"From what I've observed among the numerous camp survivors, there are two categories: those who left and those who are still there." Quoted in Charlotte Dembo, Le Convoi du 24 Janvier

Voices from the Holocaust

A diary entry
Bravery or hopelessness?
Trainride to death
An anonymous rescuer
"...hoping that this was only torture"
On re-visiting Auschwitz
The first night in the camp
The apple
In Treblinka
3 crows
Organization
The Creed of a Holocaust Survivor



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This happened to us at the end of the summer of 1943. A transport of Jews arrived from Tamow. They wanted to know where they were being taken. They were told, "To die." They were already undressed. They looked grave and were silent. Then they began to recite a vidui. Then a young Jew stood on a bench and asked everybody's attention. "We are not going to die," he said. And they believed him, and they died.

- Leib Langfuss, Diary



It was Wednesday, August 5,1942, when the Nazis came to the Ghetto for the children in Janusz Korczak's charge. It was not clear whether Korczak told the children what they might expect or exactly where they were going, but his staff of teachers and nurses had the two hundred orphans ready when the Nazis raided the orphanage at 16 Sienna Street. The children had been bathed, given clean clothing, and provided with bread and water to take with them. The Nazis burst in, but the children, though frightened, did not cry out or run and hide. They clung to Korczak who stood between them and the Germans. Bareheaded, he led the way, holding a child by each hand. Behind him were the rest of the two hundred children and a group of nurses clad in white aprons. They were surrounded by Germans and Ukrainian guards, and the Ghetto police. One could see how weak and undernourished the children were. But they marched to their deaths in exemplary order, without a single tear, in such a terrifying silence that it thundered with indictment and defiance.

From: Alexander Donat (1905-1983), Poland and the United States, The Holocaust Kingdom [Find our more ]



... Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows; and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement; how can one hit a man without anger?

There were twelve box cars for six hundred and fifty ... Here, then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which never return and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard people speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: box cars closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. This time it is we who are inside.

Primo Levi, Italy, If this Be a Man



There was one non-Jewish peasant woman. I do not know her name. I do not know her face. But she helped my mother save two children. There was the work camp. And the wire fence. On that day my mother could not bribe. On that day she had no choice. She could not bribe. If she left us in the barracks, they would take us away. And she had to go to work. No choice. She handed her children through the fence to one peasant woman.. . . My sister and I are here. That means the peasant lady kept us for whatever length of time and then she returned us to our mother.

Cited by Hillel Goldberg from the United States



It happened in Elul in 1942 in Zagrodski in the District of Pinsk. When I came to that place, we saw naked people lined up. But we were still hoping that this was only torture. Maybe there is hope, hope of living .... I also want to mention what my child said when we were lined up in the Ghetto. She said, "Mother, why did you make me wear the Shabbat dress; we are going to be shot"; and when we stood near the dug-outs, near the grave, she said, "Mother, why are we waiting, let us run!" Some of the young people tried to run, but they were caught immediately, and they were shot right there. It was difficult to hold on to the children .... The children were taking leave of their parents, and parents of their elders .... We were undressed, the clothes were removed and taken away; our father did not want to undress; he remained in his underwear .... Then they tore off the clothing of the old man and he was shot. I saw it with my own eyes. And then they took my mother and shot her too. And then there was my grandmother, my father's mother, standing there; she was eighty years old and she had two children in her arms. And then there was my father's sister. She also had children in her arms and she was shot on the spot with the babies in her arms .... I was searching among the dead for my little girl and I cried out for her ... I was praying for death to come. I was praying for the open grave to swallow me alive . . . I dug with my fingernails, but the grave would not open. I did not have enough strength. I cried out to my mother, to my father. "Why did they not kill me? What was my sin? I have no one to go to.î

In the district Court of Jerusalem, Criminal Case No. 4/61, the Attorney General of the Government of Israel v. Adolf Eichmann, Minutes of Session No. 30



I returned to Auschwitz in 1965, on the occasion of a commemorative celebration of the liberation of the camps ... The concentration camp empire of Auschwitz did not consist of just one camp, but rather of some forty camps. The real Auschwitz was constructed on the outskirts of the town of the same name. It had a capacity of about 30,000 prisoners, and was, so to speak, the administrative capital of the complex. Then there was the camp (or, to be more precise, the group of camps ... ) of Birkenau, which grew to contain tens of thousands of prisoners, and in which the gas chambers and the cremation furnaces functioned ....

