Zada was held for some time at Allach, the largest sub-camp of Dachau, and then at another camp in northern Germany, Neuengamme.
The northernmost point he reached was the Ladelund camp, a sub-camp of Neuengamme near the Danish border that operated in November and December 1944. There, the prisoners were forced to dig anti-tank trenches for a line of defence.
In the camp, it was freezing cold and the guards tormented the prisoners even further by refusing to allow them to warm themselves: “There was a stove in the middle [of the room], with wood and straw, but they were not allowed to light a fire,” Zada’s grandson said.
At the end of 1944, Zada was moved to Sachsenhausen, one of the major Nazi concentration camps, 34 kilometres north-west of Berlin.
He then spent the last months of the war at the Mauthausen concentration camp, which became, towards the end of the war, the site for evacuees from camps near the front line.
Zada was a first-hand witness to mass extermination, mostly of Hungarian Jews, and his group of prisoners was in charge of loading the dead bodies onto trucks.
The lack of food and rampant disease led to mass death among the prisoners of Mauthausen in the final months before liberation.
“Hunger and exhaustion still took a huge toll. Skinny human skeletons came down like [blades of] wheat when the reaper enters [the field],” Zada wrote.
“Such people mostly lay in their beds in the [detention] block, but often out of the desire to see the liberators, they went out and collapsed… they never got up again,” he continued. “In that agony, we waited for the moment of liberation.”
Zada said that some 14,000 prisoners were left at the camp in its final days, but around 6,000 did not managed to survive.
When the US Army reached Mauthausen, on May 5, 1945, Zada “couldn’t even speak due to the great excitement”, thinking at first that it was just a dream.
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Croatian Journalist Revives Grandfather's Memoirs of Nazi Captivity - Balkan Insight
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