Eyewitness Testimony Philemon Loddewijckx

"The time in Kahla was not a real life, but rather a struggle for survival." Philemon Loddewijckx One sunny afternoon, I met with Philemon Loddewijckx in Holsbeek. He was also a prisoner of Camp E. Philemon has a phenomenal memory; he talks about his capture as if it were just yesterday. He will probably never be able to erase this inhuman time from his memory. "On July 24, 1944, I was arrested. About one and a half years earlier, I had been called up to do forced labor in Germany. However, I only appeared once at a recruitment office in Leuven; I never went to Germany. I hid. From that moment on, I worked as a seasonal laborer in Soiguy." "On July 21, 1944, my boss sent me to a farm. It was a Friday evening and I jumped on my bicycle. I rode straight through the center of Brussels; not a single German was to be seen and I knew nothing yet of the problems and fate that awaited me." "The following Monday, July 24, I returned. In Haacht, I had to take the electric tram, which the Germans had stopped in Brussels. Everyone had to get off. All men were lined up against a wall, their names listed and checked. Because I had been reported as a fugitive for the last one and a half years, my name was also on that list." "We were transported to the Gestapo headquarters on Louisenstraße in a black car." "A day later, I was taken to Etterbeek, where I stayed from July 25 to August 8." "We arrived the next afternoon. From the Kahla train station, we walked onto the meadow where Camp E was built. I had a suitcase with me." "The next day we had to go to the construction site. Fischer, the engineer of the Gustloff works, was also there. He selected some of us (including me), and we were to go with some other people." "The time in Kahla was not a real life, but rather a struggle for survival." "In a warehouse where workbenches stood, we had to learn welding. We stayed there about six weeks." "After this period, we were sent into tunnels to lay pipelines for compressed air, electricity, and gas." At Walpersberg, different work shifts guaranteed the continuity of work. First, an entire labyrinth of corridors was drilled through and the debris was cleared. The next shift had to spray mortar on the walls, after which the group in which Philemon worked had to build the pipelines. "I always welded in the tunnel. We started at point 0, then completed 1, 2, and 3." "As soon as the first pipelines were finished, we had to test whether there were no holes in them. Especially when these pipelines were intended for gas, these tests were of very great importance. Once we conducted a test with soap. If bubbles emerged from the pipelines, we had to patch the holes. It took us many weeks to finish this work." "The hall where the airplanes were built also had to be supplied with pipelines. That was the most terrifying time I have ever experienced: it was due to the hard work and your lack of good and healthy food that we were all already quite weak; and in this extreme condition, we still had to climb high ladders. I always tied myself to the ladders with a rope." For one day, Philemon was assigned to another job. "One day, a Sunday, I worked at the top of Walpersberg. All troops had to help with the construction of the runway. We climbed the mountain using a cog railway and had to transport the cut trees down the mountain. At that time, the construction work was already several weeks behind schedule, but the Germans expected the runway to be completed by Christmas. So every single workforce was called upon to help." The food rations that the workers in Kahla received were too small to survive on. "We got water soup and a piece of bread." "The first bowl of water soup I received upon our arrival in Kahla, I did not touch. It was full of potato peels; I only tasted it briefly and then finally gave it to a Russian fellow prisoner. That was the first and last time I gave away part of my food." Philemon Loddewijckx "The time in Kahla was not a real life, but rather a struggle for survival." "Three men received half a loaf of bread; a little less than 200 grams per person. The longer our time in Germany lasted, the less bread we got." "At first, we occasionally got a piece of sausage, some jam or butter; however... that did not last long." "Only once, at Christmas, we got some boiled potatoes and a loaf of white bread; we almost felt like celebrating." "If you really wanted to survive on the tiny portions allocated by the Germans, you would have been dead beforehand. So I did not hesitate to try to get additional food." "The tunnels in which we worked had passages to others. In one of these passages were wooden partitions. At this place, the Germans stored potatoes for their kitchen. Once I stole 20 potatoes: if you removed the sand from the wooden board, you could reach the potatoes. I never dared to steal more than 20 pieces—out of fear of being caught." "In a pipe that I had closed on one side, I prepared the potatoes. I heated the pipe with a soldering iron until it glowed and the potatoes were done." "Our group leader was a good man. Several times he took us to the café in the center of Kahla, where the Germans went to eat." In Camp E, it was more a struggle for survival. "Life in Camp E was hell. The unfortunate ones who became sick had no chance. Only one, among a large number of sick people, recovered. People from the camp selected the sick in barracks. About half of the people who had to live in Camp E died. Over the months, more and more people fell victim to death.""I can consider myself lucky not to have become seriously ill. The only insignificant problem I had to live with was an ulcer on the larynx, which was removed in the Jena hospital." "One was entitled to a sick note, with which one could travel to Jena." Fortunately, liberation was near. Philemon Loddewijckx "The time in Kahla was not a real life, but rather a struggle for survival." "Around April 10, the Germans gathered those who could still walk. 