Eyewitness Testimony Rene Mous

"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 carried out in Essen. They also came into our house. There were six soldiers and one civilian. They even went up to the roof. Anyway, 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 into 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 fellow prisoners. One was an old school friend. Even at that time, discussions about the 'new order' were going around. 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 the interrogation, we were taken to Vandiepenbeekstraat, where I saw other fellow prisoners who had also been caught during the raid on July 2." "We left Antwerp on July 13 at 2 a.m. and were brought 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 o’clock the train departed. The journey lasted all night and the train passed through Leuven, Liège, Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf, Hagen, Kassel, and Eisenach towards Gotha to Weimar, where we arrived in the morning. We did not know if this was our final destination. They took us to the barracks there and for the first time since our departure from Belgium we were given 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 the transport of material; 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 followed ten hours of inhumanly hard work. 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 burning sun and a flood of insults and curses from the overseers. To emphasize their scolding, they beat anyone 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 common 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 slowly passed by It has been a long time since I had to leave Again and again a new morning dawns, bringing a new morning Brings 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 20 I became ill. I probably had a serious flu, but resting was out of the question, let alone consulting a doctor. 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 20 I was totally exhausted. They took me to the sick camp of the Italian camp (Rosengarten). The conditions there were inhumane. I stayed there three weeks. I had an infection in the brain resulting in paralysis of my legs and blindness 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 very poor, but the food was also very meager. In the first months, Rene and his comrades received only one loaf of bread for breakfast, which had to be enough for eight men; 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 of bread now had to be enough 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 of bread for twelve men, nothing at noon, and in the evening only some water soup, in which sometimes a potato lay. They worked seven days a week, 11 to 13 hours a day. "At the end of December or also at the beginning of January, I and some others came from Camp Rosengarten 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, that person was considered a thief and everyone knew what punishment would follow. 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 work consisted of transporting stones with the help of a cart from a tunnel and moving 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 had bitten his throat several times. 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 proving that the cruelty of the SS soldiers knew no bounds. For example, one day in October he saw an Italian 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 Camp Rosengarten, 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 deadly 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 did not know how long I had been lying there. One night I was sure I would die. The nurse was probably convinced of this too, as he crossed my name off his list that same evening, which meant: deceased. Fortunately, we were both mistaken." Gradually, the war finally came to an end. "A few days before the 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 guards 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, there were still 1,400 men; at the beginning of April, only 675 survivors could 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. 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; after that, we ate everything the army kitchen had to offer." "Two days later, there was a big commotion in the camp. The citizens of Kahla were forced by the Americans to look at the camps to see with their own eyes in what terrible condition the prisoners were. We often heard them say: 'We did not know that.'" Only in the first days did we have brief contact with the inhabitants, but this did not last long. The people were heavily pressured with all means of intimidation. They had to be hostile to 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 older ones, worked in the underground aircraft production hall. There is no doubt that they must have known what was going on 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. Then 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.