[Camp director Percival Treite] said that the extermination at Ravensbrück began with mass shooting in the winter of 1944-5. “First of all fifty prisoners [women] were killed daily in front of the crematorium by a shot through the neck,” he said. A doctor had to be there because “one bullet doesn’t always kill the prisoner immediately.” In a second statement, on 14 August 1946, he described how the victims were not only the old and sick, but also “young women capable of work,” who were brought to a place near the crematorium and shot in the back of the neck with a small-caliber gun from a short distance…
RAVENSBRÜCK
By Sarah Helm
We received a big transport of potatoes and they were unloaded from the railroad into a storage room…We were all lined up and everyone was searched. About 20 people who unloaded the potatoes were picked from the group when it was discovered that they had one or two potatoes in their pockets. They had to line up one by one; each received 25 lashes on their bare behinds from the German soldiers. As they began crying and screaming, they were whipped on their heads so that they would stop screaming. The rest, in line to receive lashes, tried to be calm. Yet, we and they could not help but tremble while we were watching their pain and horror. Again, I cannot adequately describe the cruelty of the Germans. We were not able to lift a finger or say a word. After we were dismissed, a few strangers and I picked the others up from the ground and brought them to their rooms. We helped undress them and put them into their beds. They did not eat any food that night since they could not walk to the kitchen to receive their meal.
MEMOIRS OF A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: ICEK KUPERBERG
By Icek Kuperberg
During the summer and fall of 1944, the annihilation of several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews overloaded the system. It was hindered by a shortage of Zyklon B, and the crematoria could not cope with the huge number of corpses. Hence several open-air pyres were set up to burn bodies. According to the survivor Hermann Langbein, who served as clerk and became a key witness at the Auschwitz trial in 1963-1965, there was at least one instant in 1944 when Jewish children were thrown alive into the huge fires. Another witness testified to having seen several trucks with about five hundred children driving up and dumping the children into the burning pit. There were screams and then silence. The Jewish inmate Dr. Ella Lingens also saw how small children were thrown alive into the pyre.
PERPETRATORS
By Guenter Lewy
Shortly before the stickiness [inside the box car] became truly unbearable, the doors unsealed, and within minutes we were unloaded…You had to jump… I got up and wanted to cry, or at least sniffle, but the tears didn’t come. They dried up in the palpable creepiness of the place. We should have been relieved – and for a few moments we were – to be outside the sardine box where we had been suffocating and to be breathing fresh air at last. But the air wasn’t fresh. It smelled like nothing on earth, and I knew instinctively and immediately that this was no place for crying, that the last thing I needed was to attract attention. So I swallowed the terror which filled my throat like vomit and concentrated on the hope for a little rest, a cup of water, a chance to recover. None of these were to be. We were surrounded by the odious, bullying noise of the men who had hauled us out of the train with the monosyllables “raus, raus” (get out), and who simply didn’t stop shouting, as they were driving us along, like mad, barking dogs.
STILL ALIVE
By Ruth Kluger
Hershl Zukerman, who arrived at Sobibor on May 13, 1942, described the process of forming groups of men to be sent to the gas chambers: “Every few minutes some SS men approached an inquired who among us was a shoemaker, tailor, etc. People believed it was worthwhile to appear as a skilled worker and therefore responded. Then they marched in groups consisting of 300-400 men who believed they were being sent to a labor camp. Actually they were taken directly to Camp III, to the gas chambers.
DEFY THE DARKNESS
By Joe Rosenblum with David Kohn
At night another transport arrived at the camp [Treblinka]. We ran toward the cars. I was shocked. All the cars were filled only with dead – asphyxiated. They were lying on top of one another in layers, up to the ceiling of the freight car. The sight was so awful, it was difficult to describe. I asked where the transport had come from; it turned out from Miedzyrzec…There was nowhere to place the corpses. Near the railroad tracks were large piles of clothing, and under these were still-unburied bodies. We laid the bodies in layers, near the railway. Occasionally, moans could be heard from under the piles of clothes as people recovered consciousness and asked in a weak voice for water. There was nothing we could do to help; we were dying of thirst ourselves…those still alive were moved to the side, nearer to the clothes. It was dark, and the Germans didn’t notice. Among those living I found a baby, a year or a year and a half old, who had woken up and was crying loudly. I left him by the side. In the morning he was dead.