'The Volkssturm' would take them away. Together with ten other men, I was able to escape through the fence, and we disappeared before the column started moving." Above Kahla ran a high-voltage power line. While working, Philemon once asked where this high-voltage cable led. It seemed to run from Leipzig to Frankfurt. At that time, Philemon still intended to escape from Camp E; this high-voltage line was to serve as his compass. However, in the meantime, he experienced, like many of his fellow prisoners caught during escape attempts, being put into Camp 0, which resembled a bunker. Many of them came out completely changed and did not live very long. This brought Philemon back to reality. But this particular day in April was forever deeply imprinted in his memory. "Behind the camp, we ran through a field of turnip seeds; the high-voltage line led us toward Eichenberg, Dienstädt, Gumperda, and Milda, where we aimed for the forests. Ultimately, we lay in a fir forest until dawn." "The next day, we moved to the edge of the forest and heard shots from tanks that lasted until midnight." "Shortly after midnight, we saw some tanks next to a cornfield. Some of us approached them. They were Americans. We told them that three of us were still hiding in the forest and asked if we could fetch them. For some reason, we were forbidden. The Americans did not know exactly who we were and did not want to risk that we might be traitors." "They took us to the church in Milda, where the entire village was already gathered. Around 11 p.m., I fell asleep at the altar." "That night, I woke up to the cries of a woman who had just given birth to a girl." "In the church, we received some sausages and continued our journey to Weimar, Eisenach, and Eisfeld. At night, we had to leave the road and slept on a farm." "Eventually, we were taken by car to a barracks in Frankfurt. In Wiesbaden, we took the train to Jambers; we were transported in freight containers, in which we suffered from severe cold. In our section, there were many different people: women who voluntarily worked in Germany, but also children..." Philemon Loddewijckx "The time in Kahla was not a real life, but rather a struggle for survival." "From Jambes, we were taken to Brussels; from there, I took the tram near Leuven and from there I traveled to Haacht." "I finally reached Keerbergen on foot, where an aunt and two of my nieces lived. They gave me a bicycle with which I aimed for the last part of my journey home. I saw our house, but I was too exhausted to continue. I lay down by the roadside, where I was later found." "When I arrived, I weighed only 45 kilos." Philemon has never forgotten the years 1944-1945. Philemon Loddewijckx "One night I was sure I would die." Rene Mous On Thursday, July 20, 2000, I arrived at your station in Essen at 1:19 p.m. After 5 minutes, I reached the house of Amandina Mous-Fabri, the widow of Rene Mous. Rene gave lectures about his time in Nazi Germany. The notes from his lectures as well as those Rene had written in a small appointment calendar during his time in Kahla (which Mrs. Mous handed to me) enabled me to reconstruct his stay in Germany. Rene was very busy with his lectures. Out of respect for his work, I will try to use as much as possible his own statements. "On July 2, 1944, a raid was conducted in Essen. They also came to our house. There were six soldiers and one civilian. They even went up to the roof. However, they could not find me because I always slept in different places." "Wednesday, July 5, 1944... At 5 p.m., I was carrying some wood to my father when I suddenly heard noises behind me. Two meters away stood a field gendarme who pointed a weapon at me; escape was out of the question." "The field gendarme took me to a waiting taxi. There were two other prisoners in the taxi; they were guarded by two field gendarmes and a member of the Gestapo. I shook the Gestapo member's hand, which surprised the other prisoners. One was an old school friend. Even at that time, discussions about the 'new order' were circulating. I was against it; he was for it. He even went to the Eastern Front, from which he returned badly injured and, after his recovery, dealt with the Gestapo in Antwerp." "They took us to Antwerp and left us at the headquarters on Katelijne Vest. After interrogation, we were taken to Vandiepenbeekstraat, where I saw other prisoners who had also been caught during the July 2 raid." "We left Antwerp on July 13 at 2 