| . |
Once
the incineration of the first test charge was finished, the commission left. We
tidied up the crematorium, washed it, and were taken back to block 2 in Sector
Bib. During the next ten days, we went back, under SS guard, to fire the
furnaces. No convoys arrived during these ten days. We did not burn any
corpses, simply keeping the fires going in order to keep the furnaces hot.
About mid-March 1943, one evening after work, Haupscharfuhrer Hirsch, in charge
of the Krematorien at that time, came and ordered us to stay in the crematorium
because there was some work for us. At nightfall, trucks arrived carrying
people of both sexes and all ages. Among them there were old men, women, and
many children. The trucks ran back and forth for an hour, between the station
and the camp, bringing more and more people. As soon as the trucks began to
arrive, we, the Sonderkommando, were shut up in a room located at the back
where, as I said in my description of the crematorium, the doctors who carried
out the autopsies were to be housed. From this room, we could hear the people
emerging from the trucks weeping and shouting. They were herded towards a hut
erected perpendicular to the crematorium building, towards the entrance gate of
Krematorium II. The people entered through the door facing the gate and went
down by the stairway to the right of the waste incinerator wing. At that time,
this hut served as an undressing room. It was used for this purpose only for a
week or so, then it was dismantled. After this hut was removed, the people were
herded towards the basement area of the crematorium via a stairway leading to
the underground undressing room, already described. After we had waited for two
hours in the pathologists' room, we were let out and ordered to go to the gas
chamber. We found heaps of naked bodies, doubled up. They were pinkish, and in
places red. Some were covered with greenish marks and saliva ran from their
mouths. Others were bleeding from the nose. There was excrement on many of
them. I remember that a great number had their eyes open and were hanging on to
one another. The bodies were most crushed together round the door. By contrast,
there were less around the wire mesh columns. The location of the bodies
indicated that the people had tried to get away from the columns and get to the
door. It was very hot in the gas chamber and so suffocating as to be
unbearable. Later on, we became convinced that many people died of suffocation,
due to lack of air, just before gassing. They fell to the floor and were
trampled on by the others. They were not sitting, like the majority, but
stretched out on the floor, under the others. It was obvious that they had
succumbed first and that they had been trampled on. Once the people were in the
gas chamber, the door was closed and the air pumped out. The gas chamber
ventilation could work in this way, thanks to a system that could both extract
and blow. Only the undressing room had a blower-assisted air intake system.
Despite the fact that the ventilation remained on for some time after the
opening of the gas chamber, we wore gas masks to work there. Our job was to
remove the bodies, but we did not do this for the first convoy in mid-March
because we had to go back to work in the furnace room. To do the job, seventy
prisoners were brought from block II, also members of the Sonderkommando and
working at the incineration pits of the Bunkers. This group took the corpses
from the gas chamber into the corridor near the lift. There, a barber cut off
the women's hair, then the bodies were taken on the lift to the "boiler room"
level. On this floor they were put in the store room or taken directly to the
"boiler room", where they were heaped in front of the furnaces. Then, two
dentists, under the surveillance of the SS, pulled out metal fillings and false
teeth. They also removed the rings and earrings. The teeth were thrown into a
box marked "Zahnarztstation". As for the jewels, they were put into another box
with no label other than a number. The dentists, recruited from among the
prisoners, looked into all the mouths except those of the children. When the
jaws were too tightly clamped, they pulled them apart with the pincers used to
extract the teeth. The SS carefully checked the work of the dentists, always
being present. From time to time they would stop a load of corpses ready for
charging into the furnace and already operated on by the dentists, in order to
check the mouths. They occasionally found a forgotten gold tooth. Such
carelessness was considered to be sabotage, and the culprit was burned alive in
the furnace. I witnessed such a thing myself. A dentist, a French Jew, was
burned in this way in Krematorium V. He fought and cried, but there were
several SS and they threw themselves on him, overpowered him and put him in the
furnace alive. This punishment was often inflicted on members of the
Sonderkommando, but it was not the only one. There were many others, such as
immediate shooting, being thrown into water, physical torture, beating, being
rolled naked on gravel, and other punishments. Such things were done in the
presence of all the members of the Sonderkommando in order to intimidate them.
I remember another case that took place in August 1944 in Krematorium V. When
the shifts were changing over, they had found a gold watch and wedding ring on
one of the labourers, a man from Wolbrom called Lejb. This Jew, aged about
twenty, was dark and had a number of one hundred thousand and something. All
the Sonderkommando working in the crematorium (Kr V) were assembled, and before
their eyes he was hung, with his hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar
above the firing hearths. He remained in this position for about one hour, then
after untying his hands and feet, they threw him in a cold crematorium furnace.
Gasoline was poured into the lower ash bin and lit. The flames reached the
muffle where this Lejb was imprisoned. A few minutes later, they opened the
door and the condemned man emerged and ran off, covered in burns. He was
ordered to run round the yard shouting that he was a thief. Finally, he had to
climb the barbed wire, which was not electrified during the day, and when he
was at the top, the head of the crematoriums, Moll, first name Otto, killed him
with a shot. Another time, the SS chased a prisoner who was not working fast
enough into a pit near the crematorium that was full of boiling human fat. At
that time, the corpses were incinerated in open air pits, from which the fat
flowed into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground. This fat was poured over
the corpses to accelerate their combustion. This poor devil was pulled out of
the fat still alive and then shot. To satisfy the formalities, his body was
carried to the block where the death certificates were issued. The next day,
the corpse was brought back to the crematorium, where it was incinerated in a
pit.
7 |
