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19. Central Hospital Camp
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152 19 Central Hospital Camp At the gate, our escort reported our arrival to the guard and we all went into the administration office at the camp entrance. The entry in the Archives reads: The doctors and twins are transferred again . . . in July 1944, to the prisoners’ infirmary for men in Camp B-IIf. Among them are the twins . . . and the physicians Dr. Heller (No. 146703), Dr. Bloch (146737), Dr. Julius Samek (No. 147636), and Dr. Pollak (No. 148775). (Czech, 1990, p. 594) The office was in the small barracks in which this lager’s (camp’s) elder Dr. Senkteller lived; he appeared to be unfriendly, his look bored into you as if he could discover something. We reported by our numbers, he wanted our names. After he left, a prisoner who worked in the office welcomed us. He told us that Dr. Senkteller, a non-Jewish former Polish military physician, had been a prisoner for a long time and tried to have good relations with the SS physicians. Senkteller was said to be dangerous , powerful and hated by everybody except his few friends, who were also former Polish officers. I was numb and confused and perceived only a part of what I heard. I began to realize that we had received another grace period. I recall these first moments in this new camp in the same way that one remembers a significant dream. I was physically, as well as emotionally, exhausted and my new surroundings appeared unreal. There were prisoners dressed in better uniforms moving around.They seemed to belong to another world than the one from which we had just come. We were sent to a barracks 153 that was also much more comfortable than what we had known in our camp. It was well equipped with real beds, medical appliances and even somefurniture.Italsohadrealwindows.Everythingwascleanandorderly. I was assigned to a surgical department and was told that the patients were there for minor surgery and that the operating rooms for patients in need of major surgery were in the next block.The surgeon, Dr. Goldstein, was a young, pleasant person who had grown up in Poland but had gone to study in France, where he was working when the Germans occupied that country. He told me that the first Jews to be deported from France were foreign citizens, an old trick used by the Gestapo to keep the local Jewish community calm and avoid resistance by the non-Jewish population . Until now he was the only Jew in this building and worked with the clerk who had administrative control, a former Polish officer who had been a teacher in civilian life. There were no Jews among the patients. Most were Russians; some were Poles. The majority were not regular prisoners of war but political prisoners, either partisans or captured members of the underground resistance . Some of the Poles received packages from their families and gave away or sold parts of their rations, which improved the food situation. A great number of the patients suffered from tuberculous inflammations of the cervical lymph glands.There was not much treatment for them except keeping open wounds clean in order to avoid secondary infections and support drainage.The SS physician in charge, Dr. Koenig, was interested in having this collection of patients accessible for a study he hoped to publish. I assumed he wanted us to do the daily work. The physician and the administrator in charge had their beds in a separate corner of the barracks, while the rest of the personnel slept and ate in a different building. The soup that we were given later in the afternoon was better than that of our former camp but my throat was closed. The others in our barracks, physicians, nurses, aids and the rest of the staff looked at us with great curiosity. Nobody knew why we had been transferred into this camp. They probably did not understand our confused descriptions of the last hours in the Czech family camp culminating in the sudden order we received to walk out. After awhile they understood our nagging fears about the ones we left behind. The summer evening was warm on July 12, 1944, as we slowly returned to our barracks for our first night. Otto was depressed and Central Hospital Camp [3.230.147.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:48 GMT) 154 Unfree Associations concerned about the fate of his wife and daughter. Until now they had not been separated. Supposedly...