Stories of Dachau Survivors Stephan Ross According to the book "Dachau 29 April 1945, the Rainbow Liberation Memoirs," edited by Sam Dann, Stephan Ross was one of the lucky few who was rescued in the nick of time when Dachau was liberated. Ross was interviewed for the book and according to his own story, he was one of the 1,800 prisoners who were crowded into one quarantine barrack, which was designed to hold only about a hundred prisoners. Ross says that the prisoners in the quarantine barrack had not been fed for two weeks before the Seventh Army arrived. Food was scarce, and according to Ross, the prisoners were fed only occasionally when they were given "a biscuit, hard as a rock and covered with mold." From the quarantine block, Ross says that 80 to 100 prisoners a day were carried out and put on the pile of dead bodies near the barbed wire fence, from where they were taken to the crematory. According to Ross, the quarantine block was where the German SS Doctors Sigmund Rascher and Klaus Schilling selected prisoners for their ghastly experiments. The doctors "removed thirty to forty prisoners on a daily basis for experiments" according to Ross. Ross says that he "had been isolated in quarantine for experiments since 1944." For five years, he had been confined in 10 different concentration camps since the age of nine. On the day of liberation, Ross made his way to the main gate, although he "was very weak and hardly able to walk." With the help of his brother, who was also in the camp, Ross made it to the front of the crowd and was included in one of the most famous photographs of the liberation, shown on our main liberation page. After the liberation of Dachau, Ross had to stay in the camp until the typhus epidemic was brought under control. When he was released, he made his way to Munich where he was hospitalized for 6 months and treated for tuberculosis. He was then sent to a Displaced Persons camp for orphans at a former forced labor camp in Landsberg, near Munich. Finally, he was brought to America under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Orphaned Children. He was able to recover his health, and earned a PhD degree from Northeastern University. He spent 40 years working as a licensed psychologist in Boston, Massachusetts in the field of delinquency prevention. Home