a.m. and were taken on large trucks to Etterbeek, where a train was waiting. In each compartment sat an armed Gestapo member. At the front and rear of the train were compartments with machine guns and cannons." "One night I was sure I would die." "At 8 a.m., the train departed. The journey lasted all night, and the train passed through Leuven, Liège, Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf, Hagen, Kassel, and Eisenach toward Gotha to Weimar, where we arrived in the morning. We did not know if this was our final destination. They took us to the local barracks, and for the first time since our departure from Belgium, we received something to eat. First, we had to visit the production hall, then the variety show 'Friends and Work.' They probably wanted to make us aware that we should be happy to work for the German Reich." "After five or six days, we were taken to Kahla. I stayed successively in Jägersdorf, Thüringer Hof, Rosengarten, and Camp E.""From the very first moment, I had to work on the construction of the railway line from Orlamünde to Großeutersdorf. This line was to be used for transporting materials; it was a branch line of the Munich - Berlin route." "From Jägersdorf, I had to cover a distance of 24 kilometers every day (12 kilometers there and 12 kilometers back)." In Jägersdorf, he lived in a barn and slept in the straw. "After the exhausting and tiring journey, ten hours of inhumanly hard work followed. We had to unload stones, crossbeams, and rails from the wagons, drill holes in the crossbeams, place the rails on top, and tamp the stones underneath with a pickaxe. And all this under the burning sun and a flood of insults and curses from the overseers. To emphasize their scolding, they beat everyone at any time imaginable with their batons. We were six Flemish men, some Walloon and French, about 50 Polish and a hundred Italian and Russian men and women." "A week later, we were transferred to the Thüringer Hof camp. There, I also continued working on the railway line." The Thüringer Hof camp consisted of a small room, a kind of community room. The bunk beds were placed so close together that one could only move by stepping aside. When two men met in a narrow passage, one of them had to sit on the bed; there was no other alternative. In Thüringer Hof, far from home, Rene wrote this song: "One night I was sure I would die." Fatherland, your stars... In the silence of the night When the stars glitter in the darkness A gentle wind quietly conveys your greetings And I whisper softly and melancholically There in the distance in the little house All of you whom I worship, Send your boy a greeting, a kiss, a sign of the cross That will comfort him in his loneliness Far away in a foreign neighborhood, I always think of you. Days and weeks have slowly passed It has been a long time since I had to leave Again and again a new morning breaks, bringing a new morning Bringing a new day full of worries and distress And makes me long for Flanders, my country. In the silence of the evening... When I am alone in the icy cold night I am afraid and cry very quietly I have lost all my courage But I still see you before my eyes Think of me too, oh Flanders, my country. In the silence of the evening... "Around August 20th, I became ill. I probably had a serious flu, but resting or consulting a doctor was out of the question. Sick or not, the hard work continued. Fever or not, the work had to be done, in heat and rain; otherwise, we got no food." "Around October 20th, I was totally exhausted. They took me to the sick camp of the Italian camp (Rosengarten). The conditions there were inhumane. I stayed there for three weeks. I had a brain infection that caused my legs to be paralyzed and I became blind in one eye. My head was terribly swollen. There was only one Italian nurse who could do nothing but take our temperatures (I had a fever of 42.5°C) and a young doctor from Lithuania. He saved my life by breaking my nose and removing the pus from my head with the help of small tubes." "When I got better, I had to work again, although I was still sick and had a fever." Rene Mous "One night I was sure I would die." Not only was the medical care poor, but the food was also very meager. In the first months, Rene and his comrades received only one loaf of bread for eight men at breakfast; at noon they got cabbage soup and in the evening also cabbage soup or potatoes. They worked six out of seven days, nine to ten hours a day. From October, the food was reduced; one loaf had to suffice for ten men. They worked 13 out of 14 days, ten to eleven hours daily. When Rene arrived at Camp E (end of December, beginning of January), there was one loaf for twelve men, nothing at noon, and in the evening only some watery soup, sometimes with a potato in it. They worked seven days a week, 11 to 13 hours a day. "At the end of December or beginning of January, I and some others came from the Rosengarten camp to Camp E, the death camp. When we arrived, we all had to have our hair cut; our hair was cut so that everyone could immediately recognize that we were prisoners of Camp E. When we entered the barracks, we had to take off our shoes. In front of me stood a Walloon with bare feet; like