January 27, 1945. “Get rid of that, it’ll be lighter”, I urged her. Schieber! I believe that not even the commanders of our army had any idea of the dimensions of the crime committed in this largest of camps. Excerpt from Elizer Eisenschmidt’s account of his escape and the way the Tender family of Radostowice near Pszczyna helped him: "I walked towards the artillery fire, but that was not a good decision. In Block No. I was active in the Home Army at the time and worked with other people to prepare parcels for Polish soldiers held captive in the depths of Germany. But the well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Auschwitz in 1944. Request deathcamp.02, Gricksch.rpt, and jahrling.may43), but, as Feig tells us, the SS eventually had to employ large pyres and pits to dispose of the mounting pile of corpses: As early as June 13, 1943, all was not well with the new installation. If I get rid of it, I’ll starve to death”. I’ll drink this and be on my way”. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018. The accounts presented in 'Voices of Memory' are the testimony of particular people known to us by name, which is all the more reason to remember that the tragedy of Auschwitz is, at one and the same time, the tragedy of the more than one million victims, and also the tragedy of each individual person. The results of the work by the PRC doctors and nurses are indicated by the proofs of gratitude shown to them by those... who left the hospital. She used up a good deal of energy in her lamentation. It was a long ride in difficult conditions. For a month, my place of work was Block No. Testimony of Edith Birkin. I replied dryly, “What does it matter to you who I am? Liberation from genocide takes many forms. Crematorium II [III] was still operating at this time, burning corpses supplied from the camp. Every few steps, she stumbled. Life stopped mattering to me. In the end, I forbade her to talk or moan. The sight of the rooms full of patients made a shocking impression on me... when I went in there for the first time. The … The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. Her parents had been killed, and she didn’t have anyone or anywhere to return to. These were open holes. The pits had indentations at one end from which human fat drained off. Remember.org helps teachers and students find the best resources on the Internet, and connect them through a collaborative learning structure developed since 1994. Among other things, he told me: “Who do they send here to work? Himmler soon became dissatisfied. It was written in Dutch and published in 1946 as “Eindstation Auschwitz. We went to work in the hospital without delay. Account by former prisoner Dr. Irena Konieczna, a doctor in the camp hospital, on the last days of Auschwitz and liberation: The final evacuation on foot of women from Birkenau began on January 18, 1945. Founded April 25, 1995 as a "Cybrary of the Holocaust". Above all, the patients had to become accustomed to food. I had to remove the corpses from the bunks myself and carry them to the corridor. The husband asked, “Where do you want to go?” I replied that I didn’t know. 53, pp. Time has no sway over these recollections. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. It has not squeezed all the horrible things I saw and filmed out of my mind...". We have dug up a lot of graves, but there are still two open graves on the grounds of the second and third crematoria. The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. Nevertheless, they signed me up immediately as a nurse. I walked around in circles all night, unable to get out of the woods. … Eventually the ovens seemed to fall apart. From the testimony of Filip Muller, an Auschwitz survivor, Connilyn Feig reports the following account in “Hitler’s Death Camps”: Filip Muller, a young Slovakian, arrived early in Auschwitz _ April 1942 _ and survived! Then her husband appeared and wanted to know who I was. After liberation in 1945, my comrades in the organization suggested that I go to work on the grounds of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, in the hospital for former prisoners. Camp authorities needed an economic and fast method of corpse disposal, so they again dug six huge pits beside Crematorium Five and reopened old pits in the wood. Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened. Now I was dragging her along. Remember.org shares art, discussion, photos, poems, and facts to preserve powerful memories. Liberation of Buchenwald by Harry J. Herder, Jr. They managed to survive because they were wanted for medical research, instead of mice and rabbits. They said that the whole camp was mined and that they were going to blow it up after they left. Despite open tubercular lesions, one of the Yugoslavians performed all sorts of duties with exceptional zeal. The truck stopped frequently, since there were bottlenecks of Soviet military transports on the road, and, coming in the opposite direction, crowds of people returning from the camps in the West. You could say that there were pyramids on the grounds of the camp. A moment later, there was a shot. Thus, late in 1944, pit burning became the chief method of corpse disposal. Iron stoves helped heat the rooms. (Müller, 60-61; Klarsfield, 99-100). Then they took me to the hospital for treatment... ". Podcast: Surviving Auschwitz. I remember that there were personal confrontations between some of the women during the days of the “interregnum”. He did so, however, because of his forced work assignment as a stoker in the Auschwitz crematorium and then as a jack-of- all-trades in the Birkenau extermination plant squad, the Sonderkommando. ... 1995, because today is my 50th anniversary of my liberation from Auschwitz. On one occasion, I received orders to give a sick former prisoner an intramuscular injection of camphochina. “No. “Well then, stay with us”. Liberation is often imagined as a time of celebration. We began disassembling the furnaces. There were no longer any shortages of medicine. 95AD, remember.org. Thus it was decreed that the most economical and fuel-saving procedure would be to burn the bodies of a well-nourished man and an emaciated woman, or vice versa, together with that of a child, because, as the experiments had established, in this combination, once they had caught fire, the dead would continue to burn without any further coke being required. In this situation, I went to the head physician, Dr. Józef Bellert, and informed him that I was unable to carry out the order for obvious reasons. No one carried corpses out of the block and no one cleaned up the filth. I threw her bundle to the ground. We reached the place late in the evening. It is extremely important for Liberators and any other witnesses to the atrocities of the Holocaust to document their testimonies. The memory has stayed with me my whole life long. I know that a fair number of prisoners left the camp during the “interregnum” period and set off for home on foot. For this work, they sent additional prisoners from the camp, from other Kommandos [labor details]. We only managed to take the chimneys and roof apart. On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive. When he saw what bad shape she was in, he apologized to me. Dunn, M. D. The toilets, however, continued to be closed, probably because they were damaged. However, survivors in this section, paint a rather different picture. When she fell for the final time, and I no longer had the strength to lift her up, I called for help, and somebody’s hand took hold of me and pulled me forward. There were many difficulties associated with caring for the ex-prisoners. 24, the prisoners had better conditions. When the Soviet Red Army rolled into the camp, only about 7,000 prisoners remained. Ex-prisoner physicians also worked with us. Several graves are still full of ash... A vast amount of ash from hundreds of thousands of Jews, Russians, and Poles is scattered and plowed into the grounds of the crematoria...”. Among the 2,819 liberated Auschwitz inmates, there were 180 children. Ex-prisoners were a great help to us in maintaining cleanliness. Many women asked me: should they go with the transport or stay there? Some were made up of accumulated clothing, others of pots, and others still of human jaws. All Rights Reserved. She wept out loud. Remember.org - The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivors' History. The staff built a new modern chimney in the summer of 1942. “Do you know anyone in these parts?” “No”, I answered. We prepared the building for demolition by making holes in its walls...”. Statement by Alexander Vorontsov of Moscow, camera operator in the Soviet military film crew that recorded the liberation of Auschwitz: "A ghastly sight arose before our eyes: a vast number of barracks (in Birkenau)... People lay in bunks inside many of them. Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gathered Monday for commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, using the testimony of survivors to … In August the total cremation reached a peak one day of 24,000, but still a bottleneck occurred. I immediately went on duty in a room with eighty women in it. 52 of them were under eight years of age. The bridges were out, and this made it necessary to take a roundabout route. She was breathing heavily and whimpering like a baby. Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gathered for commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the Soviet army's liberation of the … From there he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was forced into slave labour and subjected to medical experimentation. However, these were brief conversations, because these people who remained alive were totally devoid of strength, and it was hard for them to say much about their time in the camp. We tried to keep up the spirits of all our fellow prisoners, so that they would not give up but rather hold out until the moment when they returned to their families. It took an hour a day to clean them out. The published manuscripts and documents relate to the specific process of extermination at Birkenau, and provide detailed descriptions of the crematoria and gas chambers.). More than 15,000 died during the death marches from Auschwitz. They don’t even know how to give injections…! In the final minutes before the column started out, they were looking for me in the blocks. