Oral History Interview with Karessa Foldvary

Karessa Foldvary describes serving as a nurse in the US Army during World War II; working in field and evacuation hospitals (54th Field Hospital temporarily then 116th Evacuation Hospital) in France and Germany from November 1944 until spring 1945; how beginning May 2, 1945, she moved with the American Seventh Army to Dachau Concentration camp several days after liberation; the emaciation of the thousands of living male prisoners; seeing the dead bodies of women and children piled outside the crematorium; a typhus epidemic and the use of DDT powder on prisoners; details of conditions in the boxcars that transported prisoners from Auschwitz to Dachau; loss of American property resulting from thievery by demented prisoners; viewing and photographing 16 wagonloads of dead bodies; the neighboring German farmers, who were forced by the American military to load and drive the wagons into München (Munich) to show the local population what occurred at Dachau; and the hostility from some Germans in Limburg and relations with others in that city, with whom American nurses bartered soap and cigarettes for laundry service.

Date: 07/06/1989
Interviewer: Natalie Packel
Interviewee: Karessa Foldvary
Language: English
Subject: Concentration camp inmates--Medical care.
Crematoriums.
Disinfection and disinfectants.
Nurses.
Typhus fever.
World War, 1939-1945--Medical care.
World War, 1939-1945--Participation, Female.
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American.
World War, 1939-1945--Photography.
Women--Personal narratives.
Geographic Name
France.
Germany.
Munich (Germany)
Location: France
Dachau concentration camp
Limburg an der Lahn, Germany
Munich, Germany
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