so many others, he no longer had socks. An SS man came in and shouted: 'In line and quiet.' The Walloon turned around and asked me what the man had said. Then the German stepped on his bare feet with his boots." "In Camp E, a small offense was punished with 25 lashes. For example, if a search of the barracks was conducted at night and someone was found hiding a potato, he was considered a thief and everyone knew what punishment followed. Once I had to watch such a punishment; one was forced to laugh or suffer the same fate. The person to be punished lay naked and bent over on a stool, and one of the guards beat him in front of the camp leader. The man's excrement splattered up to a meter high. He made no sound; I do not know if he survived." "In Walpersberg, my job was to transport stones with the help of a cart from a tunnel and move them aside. Once, when I came out of the tunnel with my cart, I saw an SS man attacking a prisoner with his dog. The man fell unconscious to the ground after the dog bit him several times on the throat. The SS soldier fetched a bucket of water and poured it over his victim. This meant certain and usually immediate death, as the water froze instantly at -22°C."In his lectures, Rene spoke about further similar incidents that prove the cruelty of the SS soldiers knew no bounds. For example, one day in October, he saw an Italian being shot on his way to the camp because he had picked an apple from a tree. An apple was worth more than a human life... In the Rosengarten camp, he witnessed an SS soldier chasing an Italian, knocking him to the ground, and stamping on his skull with his boots, which had spikes. Rene heard the boy’s screams and the cracking of his skull until he died; after that, there was deathly silence. All this happened only two meters away from the latrine where Rene was. Rene Mous “One night I was sure I would die.” “In March 1945, I contracted typhus. One day I woke up in the hospital camp, where only a few came out alive. A guard had brought me there; I didn’t know how long I had already been lying there. One night I was sure I would die. The nurse was probably convinced of the same, as he crossed my name off his list that very evening, which meant: deceased. Fortunately, we were both mistaken.” Gradually, the war finally came to an end. “A few days before liberation, Camp E was evacuated. Everything and everyone was taken to the left bank of the Saale. All those who could still walk were driven towards Orlamünde. Those who could no longer stand upright had to walk under guard of the wardens into the Leubengrund. Those who could no longer stand on their feet were taken to a hospital camp in Hummelshain.” “So we dragged ourselves into the Leubengrund. The path was four kilometers and it took me the whole day. From then on, we had escaped the hell of Camp E. At the beginning of January, we were still 1,400 men; by early April, only 675 survivors were able to leave the camp.” “On April 14 at 11 a.m., I had to go outside because I needed to relieve myself and saw an American coming out of the forest. He looked right and left and then disappeared back into the forest. I went back to bed. In the afternoon, there was not a single German left; khaki-colored silhouettes moved between the barracks.” “The next day, American soldiers disinfected and deloused most of Camp 6. They set up a kitchen and a shower four by six meters in size. We were also deloused. We had to shower, 25 people at a time, and from then on received three meals a day. At first, we only got rice against diarrhea; afterwards, we ate everything the army kitchen had to offer.” “Two days later, there was a great uproar in the camp. The citizens of Kahla were forced by the Americans to visit the camps to see with their own eyes the terrible condition the prisoners were in. We often heard them say: ‘We didn’t know that.’” Only in the first few days did we have brief contact with the residents, but this did not last long. The people were heavily pressured with all kinds of threats. They had to be hostile towards the foreign scum, who had no culture whatsoever. Nevertheless, some German workers gave us something to eat. But the people knew what was really going on in Reimahg, because many of them, especially the older ones, worked in the underground aircraft production hall. There is no doubt that they must have known what was happening in the camps; but in any case, they denied it. It was obvious— even a blind person could see how Russian groups repeatedly dug up mass graves. Rene Mous “One night I was sure I would die.” “We stayed another week or even four in that camp, slept a lot, and sometimes ate six times a day. Afterwards, we were transported to the SS barracks in Erfurt and a few days later we were on our way home. On May 31, 1945, we arrived home.” After his arrival, Rene resumed his daily life. But he could not push the terrible memories of the months in Nazi Germany out of his mind. “At the train station stood a group of Russians, so dirty and crumpled. We walked around them, not knowing that in less than a week we would end up the same way.” Rene Roell Through a list of addresses that I received from Paul Baert and also thanks to the help of the family