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of willful radical evil in our time. How could they survive this hell? Charlotte Delbo (10 August 1913 - 1 March 1985): French writer, former prisoner of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. After the departure of the last evacuation transport, there were about 2,000 patients left in the women’s camp hospital, and a mere handful of moreor- less healthy prisoners to care for them. Edith Birkin was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1927. Of course we spoke with them. She had a huge pack on her back. When we talked with these people and explained to them who we were and why we had come here, they trusted us a bit more. Supposedly, they were being shipped to Gross-Rosen [concentration camp]... We did this and similar jobs until January 18, 1945. In each block, there were one or two (seldom three) PRC nurses, and several Soviet nurses. She was a Jewish girl from the vicinity of Radom. In the morning, along with other people brought to work in Ooewięcim on February 24, I was introduced to the head physician of the PRC hospital in Ooewięcim, Dr. Józef Bellert. Some time later, a horse-drawn military column drove up in front of the blocks. Source: Scenario of the documentary film Die Befreiung von Auschwitz, by Irmgard von zur Mühlen (Chronos-Film GmbH, West Germany), commissioned in 1986 by the HolocaustMemorial Council of the USA. During World War II, for prisoners and Allied troops alike, liberation from the death camps of the Holocaust was a shock to the senses – at once a … It is estimated that at minimum 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945; of these, at least 1.1 million were murdered. In 1945, soon after the liberation of Auschwitz, Soviet authorities in control of the Kattowitz (Katowice) camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions they witnessed in Auschwitz. Total anarchy reigned in the camp. All my strength was gone. I said: “Give me something to drink!” The woman asked, “What do you want to drink? I did not personally possess adequate preparation for that work, since all I had done before the war was to serve as a hygienist at a Scouts’ unit run by Olga Małkowska in Sromowce Wyżne (Dworek Cisowy). I’ve got bread in there. I would refer to the period before the arrival of the first lines of the Soviet troops as an “interregnum”. I declared that she would come back with me to my home, and that I wouldn’t leave her. Soviet troops liberated the death camp of Majdanek in July 1944 and the Auschwitz camp in January 1945. With extraordinary gratitude, they thanked us for our care, and often invited us to their countries and families, leaving their addresses and photographs. Now, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we are no closer to comprehending the magnitude of this catastrophe. And so we found ourselves at the tail end of the column. The process moved too slowly; the stench contaminated the surrounding countryside at night; and the red sky over Auschwitz could be seen for miles.[11]. They were skeletons clad in skin, with vacant gazes. All of this was the most moving and most terrible thing that I saw and filmed during the war. They ordered the prisoners to prepare immediately. All night, from various corners of the room, I heard calls: “Schwester! I also received instructions as to my most important duties. You haven’t got the strength to carry anything”. The result was an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. In a later period, this mortality diminished considerably, until in the end there were hardly any deaths at all. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from remember.org Remember.org shares art, discussion, photos, poems, and facts to preserve powerful memories, Remember.org - The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivors' History. Then someone ahead of me fell over. I also heard that groups of SS men entered the camp sporadically and shot many Jewish women. I took these instructions very much to heart. Children wearing concentration camp uniforms shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945. Between 1941 and 1945, an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered there, mostly European Jews but also prisoners of war, gay people, and Roma. APMAB, Scenario Fond, vol. The multi-tiered bunks were removed and the prisoners placed in regular single beds with clean sheets. In this effort, they had the assistance of the firm of Topf and Sons, who had