Camp Ebenezer was located on the border between Austria and Italy, on a
hill surrounded by high mountains. In this particular slave-labor camp, there
were 10,000 people of all nationalities, Jews among them. It was a work camp;
the majority were young people. From
the camp every morning, they took out young people to the mountain. There they
worked under circumstances of severe hunger; they worked building tunnels, long
distances into the mountains, which served to store ammunition. And there they
also had ammunition factories for the Nazi army. The only food for these workers was bread and water. There were
people who looked like skeletons, who were walking around the camp, wishing for
death, which was the only way out from their suffering.
From work, there were always on the way
back only half the people of the hundreds who were sent out. They used to just
fall down where they were working and remained there. A few days later, when
enough bodies had accumulated, they would throw them into the crevices made
when they threw stones down the mountain. In camp there were constantly new
people coming in the transport, to fill in for those who died. That's how the camp existed for two years.
On a certain Saturday morning, a day before they were freed, the Nazi
slaughterers devised a plan, to do away with all the slave laborers with one
blow. They decided to bring all the slave laborers into the tunnels in the
mountains, put in poison gas and blow up the entrances, so they all would choke
to death. That particular plan was
found out in the camp, and they decided not to carry out the plan of the
capos. The camp leaders had very little
time to carry out the violent plan. The same day, American bombers dropped
bombs on the railroad station in the camp. Almost right away, the American
soldiers came over the mountains, and the Nazi "heroes" ran away like
poisoned mice. And we were about 10,000 survivors.
Note: CHAIM KAMENKER, from Shereshev, was
a survivor of the Ebenezer Camp, and this particular fragment was told to HERSCHEL
POMERANTZ, who wrote it down.
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