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA
By Yitzhak Arad
Soldiers at times volunteered for the shooting of Jews. A thirty-six-year-old police officer from Vienna, the father of two infants, happily reported such an opportunity to his wife: “For tomorrow I have volunteered for a special operation.”…Three days later he described what it had been like: “With the first truck [of victims] my hand shook a bit while shooting, but one gets used to it. By the tenth truck I calmly took aim and shot comfortably at the many women, children and infants…Infants were flying in big sweeps through the air and we blew them away while they were still flying and before they hit the pit and the water. Away with this brood, who have plunged all of Europe into war and now even stir up America.”
PERPETRATORS
By Guenter Lewy
We could hear soldiers climbing up on the roof, and the clicking of safety catches on their machine guns. My armpits started to gush. When the train started up, the guards started firing into the cattle cars, and we all tried to hide behind each other. Two people near me were killed. I cringed, along with the rest of my family, and wondered whether I would live to see out the day…Germans, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians – again started firing mercilessly into the cars. Two of my neighbors were wounded. The screaming and shrieking filled my ears. People huddled up against each other as protection, crouching as low as they could. Still, the blood welling up around my feet felt as though it were going to wash over my shoes. The smell of people dying and letting go of their bladders and bowels, the sound of screaming and wailing, were almost like being in hell itself. Six or seven of us were killed, and twice that many were wounded. I felt numb, but I was never touched. I crouched down, lying between the dead and wounded, waiting for the Germans to shoot again.
DEFY THE DARKNESS
By Joe Rosenblum with David Kohn
Another time, after their latest pogrom [in Devaltsevo], the Germans loaded up a truck with a group of Jews and drove them to an anti-tank ditch, where they began dealing with them savagely. They stripped men, women, and children naked, beat them, and then threw them half alive into the ditch, piled straw on them and set it alight. Infant children were taken from their mothers and thrown alive into the fire.
THE UNKNOWN BLACK BOOK
By Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman
The Czech Lager [at Auschwitz] used to be the object of our envy. There, the families – men, women, children and the elderly – were allowed to live together, and apparently no selections had been made because there were even some invalids in wheelchairs among them. Compared to us they were doing extremely well; they were dressed in their own clothes and their hare was not shorn. Then, one day during a July Appell we saw that there was a big selection going on among the Czechs. Young women and men were separated out and immediately taken away in a transport. From that day on, those left behind were not given anything to eat. They were condemned to death, a waste to feed. In a few days their eyes grew hollow from hunger. They perished by the hundreds every day, allegedly from typhus, but in reality they starved to death.
AS THE LILACS BLOOMED
By Anna Molnar Hegedus
Jews from Ukraine undergo a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Look further down the ramp and across the tracks to see the vast number of people to be processed. It’s likely more trains will be unloading this day. About 1/3 of these victims will be used for labor until they die of starvation and disease. The rest will be sent to one of the five gas chambers at Birkenau. The Germans easily murdered thousands of people in a day.
“I saw in the yard five wheelbarrows [at Ravensbrück] that were normally used to cart manure; each one contained one woman. They were Jews who had dropped from exhaustion in the road on their way from work at Siemens and who’d been beaten to the brink of death by the Aufseherinnen in charge of them. Their comrades had been forced to pick them up and take them back to the camp. The Oberschwester forbade anyone to touch them. Two of them were dead when I saw them, the others were on the point of death.”
RAVENSBRÜCK
By Sarah Helm
After a few weeks a new transport arrived [at Graditz] from different towns. These new people told us how they were rounded up and had to leave behind everything they brought to the railroad station. There, they were also separated from their loved ones. One such story involved a couple. The husband did not want to leave his wife because she was eight months pregnant. A German soldier stabbed her in her belly and killed her.
MEMOIRS OF A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: ICEK KUPERBERG
By Icek Kuperberg
One evening Susi told me [age 13] that the kitchen staff had some leftovers, which they were saving for the children. I ran to the back entrance of the building and stood around for a while; a few women who must have heard the same rumor joined me. I got impatient, thinking that perhaps these latecomers would push ahead, though I was there first, and so I went up a few short stairs and then walked along the narrow, well-lit hall to the back door of the kitchen. Suddenly a door to the right opened. A tall woman guard appeared, and behind her an SS man I had never seen before. He calls me with a strong northern accent, using the polite form of address. I stand before him, my metal dish in hand, and he asks what I want. I tell him I’ve heard there are leftovers. He says, “Now watch out.” Idiot that I am, I still think he’ll let me pass, for why would he want to waste the leftovers, if indeed there are any? You don’t throw away food when it’s so scarce, do you now? And before I knew it he has hit me in the face, full force, so that I stumble backward along the hallway and see stars. My wooden clogs fall off my feet; the dish falls from my hands as I crash to the ground.
