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October 14, 1942. It is sort of like a perpetual bad dream. The smells, the sounds of the insane voices, the bad equipment. The long, dark corridors....I tell you, it is all very much like a medieval fairytale of the nether regions. We'd heard about how these patients had been treated by the attendants, beat with rods, you know, do all kind of things. We took a vow before we left the camp, we decided that we would not assault or in any way, strike a patient. I opened one of those rooms, and there was a man lying on the floor. I leaned over to try to see what I could do to minister to him in some way, do something for him. He may have been on a mattress or he may have been on the bare floor, no he was on the bare floor, because when I tried to move him, his skin came off. His skin was bloody and stuck to the floor and when I tried to lift him up it just peeled his skin off. He was in the last stages of syphilis. He died less than a week afterwards. Now that was my first sort of introduction to what was that badly needed in that institution.
- CO Asa Watkins
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