23 February 1945: from Falkenberg-Eule to Ebensee

“Give us water, give us bread!”

Noach Flug was born in Lodz on 1 January 1925. He was there in 1939 when the German troops marched into the city. In Lodz he and other Jews were crammed together in a ghetto. It was from here that he and 90,000 other Jews from the city were transported to Auschwitz in August 1944. Only one third of them survived the selections on the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This is the moment that still remains most clearly in his memory, and still moves him most to this day: the arrival in Auschwitz at this ramp. It is the moment in which he sees his family for the last time. He was unaware of this on arrival, but after two days in the camp he understood what had happened to them. His close relatives alone amounted to 120 people. After the war Noach Flug managed to find just two of his relatives again in Lodz.

Consequently, it is understandable that Noach was unable to imagine that after Auschwitz, after the loss of his parents and his imprisonment in Falkenberg-Eule subcamp, he could possibly experience anything worse. But he did.

“In February we could already hear the Allies, the front had moved closer. On 23 February 1945 we were given the order that we had to vacate the camp at 6 a.m. the next morning.”

A total of about six hundred shivering prisoners assembled in the icy cold next morning. They were wearing their striped prisoners’ uniforms which were easily penetrated by the bitter wind. The majority had poor, worn-out shoes, some had just wooden clogs. They were given nothing for their journey, no provisions, no water. “And that’s how we set off on the march, in sleet, from six in the morning until late in the evening. Those who couldn’t keep up where shot. Those who could still walk tried in twos to help someone who no longer had the energy to carry on. This went on for several days.”

They spent the nights in barns or other small concentration camps. Noach Flug is no longer able to remember all of the stations. After a few days the prisoners were loaded into open goods wagons.

But their situation in the wagons didn’t improve. There was nothing at to eat or drink. There were no toilets and no protection from the relentless sleet.

The train took them through Czechoslovakia. There they experienced a brief moment of human kindness. “In Czechoslovakia we stopped at a station. We saw people going to work. So we cried out: Give us water, give us bread! They threw us whatever they had with them, flasks of water, bread. But the SS were intent on stopping it and opened fire on them.”

After about nine or ten days, when the transport finally reached its destination in Ebensee, a subcamp of Mauthausen, a third of the group had died: frozen to death, shot or starved.

If the prisoners believed they had finally overcome the worst, they were under the wrong impression: worse was still to come.

“The reception in Ebensee was terrible. We had to run the gauntlet between rows of overseers and special operations units. Each of them had a truncheon and beat us as we passed.”

Many of the emaciated men didn’t make it to the end of the corridor beneath the hail of blows. Those who fell without getting up again were simply dragged off and dumped on a pile of corpses. This also happened to Noach Flug. But in the night friends came looking for him. They found him among the dead and gave him something to eat and drink. This is how he survived. At the end of this particular day only half of the prisoners who had been marched out of Falkenberg were still alive.

Ebensee was a ‘young’ camp destined to produce a new wonder weapon, the A 9/10 rocket, in underground factories. This never actually happened, so engine fuel was produced instead. But up to the final hour the prisoners were forced to carry on constructing the underground factories. That’s where Noach Flug was put to work as well. Ebensee was completely overcrowded during these last months. Because it was one of the few places that the Allies had not yet reached, prisoners constantly arrived in one transport after another. Like Noach Flug, all of them had been on death marches and death trains “The living conditions in Ebensee camp were appalling. Prisoners died like flies, five hundred a week,” says Noach Flug. “We were given 120 grams of bread a day and some weak soup. At the same time we were doing hard labour, from early morning and into the night. We removed soil from the underground galleries with shovels and handcarts.”

At the end Noach Flug was nothing but skin and bones. For him the liberation on 5 May 1945 came literally at the very last minute.

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