STILL ALIVE
By Ruth Kluger
“Two desperate Jews fell to their knees begging a German general for protection [at Bialystok]. One member of Police’ Battalion 309, who observed these entreaties, decided to intervene with ‘what he must have thought to be a fitting commentary: He unzipped his pants and urinated upon them. The anti-Semitic atmosphere and practice, among the Germans was such that this man brazenly exposed himself in front of a general in order to perform a rare public act of virtually unsurpassable disdain. Indeed, the man had nothing to fear for his breach of military discipline and decorum. Neither the general nor anyone else sought to stop him.”
HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
In our car, there were 107 people. Anytime anybody died, we took their clothing off, put it around us to keep warm, and put the dead bodies over to one side. When we arrived in Buchenwald, they opened up the train and the few people that were still alive could hardly walk. I, myself – my toes were frozen – have no toes left. All of them fell off.
WHAT WE KNEW
By Eric A Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband
The Jews that were lying on the ground did not all die straight away [Kovno, Lithuania]. After they had been led into the square they were hit on the head or in the face indiscriminately and immediately fell stunned to the ground. Then they were beaten by the convicts until they no longer shoed any sign of life. Then yet more Jews were led to the square and they too were beaten in the same way. I stayed in total some ten minutes at the scene of this cruel event and then left and continued my journey. While I stayed in the square I witnessed the beating to death of some ten to fifteen Jews…Before they were beaten to death, the Jews prayed and murmured to themselves. Some of them also said prayers to themselves as they lay badly wounded on the ground.
“THE GOOD OLD DAYS”
By Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess
“Above all there was beating,” she said. “Beating for any reason and for no reason. Beating over the head with a bullwhip at roll call, with a fist to face, over a special stool with a piece of rubber or cane…They all beat us”… “But it was a female guard called Else Ehrich who “probably broke all the records. She beat women with a passion with frigid cruelty in her eyes. No SS woman could match her for strength or inflicting pain. She always beat us until she drew blood.”
THE HOLOCAUST
By Laurence Rees
Tadeusz Smreczynski was well aware of the functions of Auschwitz was to murder Jews. Indeed, once in the middle of the night he witnessed the emotional aftermath of the mass killing when he heard “some commotion” outside his block: “I peeped through the window very discreetly so as not to be seen and shot. There were men – only young and middle-aged all naked. Their families had been gassed and they were brought to the main camp. They were ordered to stand in compact groups of five, but they were in panic and each wanted to be close to his nearest relative: brother, father or a friend. SS men with dogs and Kapos were beating them. It was a teeming mass of human bodies reflected in the light of the lamps. It was a horrible sight.” He imagined how he would have felt if “my parents had just been gassed and I stayed alive. It must have been a terrible experience – that sense of helplessness in the face of fate. One could do absolutely nothing to save one’s loved ones.”
THE HOLOCAUST
By Laurence Rees
“I was so sick that I remember hoping I would just die. At times we were jealous of the people who died naturally, but we were very afraid of being sent to the gas chamber. I don’t know why, but even when I hoped I would die, I was afraid of going to the gas chamber. A lot of the girls died in our barracks. Some took their lives by grabbing the wire at the edge of camp, but it was the ones who died in their sleep that we envied.”
THE BLEEDING SKY: MY MOTHER’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE FIRE
By Louis Brandsdorfer
“At the appointment time the patients I had selected were led into the same end [at Auschwitz] block [at Auschwitz] and taken to the room on the other side of the corridor, opposite the room where they had originally been examined and selected. The patient was laid down still alive on the dissection table. I would go up to the table and ask the patient to give me some details essential for my research. For example, for his weight before his detention, how much wait he had lost since his detention, whether he had taken any medication recently, etc. After I had been given this information a medical orderly would come and kill the patient with an injection in the heart area. To my knowledge all these patients were killed the phenol injections. The patient died immediately after being given such an injection. I myself never administered fatal injections.”
“THE GOOD OLD DAYS”
By Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess
A column of Jews March with bundles down a main street in Krakow during the liquidation of the ghetto. SS guards oversee the deportation action. Those who could work were sent to Plaszow labor camp. If they could not work, they were shot or sent to Auschwitz.
