From The Testimony of Max Dreimer about planing The Escape from Auschwitz My escape. I started on this one. There's other things involved before the escape. This Herman Schein I mentioned before. He was the roofer which he actually learned his roofing profession in Sachsenhausen at "Klinker". He's two years younger than I am. He came in when he was seventeen. And he had, calling it in the camp a better life than some other ones had. He had free access to go in and out of the camp in Auschwitz. He was taken care of. He had his crew fixing the roofs. The SS were living around the camp in barracks and he took care of those barracks. He was more known than many of us. And one day, maybe four or five months prior to our escape, he was taken away from us, from "Buna" to "Glivitz" which is an eastern German city, I don't know how many kilometers away. They had camps there, working there, where they needed roofs repaired badly and they heard of him, between the SS, so thy sent him over there. As he was working on the roof, the first day he noticed that there were four or five girls coming down with ashcans and they had a Star of David on their dress or whatever they had on. Those girls were not in the camp. They were living in the city, in Glivitz, came out of mixed marriages - father was Jewish, mother gentile or vice versa - and were forced to do labour not to their likings. And they came every day and went to the kitchens and picked up the debris from the kitchen and they had pig farms and things like that. So as Herman was on the roof, he saw the girls and started talking to them, speaking the same language as we do. And he got friendly with them. He loves to sing and he loves to kid around. And then one of them, one of the girls - there was three sisters and two other girls - and one of them he fell in love with. That is like talking "Can you swim the Atlantic Ocean?" Will he ever have a chance to get to this girl? He was there six weeks and he just saw them just about everyday. So then he was told that he was all finished with his jobs there. Couple of three days he's going back to Buna. And somehow he got a hold of a bandanna and he give it to her as a token of love or remembrance or what you want to call it. And she told him, "If you ever want to write me," which we could do, maybe smuggle out, so she gave him the address. Not on a piece of paper. He wrote that into his mind. And she asked him, "Give me your address. I would like to send you a note." Which we were completely cut off from the outside world. We never received mail. So she 1/6
copied down the number on the arm like I have here, he had a different number. She wrote down and the barrack number where he lived and the whole thing was forgotten for awhile. So now came the offer I got. This guy's name is Joseph Grona (sp?) and I was not fortunate to meet the guy after the war anymore. He made me the offer, he helped me escape from there. And since I said before, I talked to Herman and we both agreed on it. My kapo - his name Leo Brenner who is in Delaware, Wilmington today - I put him in a hospital because I didn not want him to be the kapo when I escaped from this camp. He would have probably taken a big punishment. I myself was in a hospital for six weeks, three months in Buna. I came back with a cripple, my left foot is crippled. I came out with T.B., and also, I just compare, it's like if a man comes in the army today or he's in there for five years, he always have a tiny bit more advantage than the new guys. The so-called doctors or nurses in our hospital were all inmates. Being that many years in a camp, you know all those old guys, so I had a little advantage in this. I came in, I was working on the construction field where I was directing a crane to lift up five and ten and twenty ton pieces of posts to build factories and one time the chain broke and a five-ton piece fell flat on my foot. That I have my foot today I can say thank you to it because I stood on sand and that must have given a little. So I was taken to the hospital and there Auschwitz had a much stronger ruling...(not clear). I was transferred from my friends every week into another room, into another bed, so he could have never say, "I saw the guy last time I was here." So that made me surviving out of this hospital, so to speak. So going back to the escaping. Till we planned it, tomorrow morning...then I put my friend Leo Brenner, the kapo, who was my kapo, I put him into the hospital and I says, "Leo, don't ask any questions. You go for three days in the hospital." I gave him just one sentence maybe. He understood it. So I was the kapo because he wasn't there. So the evening before we were supposed to escape, Herman comes to me all excited. He just got a note he has to appear to the lager Gestapo the next morning. I start yelling and screaming. I said, "You must have told somebody about it. Somebody must have gotten the wind that we want to escape tomorrow." And he swore up and down he hasn't talked to anybody, which he really couldn't, otherwise he'd never make it. And we stopped right there. There was another incident as we were gone already. There was three guys who escaped and one of the three guys had a good friend in the hospital, a doctor, inmate. He said goodbye to him and this guy called the...reported it 2/6
the next day after they were gone. Those three guys were caught. Two brothers came into Sachsenhausen. Two sons and the father came in. The father died in Sachsenhausen, the two brothers came to Auschwitz. One of the brothers was in that trio who escaped and the other brother has a wife - he lives in Los Angeles. He came in when he was twelve years old, the one who survived. They caught those three and the reason...they hung all three of them in front of everybody. I was somehow in contact with this guy who took us out because he went back to work and he talked to him, my friend, and we gave him the news each other. The reason why they hung them - they would have had maybe a little leniency because everyone of those three was in five years or longer. They had pepper on them and pepper was there for in case they get caught - we had no access to guns, so take the pepper and throw it in the guards' eyes or something. That was why they were hung, everyone. Three of them at the same time, in front of about fifteen thousand people, just to scare them. Also I forgot to say, in Sachsenhausen some have escaped. There it was rough. They let us stay day and night until they have found and captured their guy. Well, we stayed as long as a solid week in wintertime outside, day and night. They did bring that socalled food, whatever, they bring it outside to the "appellplatz". People were frozen overnight. Clothes was nothing special to get because we are outside. So we stayed a day and three days and four days, half a day and eight days was the longest. That was one advantage in Auschwitz. It wasn't that way. Somebody escaped, you may stay a couple or three hours longer, then they let you go back into your barracks. (end of side)...appear to the Gestapo the next morning. I thought this is the end of it. I had planned marched out with the commandant (?) the next morning and since he had access to go in and out the camp to the factory because he went there to pick material for the roofs inside the camp, was planned that he comes out at twelve o'clock. The guy, Joseph Grona, who planned the escape for us, was supposed to meet at one o'clock at his factory and he was in a factory where they have insulation of pipes, insulation of big tanks, water tanks, and they used as insulation glass wool, asbestos rolls. So we meet him at one o'clock, we're going into a warehouse and he comes in and he buries us three feet, six feet under glass wool. So far everything. He comes out and they says, "What happened?" They called him in for the following things: they told him, "Herman, you received a postcard from Glivitz", from this girl. We have no 3/6
