in heaps as nobody made any effort to transport them away from the camp. The stench of death hung in the air. At the same time, the war was taking its toll. It was the final days. It was a battle to see who would manage to survive and reach the finish line.

Danny fell ill with typhus. He doesn’t know exactly when it happened. As always, he ignored the illness and didn’t seek help. His hair fell out and he was severely weakened but he kept active.

In the first week of May 1945 (on 5 May 1945), the children noticed that the German guards had left their posts and swapped their uniforms for civilian clothes. This was the first sign that the war was over. Immediately afterwards, a tank unit from the 761st U.S. Tank Battalion appeared. Soldiers were sitting on the tanks. These were the “Black Panthers” of the U.S. Third Army under General Patton. A jeep unit of the 71st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army also arrived in the camp. Shots could be heard all around. There was a terrible stench hanging in the air from the piles of dead bodies everywhere. Later, it emerged that of the 20,000 people who had been brought to the camp, only 5,000 survived. Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, three days after the liberation of the Gunskirchen camp.

Of the 131 children who had begun the death march from the Kaunas ghetto, 27 children now finished this long journey – a journey that had ultimately led to their survival.