Polish Research Institute at Lund University, Sweden

Transcription

1 Witness family & given names: Mrs. XXXXXXXXXX Places of internment Born on 18 th August, 1916 Time period from / to Birth place: Łódź, Poland 1940 / Occupation: Nurse Citizenship: Polish Aug 18, 1944 Religion: Jewish Aug 20, 1944 / Parents names (F/M) Szulim / Chana Sep 1, 1944 Last residence in Łódź Sep 1944 / Poland: Present residence: Leaving for Łódź, Poland mid-april, 1945 mid-april, 1945 / Apr 24, 1945 Placed in: ŁÓDŹ AUSCHWITZ Prisoner data (triangle, number, letter) NEUKÖLLN Number N.349 RAVENSBRÜCK Notes Ghetto The testimony consists of six pages of handwritten text and covers the following main items: 1.Łódź Ghetto Compulsory work in resorts, food, epidemics, hospital mortality, shortage of medications, illegal obtaining of medications; Kripo activities: interrogations, deportation from Pabianice. Szpera selections in hospitals and in the city, gallows in the city to spread terror, order to give away children, one-time greater food allocation following the action, hunger, closing hospitals and opening of a new hospital, tuberculosis, emptying the hospitals, transports, liquidation of the Ghetto. 2.AUSCHWITZ Selection, bath, haircut, change clothing. Lodging, roll calls, food, selection, transport. 3.NEUKÖLLN Quarantine, work, bombardments. Lodging and sanitary conditions, evacuation. 4.RAVENSBRÜCK Lodging and sanitary conditions. Page 1 of 6

2 Institute member at the protocol: Luba MELCHIOR (Translation from Polish by Kris Murawski 1 ) RECORD OF WITNESS TESTIMONY No. 308 Name: Mrs. XXXXXXXXXX Born: 18 th August, 1916 In: Łódź, Poland Occupation: Nurse Religion: Jewish Parents 1 st names: Szulim, Chana Last residence in Poland: Łódź Current residence: Leaving for Łódź, Poland Instructed about the importance of truthful testimony as well as on responsibility and consequences of false testimony, the witness testifies as to the following: I was in: Łódź Ghetto from: 1940 to: Aug 18, 1944 then I was in: AUSCHWITZ from: Aug 20, 1944 to: Sep 1, 1944 then I was in: NEUKÖLLN with Number N.349 from: September 1944 to: mid-april, 1945 than I was in: RAVENSBRÜCK from: mid-april, 1945 to: Apr 24, 1945 Asked if in connection with my incarceration, my work in concentration camp, I have any specific information about camp organization, the camp regimen, prisoners work conditions, treatment of prisoners, medical and pastoral care, sanitary/hygienic conditions, and also any specific events in all aspects of the camp life, I testify as follows: The testimony consists of six pages of handwritten text and covers the following main items: 1.Łódź Ghetto Compulsory work in resorts, food, epidemics, hospital mortality, shortage of medications, illegal obtaining of medications; Kripo activities: interrogations, deportation from Pabianice. Szpera selections in hospitals and in the city, gallows in the city to spread terror, order to give away children, one-time greater food allocation following the action, hunger, closing hospitals and opening of a new hospital, tuberculosis, emptying the hospitals, transports, liquidation of the Ghetto. 1 Translator s notes (if any) are in italics, enclosed in square brackets. Page 2 of 6

