I stood there for a while and then went in the same direction because I thought maybe
I could help him somehow.
But when he came back onto the street, we first went through an underpass there,
I slowly went back because I saw that I couldn't do anything on the street.
But then I went into the underpass again
and as I was in the middle of the underpass, there was the uniformed man
who stopped me earlier on the platform and where I was able to talk my way out of it.
He probably recognized me because he reached for his gun.
But then, I was a little faster, shot and fled.
He went toward the station and I, what happened to him, I don't know.
He went toward the train station and I fled toward the Gestapo prison.
One night, we were woken up by loud shouting in German, there were commands and dogs barking.
We knew immediately what it meant. We had prepared a hiding place.
The hiding place was stocked with enough provisions for three or four days and adequate water supplies.
It was intended for six, for eight people. But in this situation, no one could be turned away.
There were maybe 30 people in there. It was the beginning of August and the heat was sweltering.
The main problem was not the food, but that we didn't have enough water.
The Germans were so clever in that the only water pump in the whole area was
set up at a post, so we would wither away;
at that time, there were no water pipes in the Kamion Church.
We tried to fetch water at night.
The shooting didn't stop because they were lying in wait.
And they took out anyone who tried to get to the pump.
After a few days in the bunker, where we were better informed about everything since our hiding place was under the floor,
we were able to loosen a roof tile and from there, we could see almost all of the whole hustle and bustle.
They went from apartment to apartment with search teams and dogs
and almost all the Jews who were hidden were discovered by the dogs.
There was a young couple in our bunker, the Mauer family, and the woman had an infant with her.
After a few days, she had to strangle her own child because it was constantly crying.
When I left the bunker after four or five days, I saw the child in front of the bunker, blue.
And today, I still wonder what this woman was thinking,
when she strangled her own child to save us all.
I managed to escape thanks to the fact that I already had a so-called "Palzufka" in my pocket.
It was a normal ID card with a fingerprint on it.
And that gave me so much courage that I asked to leave the ghetto.
It was very helpful for my company that our apartment in the ghetto was right on the ghetto border.
I just had to cross the street.
In order not to make any noise, I took off my shoes and hid them behind my belt on my back so that I could crawl.
There was a potato field on the other side of the street.
Once on the other side, I arrived outside the city at an old brickworks,
which seems nothing short of a miracle to me today because these guards
were constantly marching back and forth.
I washed myself there and I was able to venture into the city as a Pole because
I already had my false papers in my pocket.
Our hiding place was above Mr. Bescheid's shoe polish factory in Sosnowiec on Pogon.
There were just mattresses lying on the floor.
There were two buckets where we could take care of our necessities.
To this day, I don’t know who looked after us, who gave us food, who brought us water.
It was organized in such secret according to the motto: What I don't know, I can't reveal.
To this day, I don't know where it was.
We were only let out of the bunker at night to get some air.
At about two or three in the morning, we went for a walk.
All I know is that there was a metal works plant across the street
because these blue flashes of light from welding machines constantly lit up the halls.
To this day I don’t know who the owner was.
Years later, I learned that Mr. Bescheid, a German, had made this bunker available to us.
Mr. Bescheid was also subsequently decorated by Israel
and also had a tree planted at the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem.
After a few days in the bunker, all of us inmates, there were eight or ten people,
were instructed to meet at the train station in Katowice in the evening.
We would go to Vienna with a collective paper to work with the farmers there.
We arrived at the train station in Katowice on time and there were already other people
who we believed were also Jews, we were not sure.
I had never seen these people before in my life.
And from someone who I only now know was Leon Blatt,
I got the papers, the tickets and a few marks pocket money,
and best wishes for the trip to Vienna.
That it was Leon Blatt.
I didn't know that at the time.
For me personally, the trip to Vienna was not yet the end.
Something I could be happy about because I was aware of the danger that was coming our way.
I knew that the quality of the papers was poor.
The papers that Fredka got for us were in order.
But the Valzufkas that you got, you know better than anyone that they produced them themselves.
And luckily, they didn't notice anything at the border. They must have been blind.
When we arrived here in Vienna, we thought we had finally reached a destination
where we would work in peace for at least a few months.
But a few hours later at the foreigners’ employment office, a new hurdle arose against us.
They said, girls go into the other room, boys pants down.
And then we thought our final hour had come.
What we could not have known is that most Austrians are also circumcised
and for this reason, there were no complications at all.