I experienced a feeling of violent anguish when I entered Birkenau Camp, which I had never seen as a prisoner. Here nothing has changed. There was mud, and there is still mud, or suffocating summer dust. The blocks of huts ... have remained as they were, low, dirty, with drafty wooden sides and beaten earth floors. There are no bunks but bare planks, all the way to the ceiling .... With me was a woman friend of mine, a survivor of Birkenau. She pointed out to me that on every plank, 1.80 by 2 meters, up to nine women slept. She showed me that from the tiny window you could see the ruins of the cremation furnace. In her day, one saw the flame issuing from the chimney. She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?" And they had replied: "It is we who are burning."

Primo Levi, Italy, Shema, trans. by Ruth Feldman




Auschwitz, 1944. Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies! . Around us, everyone a weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves .... Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp .... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky.

Eli Wiesel, Rumania, France and the United States, Night; 0 the night of the weeping children




November, 1944. Jewish children were brought to Auschwitz. A truck stopped in front of the Political Section. A little boy jumped off. He held an apple in his hand. Two of the SS men were standing in the doorway. Suddenly one of them went over to the boy, grabbed his legs and smashed his head against the wall. Then he calmly picked up the apple. And the other told me to wipe "that" off the wall. About an hour later I was called by the first to interpret in an interrogation and I saw him eating the child's apple.

Bernd Neumann, Auschwitz, trans. by Jean Steinberg




Between 450 and 500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring 125 square feet in Treblinka. Parents carried their children in the vain hope of saving them from death. On the way to their doom they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and gas pipes. Dogs were set on them, barking, biting and tearing them. To escape the blows and the dogs, the crowd rushed to its death, pushing into the chamber. The bedlam lasted only a short-while, for the doors were shut tightly with a bang. The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow tubes and, within five minutes at the most, everybody stood dead. There being no free space, they just leaned against each other .... Between ten and twelve thousand people were gassed daily.

Yankel Wiemik, A Year in Treblinka

I am not a young man and I have seen a lot in my lifetime, but Lucifer himself could not possibly have devised a worse hell. Can you imagine three thousand corpses of people recently alive, burning all at once in an immense fire? Looking at the faces of the dead, one can ordinarily think that they might arise momentarily and awaken from their deep slumber. But here at a given signal, a giant torch was set on fire, and it burned with a huge flame.

Yankel Wiemik, A Year in Treblinka




One day when we came from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains-and one of them a young boy, a sad-eyed angel ...

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent .... At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs were tipped over...

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive .... For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.

Behind me I heard a man asking, "Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is- He is hanging on this gallow."

Elie Wiesel, Rumania, France and the United States, Night; 0 the night of the weeping children




Maidanek. Black Wednesday. November 3, 1943. For three days 300 prisoners working in two shifts had been made to dig three ditches two yards deep and about 1000 yards long. Approximately 100 SS men were then lined up in two rows to form a gauntlet, and groups of 100 Jews at a time were made to undress, run the gauntlet to the L-shaped barracks, and from there to the ditches, men and women separately. SS men drove them into the ditches with rifle butts, forcing them to lie flat. Other SS men standing above them raked them with automatic-rifle fire. The next groups were forced to lie down on top of the corpses of the previous ones. The killing went on for two days, from 6 A.M. to 5 P.M., with SS men relieved at two-hour intervals. During this process, two trucks were drawn up blaring gay ballads, marches, songs and dance tunes through a loudspeaker to drown out the victims' screaming. Eighteen thousand people were killed in two days.

Alexander Donat (1905-193) Poland and the United States, The Holocaust Kingdom




The Creed of a Holocaust Survivor
A poem by survivor Alexander Kimel.
It begins: "I do believe, with all my heart,
In the natural Goodness of Man.
Despite the blood and destruction,
Brought by one man, trying to be God,
In the Goodness of Man, I do believe..."

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