“With the approach of the eastern front, the Germans evacuated the camp, probably on January 20. This was not the first death march for these women, who had already survived the one that had brought them there from Auschwitz. Of the approximately 970 Jewish women who began the Schlesiersee evacuation march, lasting eight or nine days and covering only sixty miles along their circuitous route to Grunberg, about 150 died along the way. Of these, perhaps 20 fell dead from starvation and exhaustion, which is not surprising given the debilitation that they had suffered at Auschwitz and Schlesiersee. The other 130 who did not survive the march were shot by the Germans along the way. On this march, their German keepers immediately killed anyone who was too exhausted to carry on.”
HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
“Fourteen days after my arrival, I already experience real hunger, the chronic hunger that free men do not know, that produces dreams at night and dwells in every limb of our bodies. My own body is no longer mine; my belly is bloated, my limbs are withered, my face is swollen in the morning and hollowed in the evening.”
PEOPLE IN AUSCHWITZ
By Hermann Langbein
Five thousand, one hundred were selected to the left, taken off to the village of Skridlevo, beaten up on entering the forest and ordered in parties of 50 to lie face down on the ground. If anyone lifted their heads up they were severely beaten; from there again in parties of 50 they had to give up all their valuables, undress in the bitterly cold weather and be driven by these terrible people to the pits where they were shot by the Einsatzgruppe. That day, we lost my uncle Moshe, my aunt Shoshke, Leizerke, and a cousin staying with us, Berele Kapushevski from Karelitz. It was an appalling blow to us all.
SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST WITH THE RUSSIAN JEWISH PARTISANS
By Jack Kagan and Dov Cohen
In spite of the cold, wet, winter, which drained every bit of strength from my body, I was alert enough to avoid a serious infraction of SS rules. I saw my comrades, one after the other, becoming Muselmen (a term used to describe a man barely alive whose skin loosely covered his bones), men too weak from diarrhea to keep themselves clean. These pitiful comrades were the ones who suffered the most. Death or thoughts of dying were constant companions of everyone in Auschwitz. Many a time when I was squeezed in between two people in my bunk for the night, I found that one of them had not awakened in the morning.
MY DARKEST YEARS
By James Bachner
The work was the stuff of nightmares. As Reder and the other Jewish workers tried to bury the dead, “We had to walk across from one edge of the grave to the other, to get to another grave. Our legs sank in the blood of our mothers, we were treading on mounds of corpses – that was the worst, the most horrible thing…” the effect of all this was that “We moved around like people who had no will anymore. We were one mass…We went mechanically through the motions of that horrible life.”
THE HOLOCAUST
By Laurence Rees
I jumped to my feet and stood on the dirt floor. I felt a dizziness come over me and fell back on to the straw bed. The torture, the separation from my family, the continuous hunger…I don’t care anymore, I thought. I have suffered as much as any human can, and now I have no more to give. My courage has run out and I cannot find it in my heart to stay alive any longer. But it didn’t matter, for as much as I suffered, cried and begged to die at times, I continued to survive. God only knows how.
OUTCRY: HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS
By Manny Steinberg
When quotas [of those being sent to the death camps] were not being met, Eichmann personally went through the hospital picking those to be taken. He assembled a meeting of the hospital staff at which he went through the ranks pointing at people: “You, you, you,” he said, as his assistant wrote names on a clipboard. My mother noticed that he was singling out those who were fat and wore glasses. She fit both categories. As his gaze was turning to her area of the group, she bent down behind a taller nurse standing in front of her. She was passed over.
REFUGE IN HELL
By Daniel B. Silver
Abel Gimpel, at the time a young man barely twenty years old, describes how he was humiliated by a German soldier: “He said, ‘You have to wash the car…’ I said, ‘Give me a bucket and a cloth.’ He said, ‘No.’ I had on a coat that I had owned for less than two weeks. He said: ‘Take your coat and wash the car with it.’ When I was finished, he screamed, ‘Get lost.’ I wanted to take my coat with me. But he wouldn’t let me have it. – I stood there in winter without a coat.”
JEWISH FORCED LABOR UNDER THE NAZIS
Translated by Kathleen M. Dell’Orto
On the second day of the Anschluss three SA troopers, Brown Shirts… proceeded to march up one floor and arrest our neighbor, an Aryan, that is, a pure non-Jewish Christian with no Jewish ancestors. The reason for this arrest was Rassenschande (Shame of the Race), because he had a Jewish girlfriend. The brutes beat him, then sent him to a concentration camp where he died.
CHILDREN OF SEPARATION AND LOSS
By Gertrude Pollitt
