Oral History Interview with Karessa Foldvary
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Summary
Karessa Foldvary served as a nurse in the U.S. Army during World War II, in field and evacuation hospitals in France and Germany, from November, 1944 until spring, 1945. On May 2, 1945, she moved with the American 7th Army to Dachau Concentration camp, several days after liberation. She describes the emaciation of the thousands of living male prisoners and the dead bodies of women and children piled outside the crematorium. She mentions a typhus epidemic and the use of DDT powder on prisoners. Details of conditions in the boxcars that transported prisoners from Auschwitz to Dachau are related. She mentions loss of American property resulting from thievery by demented prisoners, and describes viewing and photographing 16 wagonloads of dead bodies. Neighboring German farmers were forced by the American military to load and drive the wagons into München (Munich) to show the local population what occurred at Dachau. She mentions hostility from some Germans in Limburg and relations with others in that city, with whom American nurses bartered soap and cigarettes for laundry service.
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See also the interview with her husband, Daniel Berkowicz.
Holocaust Jewish 1939 - 1945 - Personal narratives
World War, 1939 - 1945 - Personal narratives, Jewish, female
Atrocities
Displaced Persons Camp -- Stuttgart
Germanoccupation -- Lwów
Hiding – false papers
Jews - Polish
Starachowice - labor camp
Survival skills
Wolanów -labor camp
Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.
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