There have been hundreds of horrific Stories from the Gas Chambers of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. here is one that is quoted eagerly by Robert Jan Van Pelt . . . Events in Auschwitz -- [An improbable eye-witness account, of which usually only the less improbable bits are quoted by the conformist historians.] [Click for another version of the one-bullet-shooting-through-many-heads story] | |||
[Pages 349-350, Appendix 159:] Experiences of a Fifteen
year old in Birkenau.
ON MAY 20, 1944, I arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a fourteenyearold from the camp at Theresienstadt. The crematorium greeted us with its horrible tongues of flame coming out of its smokestacks. those of us able to march set out toward the camp on foot and had to carry the sick. Many of the elderly refused to cooperate with the SS, which had taken the last little piece of food from them. They were killed on the spot. After midnight we entered the camp. In the camp we went to join the Czechs; for the first two days we got nothing to eat. In these two days we saw how people who had once been good human beings had turned into ravening wolves. They did not care that we were their countrymen; they beat us to save their own lives. In the camp it was well known that every transport was gassed after six months. I had been in the camp a month when the oldest transport was gassed. They took us immediately to the selection, at which the strongest men and women were sorted out. The remainder were gassed. After a lengthy struggle our senior camp inmate was granted 100 strong young people capable of hard work. Out of 1,500 people the camp doctor, SS Captain [Josef] Mengele, selected ninety-eight. I was among the "strong." We immediately went into camp; the rest of the family camp were gassed. In camp I became a helper in the kitchen. I visited the barracks of the Jewish work detail, which worked in the crematorium. These comrades told me about the horrors of the crematorium, where I would later work. After May 19 [1944] the Hungarian transports began arriving, with around 7,000 people daily. |
I will now describe the crematoriums and the transports. At the station 2,000 people got off the trains. They had to throw away all their luggage. Afterward the men and women were divided into two groups, at which the larger boys were assigned to the group with the men. Then that great devourer of Jews, Mengele, drove by in a car, seeking out the strongest from each transport. They numbered around thirty out of 2,000. The remainder were led away by SS Technical Sergeant Moll, the officer of the crematorium. The elderly were loaded onto dump trucks and then dumped into burning trenches while still alive. The remainder were led into the gas chambers. Meanwhile new transports were arriving. In front of the gas chamber was a dressing room. On its walls was written in all languages: "Put shoes into the cubbyholes and tie them together so you will not lose them. After the showers you will receive hot coffee." Here the poor victims undressed themselves and went into the chamber. There were three columns for the ventilators, through which the gas poured in. A special work detail with truncheons drove the people into the chamber. When the room was full, small children were thrown in through a window. Moll grabbed infants by their little legs and smashed their skulls against the wall. Then the gas was let into the chamber. The lungs of the victims slowly burst, and after three minutes a loud clamoring could be heard. Then the chamber was opened, and those who still showed signs of life were beaten to death. The prisoners of the special work details [Sonderkommandos] then pulled the corpses out, took their rings off, and cut their hair, which was gathered up, put in sacks, and shipped to factories. Then they arranged the corpses in piles of ten each. After Moll had counted them, they were taken to the ovens, or if the crematoriums were insufficient, thrown into fire trenches. Once it happened that a victim crawled out of a burning trench. He was beaten to death with truncheons. Once Moll put a naked woman in the trench and shot her in the genitals. Another time Moll found a ring on a member of the special work detail. He ordered naphtha poured over him and had it lighted. On another occasion he arranged twelve women who were lined up behind each other in a row, so that their heads were at the same height. Then he mercilessly shot through them all with a single bullet. He hanged a man up by his hands and shot him until his arms were torn through; then he hanged him up by the feet and repeated the process. Once an Italian woman, a dancer, was brought to the crematorium. That drunken pig, the roll call officer Schillinger, ordered her to dance naked. She took advantage of a favorable moment, came near him, grabbed his pistol away from him, and shot him down.2 In the exchange of gunfire that followed, the SS won of course. Once Moll took a family of six. First he shot the youngest in the presence of the rest, then he shot the older ones and finally the father and mother. Thousands of women with shaved heads asked about their children and husbands. I lied to thousands of women, telling them that their loved ones were still alive, even though I knew very well that they were all dead.
JANDA WEISS, Brunn (Brno)
[Footnote] 2. This incident became one of the more famous stories of resistance to the Holocaust. Because of its ubiquity and the vagueness of its source, Lawrence L. Langer (citing Kogon and Bettelheim) treats it as probably mythical; Versions of Survival (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 43. It seems somewhat more credible in this account, as the source was a fifteen-year-old child who reported it even before the war was over and before any published accounts had appeared. See SSS, 186; TPH, 240; Bettelheim, Informed Heart, 259. |
From
The Buchenwald Report, translated edited and with an
introduction by David A Hackett, Foreword by
Frederick A Praeger (Westview Press, Boulder/San
Francisco/Oxford, 1995).
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to David Irving