Sunday, October 14, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
THE 600 BOYS
Salmen Lewenthal was a member of the Sonderkommando, the “special squad” of prisoners forced to “service” the gas chambers.
On 20 October 1944 he witnessed the following, which he recorded in a manuscript buried near one of the crematoria and recovered in 1961.
”In broad daylight 600 Jewish boys between 12 and 18 were brought here. They were clad in long, very thin, prison clothing; on their feet they had worn-out shoes or clogs. (…) When they reached the square the Commander ordered them to undress. The boys noticed the smoke coming from the chimney and realised at once that they were going to be put to death. They began to run around the square in total desperation and tore their hair without knowing how to escape. Many of them broke out in terrible weeping, inconsolable shouts for help could be heard a long way off.
The boys undressed with an instinctive fear of death. Naked and barefoot they huddled together to avoid the blows and stood absolutely still. One brave boy went up to the Commander - who was standing near us – and asked him to allow him to live, promising to carry out all the heaviest jobs. He was rewarded with blows to the head from a thick cudgel.
Many boys ran to the Jews of the ’Special Commando’, threw themselves round their necks and begged them to save them. Others ran naked in different directions on the large square (to avoid death). The Commander called an SS-guard with a truncheon for assistance.
The sound of the clear, young, boyish voices rose minute by minute until it changed to bitter weeping.
This terrible wailing could be heard for miles. We stood stiff and paralysed by the weeping and wailing. The SS-men stood there with contented smiles, without the least sign of compassion, and looked like proud victors, driving them into the bunker with terrible blows. (…)
Some boys were still running around the square and tried to escape. The SS-men ran after them, hitting out in all directions, until they had the situation under control and finally got them into the bunker. Their joy was indescribable.
Didn’t they have children of their own..?”
On 20 October 1944 he witnessed the following, which he recorded in a manuscript buried near one of the crematoria and recovered in 1961.
”In broad daylight 600 Jewish boys between 12 and 18 were brought here. They were clad in long, very thin, prison clothing; on their feet they had worn-out shoes or clogs. (…) When they reached the square the Commander ordered them to undress. The boys noticed the smoke coming from the chimney and realised at once that they were going to be put to death. They began to run around the square in total desperation and tore their hair without knowing how to escape. Many of them broke out in terrible weeping, inconsolable shouts for help could be heard a long way off.
The boys undressed with an instinctive fear of death. Naked and barefoot they huddled together to avoid the blows and stood absolutely still. One brave boy went up to the Commander - who was standing near us – and asked him to allow him to live, promising to carry out all the heaviest jobs. He was rewarded with blows to the head from a thick cudgel.
Many boys ran to the Jews of the ’Special Commando’, threw themselves round their necks and begged them to save them. Others ran naked in different directions on the large square (to avoid death). The Commander called an SS-guard with a truncheon for assistance.
The sound of the clear, young, boyish voices rose minute by minute until it changed to bitter weeping.
This terrible wailing could be heard for miles. We stood stiff and paralysed by the weeping and wailing. The SS-men stood there with contented smiles, without the least sign of compassion, and looked like proud victors, driving them into the bunker with terrible blows. (…)
Some boys were still running around the square and tried to escape. The SS-men ran after them, hitting out in all directions, until they had the situation under control and finally got them into the bunker. Their joy was indescribable.
Didn’t they have children of their own..?”
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Shoah
"For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It's not a written law that the next victims must be Jews."
- Simon Wiesenthal -
A Jew and a medical doctor, the Auschwitz prisoner Miklos Nyiszli - No. A8450 - was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform autopsies and 'scientific research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the supervision of Josef Mengele, the chief provider for the gas chambers.
Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account pp. 114-120:
"In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.
The chief of the gas chamber kommando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or suprise.
"Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses."
I grabbed my intrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.
We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas kommando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections.
My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child. The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections.
I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again .. I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure. Three months in the same camp and in the same milieu had created, in spite of everything, a certain intimacy between us, Besides, the Germans generally appreciate capable people, and, as long they need them, respect them to a certain extent, even in the KZ. Such was the case for cobblers, tailors, joiners, and locksmiths.
From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities. He knew that my superior was Dr. Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science. He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the dissecting room was for the futherance of German medical science.
As Dr, Mengele's pathological expert, I also had a hand in this progress, and therein lay the explination for a certain form of respect that Mussfeld paid me. He often came to see me in the dissecting room, and we conversed on politics, the military situation and various other subjects. It appeared that his respect also arose from the fact that he considered the dissection of bodies and his bloody job of killing to be allied activities. He was the commandant and ace shot of number one crematorium. Three other SS acted as his lieutenants. Together they carried out the "liquidation" by a bullet in the back of the neck ..
And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared. I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benifit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.
These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.
It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through.
But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's no way of getting round it," he said, "the child will have to die." Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck."
- Simon Wiesenthal -
A Jew and a medical doctor, the Auschwitz prisoner Miklos Nyiszli - No. A8450 - was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform autopsies and 'scientific research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the supervision of Josef Mengele, the chief provider for the gas chambers.
Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account pp. 114-120:
"In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.
The chief of the gas chamber kommando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or suprise.
"Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses."
I grabbed my intrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.
We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas kommando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections.
My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child. The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections.
I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again .. I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure. Three months in the same camp and in the same milieu had created, in spite of everything, a certain intimacy between us, Besides, the Germans generally appreciate capable people, and, as long they need them, respect them to a certain extent, even in the KZ. Such was the case for cobblers, tailors, joiners, and locksmiths.
From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities. He knew that my superior was Dr. Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science. He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the dissecting room was for the futherance of German medical science.
As Dr, Mengele's pathological expert, I also had a hand in this progress, and therein lay the explination for a certain form of respect that Mussfeld paid me. He often came to see me in the dissecting room, and we conversed on politics, the military situation and various other subjects. It appeared that his respect also arose from the fact that he considered the dissection of bodies and his bloody job of killing to be allied activities. He was the commandant and ace shot of number one crematorium. Three other SS acted as his lieutenants. Together they carried out the "liquidation" by a bullet in the back of the neck ..
And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared. I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benifit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.
These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.
It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through.
But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's no way of getting round it," he said, "the child will have to die." Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck."
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