Eyewitness Testimony Gianmaria Dossi

[…] After spending four days on a freight wagon, we arrived at the camp. We were placed in barracks with bunks, each shared by two deportees. Every day we were given a turnip soup, a ration of bread, and a little margarine [sic]. There were two roll calls a day: one in the morning and one in the evening. Work shifts started at seven until twelve and from one to six. We were subjected to delousing [sic] for lice. The guards were all SS. What they ordered was translated by deportees. I was sick from December 1944 until the liberation of the camp. I managed to stand up around March and had to work as a carrier of the dead from my barrack, where someone died every day [sic]. We carried them from our barrack to a kind of warehouse from where they were loaded and taken away to the pits. [When one was sick] one stayed in the barrack and received only half a food ration. [The most frequent illness was] organic wasting. Swellings that led to death. In the camp, thousands of internees were often beaten with oxhide whips. [I do not remember episodes of solidarity]. Only with a friend, Guinzani [Federico], did we share everything and help each other to survive. But generally, there was no solidarity. [There were escapes but those who tried] were immediately caught and sent to a special camp near us from which no one returned. The evacuation took place when the American troops were arriving. We were transferred on foot to another camp where we arrived the next day. [There were reprisals against the kapos]: beatings. Some [sic] kapos died. [Afterwards I was transferred to the hospital of] Rudolstadt (Thuringia). After a month I returned to Italy after walking to Innsbruck. From there to the Brenner Pass and then to Verona. [What helped me most to endure was] luck, age, spring, and bearable weather. I cannot imagine more cruel men who used treatments like wild beasts. [The episode I remember best is this]: one day Guinzani and I were absent from work—naively escaped—to go to the village to get some food from a farmer’s house. We presented ourselves as French and they made us work all day gathering potatoes in the fields. In the evening, back in the barrack, two SS came to take us out and beat us so badly that we were more dead than alive, and they took away our Essen card with coupons still valid for four days. For four days we lived on potato peels scavenged from the rubbish outside the Russian barracks. After that punishment, a week later, I got sick and could no longer work: [I was] classified as a sick person of the IVth category, the highest. Source: Historical Archive of ANED Brescia, B. 9, folder 114 (“Lists of deportees”), ad nomen; reproduced by ANED Brescia.