Ghost-like, gaunt Jewish survivors of Dachau are still being encountered along all the roads of southern Germany. They are part of transports en route from Dachau who were abandoned by the German guards when the advancing American forces came near.
A typical pair are Moses Gold and Abraham Koenigsberg, Czechoslovak Jews, both of whom have uncles living in New York City. A Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent met them on a snow-filled Alpine road along which American military vehicles were passing. Both had been confined in wards for typhus victims when the Gestapo decided to evacuate Dachau. They were loaded onto a train of flatoars which had proceeded as far as the small village of Mittlewald when the S. S. men abandoned them.
When the correspondent asked them where they were going, they replied: “We do not know,” Asked where they planned to live, they said: “Where can a Jew live? Where we had wives and children, but they were killed at Oswiecim. For years they tortured, starved and whipped us, but it seems that a few of us are still alive. What can we want now?” Similar replies came from other refugees from Dachau who are wondering around aimlessly.
A captain in the medical corps told this correspondent that he had just treated one survivor who had a two-inch square piece of flesh gouged out of his back by the Gestapo. Many of these half-dead refugees who can not go anyfarther are being sent to hospitals by army doctors.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
