Historic Laredo

the wood. So my uncle and friend of mine
grabbed me under my arms and they pulled me
along because it was not far from Glaivz. It
wasn’t where to stay, it was only a pig house,
they kept pigs in there with water. We found
some stones we put stones in the water, then
we took off the doors and put them on the
stones, and that’s where we slept.
“In the morning they loaded us up in freightcars.
It was snowing, cold, freezing. They took
us from there to Oranienburg. They undressed
us completely, and we stood in the freezing
weather outside for about six hours, I guess.
Then they gave us hot shower. They tried to kill
us either way, the best way they could, but they
couldn’t make it. We were young, we were
strong. From there they sent us to Flosenburg.”
Flosenburg was the site of a hangar. “They
had straw on the floor,” Sanitzki said. “That’s
where we slept. We were there about two weeks,
I guess. After that, they made groups and they
split us up. I went to Platling, and we were
working there at the airport.” It was early 1945.
“The American planes came,” Sanitzki said.
“At the airport there were 145 Messerschmidts—
German planes, fighters—and they shot them all
up. Every plane was on fire. I remember one
German was running, and one of the bullets took
off his leg. Then the Germans lay down and we
had to lay down on them to cover them. But
when we saw all the planes on fire, then we got
up, and we took off the jackets, the striped jackets
from the concentration camps, and we were
waving to the pilots. They were very close to us,
they looked at us. But they didn’t touch us.”
Fifty-four years have passed since that
moment, but it is one that still causes Sanitzki to
pause when speaking of it. The power of the
memory overwhelms him.
“They went away,” Sanitzki continued. “After
that, the camp was liquidated, and we started
going towards Austria. They had there some
kind of place, I don’t remember, where they
killed the rest of the people. While we were
walking, we came into a city called Vaging, and
we stayed there overnight in a pig house. They
always found pig houses.
“In the morning we walked out of Vaging—it
was May, May 4, I think—and it was snowing terrible,
and while we were walking the snow
stopped. And then all of a sudden we saw the
German army coming along. In the front was some
kind of officer, must have been a general or something,
and he stopped the car, and he said to the
S.S.—” [At this point, Sanitzki spoke a German
phrase, then said, “I don’t want to say it in
English.”] “‘Who is that?’ And they said, ‘This is
from concentration camp.’ And he said to them,
‘The Russians are in the back and the Americans are
in the front, and you’re going with them?’ So they
started ripping off their S.S. marks, and they said to
us, ‘Either you’re leaving, or we have to kill you.
Whatever you want. Split up and run wherever you
want.’” So we split up in groups of three or four
friends, and we came back into the city, to Vaging.”
A farmer let Sanitzki and his companions
stay in his barn and fed them. “In the morning,
one of our friends—there were three of us—
looked out, and he saw white flags, and he says,
‘We’re all free. The war is over.’”
In the chaos of post-war Europe, re-establishing
contact with displaced friends and family
was a monumental task, more so for survivors
of the camps, any records of whose relatives
were destroyed. But doing so was not impossible.
Sanitkzi heard of his brother’s survival
through friends. “Everything through friends,
mouth to mouth,” Sanitzki said.
“The Army left to Paris, and from Paris they
went home, so I decided to go to Germany. That’s
when I met my brother. I stayed in Germany
until I came to United States, on March 11, 1950
on the ship the General Hershey.”
❖
Nazi concentration camp survivor
David Sanitzki pictured with his wife,
Oona in New York. Sanitzki was
interned at Auschwitz-Birekneau,
one of six Nazi killing sites.
COURTESY OF DAVID SANITZKI
Chapter VI ✦ 51