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"I would never believe that a person can survive standing in the outside in the wintertime without clothes for so long." | |||
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Doriane Kurz Born 1936 Vienna, Austria 
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There were wagons...open wagons like, like carts, like the back of a horse and cart, open wagons, that were dragged along without horses. There were people pulling them. And they had corpses in them. And the corpses were lying in all directions and heaped on top of each other and there were many people who died every night and they didn't make it out to Appell but they were accounted for by being bodies and so after the grownups were marched out the...there was a squadron of people that pulled this wagon around and came into the barracks and took the corpses, and then they would, two of them would take the corpse, one at the feet and one at the hands and they would toss them up to the top of the heap and that happened every day. I still have trouble with that. | ||
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Ernest Koenig Born 1917 Vienna, Austria 
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I once came in front of a mirror, and I saw what was called a Muselmann. You know what a Muselmann was...somebody who was so emaciated he was about to die. That was the last stage and then people died, and I was struck by what I saw, myself, and outside this place where I saw myself there was a garbage can, and I looked into the garbage can and there was a book and the book contained the text of, of, uh, songs by Schubert and you might know there is one song by Schubert, an Austrian composer, the "Death and the Maiden," and the Death says to the maiden, "Don't be afraid. You are not going to suffer. You will sleep in my arms." And that, uh, encouraged me very much because I said to myself, "Okay, if I have to die, it will be sleeping. I don't have to be afraid," and I wasn't afraid, and that was a very deep experience. Shortly thereafter I was so weak that I asked for sick leave. Now you could ask for sick leave...sick leave...I mean, you could ask not to go to work for one day but it was very dangerous because then you came to the sick bay and then you went...that we knew at this time, I must have known. I was so weak I stayed in bed and I didn't want to go up. I, I...I was quite indifferent what, to what happened, I couldn't anymore. And this Stanislaw Kubackzek, this Polish officer who had become a Kapo, uh, helped me. In the first place, the Kapo has...had to...had to watch whether his people got one ration, got their food, and he had to watch others that they don't, don't come twice and take food twice, so he allowed me to go twice. I was the first and came the last one. Then he took me in to his Kommando, in his team, and I didn't have to work, so I recovered. | ||
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Eddie Hellmuth Willner Born 1926 Muenchen-Gladbach, Germany 
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In Langenstein, the work was the killing method of people. By that I mean, working in tunnels without the proper protection. You had to dig, get the rocks out, haul them on lorries out or carry them out. And then the blasting. They...they never had the prisoners far enough away that somebody wouldn't get killed by the dynamite blasting of it, and then they carried the rocks out. So the German guards, the SS guards, always stood far enough away so they wouldn't get hit, but they didn't let the prisoners get out far enough to be safe from the blasting, so many people were killed. And those people had to be carried back at night and put into the mass graves--you know, and thrown in. And I also must mention one horrible thing. At the camp of Langenstein, they buried many people who were alive. People who were, who were too weak, who couldn't get off their knees anymore, to get up, to stand up to go to work, and they were put in a pile with the dead people and buried. And one time somebody refused to bury after they were all thrown in...the...uh...a few live people were still moving--he had recognized somebody that he knew and refused to throw earth on him, and the man was shot at the mass grave. | ||
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Leo Schneiderman Born 1921 Lodz, Poland 
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When we came to...to Ebensee, the hunger and the labor and the way especially for us Jews, the way we were treated, we were sure that not one will survive that camp, that this was it. The charge...the man in charge of our block was a professional killer. He enjoyed so much killing people. The...the people who went to the hospitals when they were sick there, hardly one came out alive. The people who were not working, who were in that hospital, Jews received half of the rations that the normal worker received. Non-Jews began the regular rations if they were not too long in that hospital. Uh...we went, I remember, to the shower, in that camp. It was the end of February, the beginning of March. It was still cold. When we came out from the shower, we stood outside I don't know how long. Without clothes, without wiping ourselves off. I would never believe that a person can survive standing in the outside in the wintertime without clothes for so long. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
