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I know from my mother and my older siblings that the Lackenbach camp was equipped the same as all of the other concentration camps in Germany, Austria and Poland, except there were no ovens or crematoria installed for gassing people. [2] Therefore, every day at 6 am roll call, men, women and children were selected and loaded onto the transports to the large concentration camps and deported. During this daily "ceremony" the SS units were, of course, also present with their killer dogs. One day, my older brother and his friend had stolen two cobs of corn on their way home from their forced labor because they were so hungry. But they were caught and brought into the camp by the SS where they received 50 lashes on their backs, behinds and legs with an oxtail whip. After this beating, they were unable to work for 14 days and only received cabbage soup and a piece of bread to eat each day. They were only fourteen at the time, and only their strong will to survive kept them alive. Or if someone arrived at roll call too late in the morning, he would receive 25 blows with a stick and nothing to eat for three days, followed by work as an extra punishment, such as cleaning the toilets etc. If someone no longer had the strength to keep going and collapsed due to malnutrition, for example while working on road construction, he was shot on the spot. And I could go on with the list of atrocities which were carried out in the Lackenbach camp between 1941 and 1945 until the camp was liberated by the Russians. I would also like to mention the unhygienic conditions in the wooden barracks, where, above all in winter, the fleas, lice and bedbugs would crawl into the wooden planks and suck the blood from the prisoners during the night, infecting them. Infection with epidemic typhus was a daily occurrence and many people died of it. An equally frequent cause of death was murine typhus and dysentery, illnesses which many inmates caught because of the poor and insufficient nutrition.
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