connection to the outside world. We don't receive any mail, allowed to receive. "How come this girl has the number from your arm, she has the exact barrack number where you live? How is this possible?" Now listen to this. He just, I don't know what they say, as he wants to open his mouth, G-d came back or was there. One of the SS men opens the door and he says, "G-d dammit, Herman. What are you doing here? Aren't you going to work today? Get the hell out of here." And he chased him out and he was the man of the labour force in charge, the SS man, in charge of the labour force of the camp. And he just ran out. He ran out and not much longer, he comes out to the factory where we were supposed to meet. This is what he told me. So in the afternoon at five o'clock, it's time to collect the different commanders on the place and the kapo counts the people. Of course the factory was not surrounded with the electric load wiring. It was only barbed wire, but not loaded electric. So at five o'clock, my commando which I was in charge of is all there except the kapo isn't there. There was one man in charge of all the inmates which was an inmate himself and he counts the commandos and there's one commando missing. That was my commando at the time and they stayed. They figured he going to come any minute, he's going to come any minute. So it was not too far away where we were hidden and we heard all the commotion and more people come and more screaming and yelling. He isn't there. So the last I heard was, "Okay, march in." Somebody came from the inside and brought this commander where everybody else was already in the camp to be counted. So then we heard, "Up zuchen." Means "go look for him". When he comes back in he signs in again. They look back - yes, he went out and he never signed back in again so they know he's outside. So our appointment with this guy, that Joseph - he comes at midnight, twelve o'clock. He brings us sort of a mechanic overall to change clothes. He had to bring us a cap because we had no hair and he will take us out from there and take us to his house first. Then in the evening, at eight o'clock, first he brought us some coffee and something to eat. Came back at midnight. We changed clothes and we start crawling on our bellies to the fence which was quite a way to go. First time it starts already, we are crawling on our belly and there stands a guy in front of us, a real guy. Either he hasn't heard of escapees or he was scared of us. He start going away without questioning. We did get to the fence. He had a pair of wire snippers with him which didn't matter to the wire - it was not electric-loaded - so he made a hole big enough that all three of us could climb out there and there we start marching on the 4/6
street. Pitch-dark. Now all of a sudden he realize what he had done, he got scared, so he tell us, he says, "Well, I'm going to march fifty meters ahead of you and you are going to follow me." We said, "Don't go too fast because we don't know where to go yet." So here comes the first lucky strain. We're marching. All of sudden, the big "lagerfhrer" from the entire Auschwitz comes by in his car. We throw ourselves to the ground. There was luck, it was pitch-dark, the moon didn't shine. They drive on. And we go into little towns, villages and a dog is barking here and a dog is barking there and we barely can see him in front of us. I said to him, "How long does it take?" "Oh, about three, four hours." I want to go back - we didn't go out at twelve, we went out early in the evening - six or seven - because we marched about nine hours altogether. So we march in the pitch-dark on a little country lane. All of a sudden, ahead of us where he was walking we see a light shining up. We stopped and we noticed a German soldier with a rifle over his soldier, stops him, and all we see, he puts his hand in his pocket, produces some sort of identification and he lets him go and he goes, he doesn't stop. He knows there are two guys in back of him. So Herman asks, "What are we going to do?" I says, "We have no other choice. We got to go." He says, "What happens if he's going to stop us?" I says, "Well, we got to see. Maybe we have to kill him or do something." So we keep going. We're coming to this vicinity, the light goes on. In German, "Halt. Wehr ist du?" "Stop. who is this?" So we stopped. We saw there was the airforce flag - what do they call them? What they shoot the planes down? And he takes his flashlight and a big flashlight and he shines me from top to bottom. He puts the flash on Herman and looks him up from top to bottom and he sees we have the mechanic suits on and he tells us, "Oh, you're working down in a factory?" We say, "Yes." "Go ahead." He did not ask us for identification. If he would, I guess that would have been the end. So we go slowly as if nothing happened. Our heart was in our pockets. And then as we disappeared more away from him, we start running because we didn't see him anymore. So all of a sudden we caught up with him and we ran to him and he gives us hell. "You couldn't talk to me now. Just follow me." So we noticed that right from the beginning he got scared, he realized what he did. So we were marching and marching and marching and we happened to look backwards. We see a tiny little light ray in back of us. We go a little faster and we always look back and the light is getting bigger and it's getting bigger. We see him in front of us and this may be twenty, thirty feet in back of us, we saw a cop on a 5/6
bicycle. So on the road there, he had a road with a ditch next to it for water relief, so we throw ourselves in the ditch and luckily that was full of water, so we could dip under the water - head down and head up and head down and head up and I keep my head up and I see the guy on the bicycle having his flashlight, shining around the area. Didn't see us. He got back on his bicycle and went back, not forwards, thanks G-d. Source: Yad Vashem Archives 0.3-9557 6/6