Inside the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, the inmate physicians in the prisoner infirmary were ordered on January 17, 1945, to release from the hospital all prisoners who were “fit to march.” Only prisoners “not fit to march” and a few prisoner physicians were to remain behind. The next day, January 18, 1945, the inmates were given double bread rations. In the evening, all 10,000 inmates of the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp were required to gather in the roll-call square and form columns of 1,000 prisoners. Most of the men possessed little more than the thin prisoner uniform, a food bowl, and wooden clogs held on by cloth straps. That night and the following one, SS men drove the emaciated inmates through deep snow and stormy weather, and some had to carry the SS men’s belongings in addition or push them along in pushcarts. Anyone who lagged behind or collapsed at the side of the road was shot by the SS. During the second night, the survivors’ trek reached the Gleiwitz concentration camp, about 80 km (50 miles) from Buna/Monowitz. Here the prisoners were given a loaf of bread and, after one or two days, starting on January 21, they were divided into various “transports”. Anyone who survived the march “was once again used for forced labor in the concentration camps of the Old Empire.”[1] When liberation came, most survivors were in a camp, utterly exhausted; only a few succeeded in escaping from one of the death marches and making their way through to the Allies. Some, like John Fink, passed through the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, where they were turned away because of the camp’s overcrowding, and ended up in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp d , where they were lodged on the grounds of the Heinkel aircraft plant in Oranienburg. Many of them were transported again in March, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Other prisoners, including Julius Paltiel, Paul Steinberg, and Heinz Kahn f , were transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in late January 1945. From there, some were sent as forced laborers to smaller camps in the surrounding area, such as Altenburg, where the U.S. Army freed them in April 1945. Only a small number of Jewish prisoners saw liberation in the Buchenwald concentration camp, because the SS forced all the Jews to set out on a further journey on April 4. Julius Paltiel was saved from this transport by German Communists.