3 2.AUSCHWITZ Selection, bath, haircut, change clothing. Lodging, roll calls, food, selection, transport. 3.NEUKÖLLN Quarantine, work, bombardments. Lodging and sanitary conditions, evacuation. 4.RAVENSBRÜCK Lodging and sanitary conditions. The outbreak of war found me in Łódź. The Germans entered early September and made our life miserable. Men were fleeing from Germans to the East. My husband was one of them but after three months he came back from the eastern territories occupied by Russia. He returned with nothing to live on. I worked in a hospital. Early 1940 the Łódź Ghetto was sealed off. First resorts were established. They were workshops making goods for the military. My husband was an instructor in a resort. Work in a resort was compulsory. Those who did not work, were deprived of food rations. Work in resorts was hard, work quota were impossible to meet for hungry people. Food allocation consisted of 200 g bread and 100 g flour for two weeks, ½ kg potatoes for two weeks and a little bit of vegetables and 100 g oil. One-half liter of soup was served daily in the resort; the soup was watery and not filling. Lodging conditions were wretched, too. Due to substandard conditions the epidemics spread with alarming speed typhus and dysentery decimated the population. In a hospital with 300 patients, people died every day. Literally, one walked on cadavers. It was impossible to keep up with burials. The hospital lacked medications. Only headache pills, distilled water and hydrogen peroxide were available. We obtained medications illegally. Kripo staff supplied medications for jewelry and valuables. Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) was a German institution in the Ghetto which was retrieving remaining Jewish assets. Jews were called in for interrogation and with beating and tortures forced to disclose locations of their liquid assets. My uncle was beaten at the interrogation so much that he went mad and died shortly after that. My husband was called, too. Knowing what happened to the uncle, he confessed to everything and renounced the remnants of what we still had. Ghetto was a self-contained closed city. We knew nothing of what was going on outside. In October 1942 there was a deportation from Pabianice: middle-aged men and women and children below the age of ten were relocated to Łódź. From them we found out how the deportation was carried out. People were split in two groups: elderly, weak, sick and children went to one group, while the strongest people to the other. My sister in-law had a small child and did not want to part with it. They kept beating her but finally they assigned her with the child to the weak group which included children. One month after the influx of people from the neighborhood, a szpera [from German Gehsperre, a curfew] was announced. Germans showed up at night at the hospital. I was on a night duty at that time. They ordered us to dress the patients and serve them breakfast. Half an hour later they threw patients onto trucks. They did not care, they tossed them like rags. The entire hospital was Page 3 of 6

4 emptied. Some patients, but only a few of them, were able to hide. The szpera lasted eight days. Strictly speaking, it was a selection. The Ghetto was divided into quarters. Every day a different section was blocked off. People were forbidden to leave their apartments. A street was first cordoned off by armed Germans. Everybody was then ordered to get out and the place was searched for those who might try to hide. Those standing were subject to selection. First of all old people, children and those who looked weak were selected but also whoever they wanted. Those selected departed in trucks. Most likely they were executed, because until now there is no sign of their life. I was able to hide my mother and nieces, but not for long. My mother could not escape death, she died next year of hunger. During the szpera I saw 18 men hanged in the market square. Germans did it to spread terror and to cause people to give up. There was an announcement during the szpera for mothers to give away their children. It had a most shocking effect. Nobody knew how to hide children. Mothers were like unconscious. Only a few of the children were placed in hiding, other were taken away. Germans paid no attention to desperate mothers. After szpera there was a one-time higher food allocation the price for children. Residents got, over the usual quota, ¼ kg cottage cheese and 1 kg kohlrabi. In spite of a diminished number of residents, food allocations remained at the lowest level, hunger was everpresent, mortality rose higher and higher. Dead bodies were kept at home for few days to get an extra food ration. After the szpera, hospitals have been closed. However, the typhus epidemic continued and it was necessary to open a new hospital. This new hospital has been established in a very primitive building with no necessary facilities, because buildings housing the old hospitals have been converted into resorts. Shortly this new hospital was also filled to capacity and got emptied again. Tuberculosis epidemic spread in the camp and German inspections repeated every month. Now they were taking away not only the gravely ill patients, but young people and less serious cases as well. At the same time transports for work in Germany began. A need for young, healthy people for work in Germany was posted. Many people responded because of a promise of provisions for travel: 2 kg bread, ¼ kg sugar, ¼ kg sausage and a package of margarine. It cannot be any worse, people thought. People who had lost their families earlier were selected for transports from the resorts. Lists of such people were composed. My sister s name appeared on a list. She had three children. She despaired, begged to be removed from the list, but to no avail. She had a 16-year old son. He went to the commissar and asked to be placed on the list instead of his mother. After prolonged pleading they agreed, sent him away and let his mother stay. Up to now there is no sign of life from that child. August 18, 1944 was the day Ghetto liquidation began. It lasted up to four weeks. The life in the Ghetto was already chaotic and people reported voluntarily for transports. The transports went to AUSCHWITZ. A selection was carried out there. And again the weaker and unwell looking people were selected. An orchestra was playing at our arrival in AUSCHWITZ. A cadaver lied by electrified wires, supposedly as an escape deterrent. Page 4 of 6