built the crematoria. Forced to dig mass graves and exhume corpses. I learned, walking along beside her and supporting her, that she didn’t have anyone at all in the world. That was the first time I had seen him. They were in two-person rooms on the second floor... During the last two–three months before I left Ooewięcim, the conditions for the ex-prisoner patients improved radically. He did so, however, because of his forced work assignment as a stoker in the Auschwitz crematorium and then as a jack-of- all-trades in the Birkenau extermination plant squad, the … Out of fear of being rearrested, I feigned indifference and said, “Do you really want to know? More and more ex-prisoners left the hospital each day. Several Soviet soldiers-scouts with their rifles ready to fire-entered the grounds of the women’s camp hospital on January 27, 1945. So I spent all my time giving them the bedpan. And so I stayed for around five weeks with that Polish Christian, until the time when the Red Army liberated the area. Dov Paisikovic, former prisoner of Sonderkommando, stated in 1964: “The SS ordered the dismantling of the crematoria in November 1944. I even talked one of my fellow prisoners, who was in danger, into leaving the camp immediately. I could see that he was moved. The prisoners rushed joyously towards them. It was my poor little ward, whom I had promised not to abandon. In the difficult nutritional conditions, the only food available for the patients was grated potato soup, which was administered to them almost like medicine, one tablespoon per person, three times a day. Pokaż menu niższego poziomu dla Liberation of KL Auschwitz. 23–26, 29, 40. They placed dynamite charges in these holes. The metal furnace parts were taken after dismantling to the railroad platform and loaded onto cars. I picked her up. On several occasions, special missions from abroad took ex-prisoners with them.". CTRL + SPACE for auto-complete. Their words are our heritage. When the Soviet soldiers realized what our situation was like, they supplied us with food of the highest quality (excellent army bread baked in pans, melba toast, and natural fats). Eva Votavová: Jewish July 1942: Otto Pressburger: Jewish From Trnava. She was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland in … I remember how the SS men from the infirmary were urging me at the last moment to go with them in the transport. Any interference in the integrity of the images – including cropping or graphic processing – is prohibited. There was no one to help me. After the disassembly of the furnaces, the demolition of the chimneys of both crematoria began. If I had to die, however, I wanted to do it as a free man. He moved to London in 1947. In the block where I worked, the active ex-prisoners included Aldo Ragazzi from Italy and two Yugoslavians whose names I did not know. At first, we carried out demolition work in Crematorium I [II], and went back to Crematorium II [III] for the night. Edited by Michael Declan Dunn, 25 Apr. I went up to a house where a woman was standing in the doorway. THEY EXPECTED THE WORST - NOT THE UNTHINKABLE. I’ve got bread. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes. They sent us to lodgings in one of the buildings on the grounds of the former Main Camp. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gathered Monday for commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, using the testimony of survivors to … In 1941 she entered the Lodz ghetto, Poland. I reported on February 24 to the appointed place, where a dozen or so people were waiting to travel to Ooewięcim. No one obeyed anyone, or showed any respect to the previous prisoner functionaries. It was such a solid structure that it was impossible to tear it down with our bare hands alone. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, listen to the testimonies of 70 Holocaust survivors, drawn from the Visual History Archive at USC Shoah Foundation, as they recall their personal experiences in the Nazi extermination camp. She was a tiny girl, totally exhausted and as completely alone as I was. But the German murderers with medical degrees were only keen on a particular kind of children. Nobody helped me. Statement by Alexander Vorontsov of Moscow, camera operator in the Soviet military film crew that recorded the liberation of Auschwitz: "A ghastly sight arose before our eyes: a vast number of barracks (in Birkenau)... People lay in bunks inside many of them. They sent all of us to the camp, and then they blew it all sky high...”. The PRC doctors and nurses lived on the second floor of this building. The father had offered his children to Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer known as the Angel of Death for his inhumane genetic … Dr. Bellert lost his temper and chastised me, telling me that I did not know how to work. But it soon evidenced crumbling; and the extermination process, never very effective, began to disintegrate. Mijn verhaal vanuit het kamp (1943–1945)” An English translation was published in 2020. During my time in Ooewięcim, I worked in Blocks 12, 13, 22, and 24 in turn. Among the Soviet personnel, I remember Major Doctor Polakov and Dr. Zhilinska... Major Dr. Polakov came to the buildings from time to time. Their use must not tarnish the good reputation of the victims of KL Auschwitz. Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. In the final phase of my stay in Ooewięcim, that is, in May–July 1945, the office of the PRC hospital was located in the building of the former Auschwitz Concentration Camp administration building outside the camp fence, near the river Soła. I had lost so much strength, I was all sweaty from the effort, but I was past the point where I could have left her. Henryk Mandelbaum, former prisoner of Sonderommando, testified in March 1947: “...They set about dismantling the crematoria. Of course we spoke with them. Coffee?” She invited me inside. The prisoners required treatment and food, but there was a lack of willing hands to look after them. Together with several fellow prisoners, including Dr. Sara Marinette, I “bent over backwards” to help the greatest possible number of bedridden patients, in terms of both medical care and food. They had been trained for combat, and most of them had barely even heard of these camps. She had stopped suffering... the echo of that shot still rings in my memory... ". In 1945, soon after the liberation of Auschwitz, Soviet authorities in control of the Kattowitz (Katowice) camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions they witnessed in Auschwitz. The Italian whom I mentioned above, Aldo Ragazzi, gave me a personal invitation, as did his two Yugoslavian colleagues. I told them that I was staying, because, if I was going to die, I wanted to die on Polish soil, but that they had to make up their own minds. At the most fifty-four bodies could be cremated in one hour. We traveled to Ooewięcim in a truck, probably a Soviet army truck. 13. I slept in the second tier of a camp bunk. I avoided evacuation by lying down alongside a sick prisoner on the top tier of one of the camp bunks. The camp was liberated by American troops in May 1945 and Premysl worked with the Americans as an interpreter. There were no more SS guard posts to be seen, only individual SS men who came into the grounds of the camp. Sister! Of the hundreds of testimonies he heard from survivors of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, retired German prosecutor Gerhard Wiese says the one that touched him most was of a Jewish father who had tried but failed to save his twins from the gas chamber. The severe physical exhaustion of the former prisoners limited the possibilities for giving them injections. The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is a time when one shall listen carefully to the voices of the witnesses - both victims and survivors. The rooms were illuminated with electric lighting. That is why our interviews, such as they were, had to be very brief. Bedpan!” The patients were suffering from Durchfall, or starvation diarrhea. The use of the images for commercial purposes requires the Museum’s approval and information about the publication. I fell asleep the next night, because I was completely exhausted. Among those soldiers were artists who began to capture the unimaginable scenes they encountered, using their talents to create representations of the Final Solution and to process the shocking reality of the Nazi camps. The Soviet field hospitals were changed. © Copyright 1995-2020 Remember.org. I was very tired, and did not realize that I was not going to save that girl, and that I myself could die with her. They traveled by truck. Liberating Auschwitz was not in their orders, but when a group of scouts stumbled into Birkenau on January 27, 1945, they knew they had found something terrible. Publishers undertake to indicate the authors and origin of the images: www.auschwitz.org, as well as to inform the Museum of the use of the images (press@auschwitz.org). I helped her up. I walked and walked until I came to a village – I did not even notice that I was going back towards Pszczyna. I’ll walk with you and I’ll share it with you. I found a good hiding place in some dried rushes near a pond. (Ed.). For this reason, everyone continued to make use of the primitive latrines located between the blocks. A thick, unpleasant odor prevailed in the rooms. 1. On January 21 Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna sparked controversy with the claim Auschwitz was liberated by Ukrainians — a statement that … As orderlies, they washed the floors, brought water, lighted the stoves, and carried out the corpses. When their Red Army liberators threw open the gates of Auschwitz 65 years ago this week, the survivors thought their nightmare had ended. I begged her to gather up her strength, to hold out until dawn, because the sun would come up in the morning and that would make things easier.