Otherwise, we would have tried to escape and that would have cost us our lives.
After a few minutes, they came back and handed us the paper.
And we were each allowed to go to the farm and start working there.
Amara.org Community Subtitles
Hello, Mrs. Kindl. How are you doing?
Thanks.
You must be the brother, right? You are Mr. Leonhardt.
Mrs. Kindl, Mr. Leonhardt, during the 1943 war, there was a group of Polish foreign workers here.
And a girl named Christine was with you.
Yes, yes.
Do you know anything else about her?
Yes, she was such a pretty girl.
If I showed you the picture, would you remember her?
Yes, of course.
What do you say now?
Yes, of course, completely by chance.
That was her?
Yes, yes, a longer home group.
I remember well, yes.
Mrs. Kindl, what was it like back then? How long was she here with you?
Yes, I have no idea, about 14 days or about a week, it was three weeks,
I don't remember how long she was there.
She left on a Sunday and never came back.
Was it on a Sunday?
Yes, I believe it was on a Sunday.
And what happened her?
We didn't know anything more. We kept her coat for so long.
We kept her coat for so long.
And a few headscarves, a few pieces of laundry, but she never came.
Did the police or the Gestapo come afterward?
Nobody came.
Now, I can tell you why Christine and the others didn't come back.
When we arrived in Vienna, we were a group of 20 people with false papers.
The other ten were in Schwardorf, you know, the neighboring community is Schwardorf.
The others were arrested and the Gestapo picked them up.
And we were afraid that the Gestapo would arrest us too.
That's why we left.
None of the other ten survived.
The ten who were housed here in Rauchenbad all survived.
Most of them live in Israel now.
I came to Vienna at the beginning of October 1943.
I brought ten suitcases of winter clothes for the members of the group who worked here.
I took up residence at the Hotel Roter Hahn and contacted Mrs. Benedikt.
She was a Hungarian journalist who had contact with Vardar Tatsala,
who was with the Jews of Hungary rescue commission.
I wanted to create a new escape route from Upper Silesia to
Hungary.
What I didn't know was that she was a British agent and was already under surveillance by the Gestapo.
For some reason, the Gestapo decided to strike as I arrived on the scene.
I was arrested here at the Opernring and all those who met me in the meantime
and had been in contact with me were also arrested.
And back then, I thought I'd never get out of here alive.
When they arrested me at the Opernring, the officers started with the interrogation right on the way here.
They suspected me of espionage.
When I realized this, I admitted for the first time ever that I was Jewish.
Because I knew exactly what I was facing as a spy.
That's also why they brought me in here and I ended up in a big room upstairs.
This was not a small cell.
All those who were to be transported to Auschwitz the following week were there.
Everyone else who had met me in Vienna, the day before or that morning, was in the same cell.
They gathered around me and the first day ended normally; we went to bed.
The next morning, a Viennese man approached me, having noticed that the others were crowding around me,
and he thought that I was their leader or director.
The boss, the big boss.
The big boss, yes.
And he told me as he took me aside, that there was a way to escape.
But he demanded that if I wanted to join in, if we got out, if we succeeded,
he would receive papers, fake ones of course, and money so he could continue living outside.
I promised him, we decided to escape that evening and our escape was successful.
Otherwise you wouldn't be here.
Otherwise I wouldn't be here now.
Up there, there it is, is the cell from which I ejected 48 years ago.
There on the left was the washroom. There was a bench there, a wooden bench, so wide and thick.
After we had hidden ourselves in the toilet and all the other prisoners in the large room in which we were locked up were locked in again,
we waited for a while until the guards went down, we could hear that.
Then we took this bench, sat down in a cross position to break open a grate, and we succeeded.
Then the first one went out, that was the Viennese, who was from Vienna.
And he came out and saw how far away the lightning rod was, and that there was a piece missing from the lightning rod.
That's why the Viennese man came back in because he was afraid of falling.
It was all the same to me. I knew that if I didn't manage to get from the top of the lightning rod down to here, I would be dead.
Whether it happened here, two days or three days later in Auschwitz, it was all the same to me.
And so I tried, I let myself fall for a moment and had the lightning rod in my hand and I really came down hard.
From up there, yes, right here.
I just left my shoes above so I wouldn't slip.
I called up to him, bring me my shoes, my shoes.
And he brought them around his neck without bringing his own.
The third one came and was already on his way.
I put on my shoes and the Viennese man remained without shoes.
And then we went there.