5 In AUSCHWITZ after selection they took us to bath. They cut our hair there, gave us skirts and pajama jackets, no underwear. Skirts were rough and they scratched skin. I got a skirt so short that I was ashamed to wear it. My sister got a skirt reaching down to her ankles. We looked crazies. We were taken to a stable converted to a barrack. The barrack was long with a brick floor in the center. There was only a barnfloor on both sides, with bunk beds. Only privileged inmates had room on bunks, all the others slept on the floor. Roll calls were twice daily, but in addition there were frequent special roll calls for unknown reasons. We were treated very badly not only by the Germans but by camp functionaries, too. Distribution of food was disorganized. First of all, rations for more than one prisoner were poured into one bowl. There were no spoons. How could one eat without a spoon? We made paddle-like spoons from pieces of wood. There were only few spoon-paddles per block. A dozen or more people used one such paddle to eat. We stayed in AUSCHWITZ for ten days. I was sick and semi-conscious all that time. I slept most of the time. After ten days we were dispatched in a transport. And there was another selection. Those designated for transport were taken to bath, given underwear, dresses and shoes. We were allowed to pick the shoes, looks like only to create a pretext to beat us up. We traveled in railroad cars which were used previously to transport coals. We were so crowded, that there was no room to sit down. For the road we got 300 g bread, 5 g margarine and 50 g sausage. We traveled 24 hours. We arrived in Berlin from where we were taken to NEUKÖLLN [an inner-city locality of Berlin]. We found the camp empty. The camp was fenced off with electrified wire. There were three barracks. Our transport consisted of 500 people. They kept us in quarantine for three weeks. After three weeks we went to work in the KRUPP munitions factory. The factory was downtown NEUKÖLLN, three minutes away from our camp. It was a big, 4-stories high building. We worked twelve hours a day. Some of the groups had night shifts and day shifts. We were watched by an SS-woman at work. We were not allowed to move around the factory. To go to the restroom, one needed a permission from the SS-woman; most of the time she would not give that permission. We were not beaten at work. The bombardments were a real plague: our camps have been burnt out three times. We mostly sat in shelters rather than being at work. The factory was not bombed out, it was only damaged on a couple of occasions. Lodging and sanitary conditions in the camp were not bad. The barracks were clean, at the beginning each of us had bed and blankets. This has changed after the bombardments. Food was meagre. Generally we were treated in a reasonable way and most importantly, they did not beat us. Health conditions in the camp were good. We did not get sick no wonder, because we were the healthiest at selection. There were accidents at work however instances of lost fingers when operating a machinery. I was nine months in that camp. Only one person died during that time. There were four tuberculosis cases and one woman got pregnant. All of them were sent in an unknown direction. Page 5 of 6

6 Early April 1945 we were evacuated to RAVENSBRÜCK. We walked on foot while there were bombardments. Half-way they put us in cattle cars. We traveled under terrible conditions. There were frequent bombardments and the situation in the railroad cars was horrible. We relieved ourselves inside the car, we were not allowed out. We panicked a lot, the gossip was that we are to be liquidated. The journey lasted two days. We reached RAVENSBRÜCK in mid-april. There was chaos in the camp. No food, filth everywhere. Beds were infested with lice, impossible to sleep in. We preferred to sleep on bare floor. My sister caught cold there and got bad lungs. Only in Sweden, after four months, she regained health. Now I am going to Poland with my sister to see our brother. There are only three of us left from our large family. Comments of the interviewer: The witness is trustworthy without reservations. (Signed) Luba Melchior Institute member Read, signed, accepted (Signed) XXXXXXXXXX Witness Certifying compliance: Signature: Kr. Karier Institute member Page 6 of 6