The Holocaust in 1944
Despite German reverses on all fronts, the Nazi death machine is murdering thousands everyday ...
We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs. We, too, know that it is not the same thing to be given a ladleful of soup from the top or from the bottom of the vat, and we are already able to judge, according to the capacity of the various vats, what is the most suitable place to try and reach in the queue when we line up.
Survival in Auschwitz - understand the system
Everyone who could, tried to hide somewhere - in lofts, in barns and basements. Gestapo bandits searched from house to house. With axes and crowbars they opened up floorboards, walls, searched every suspicious corner - they were looking for people hiding. Children, old and sick people, invalids were taken out of the ghetto in lorries. Bloodthirsty murderers searched house after house and gloated:
"Any kittens left here? "(Germans called children "kittens"...) Mothers who refused to let their children go were badgered with German shepherd [dogs]. To muffle the terrible screams Germans turned on very loud dance and march music and broadcasted it through the loudspeakers on the lorries.
The Kinder Aktion in the Kovno Ghetto
As Auschwitz began ‘processing’ Jews from Hungary at an unprecedented rate in May 1944, someone decided to document the steps taken in a series of photographs. A 56-page photographic album was prepared to show how cattle trucks crammed with men, women and children arriving at Auschwitz were dealt with. The 193 surviving images in ‘The Auschwitz Album’1 are the most graphic evidence we have of how it was possible to murder so many people so quickly.
Chosen to be Gassed
We know about the work at the sand quarry, about those who did not fulfil the norm and were thrown into the pit from the cliff. We know about the food ration: 170 grams of bread and half a litre of slops which they called soup. We know about death from starvation, about the swollen people who were taken outside the barbed wire on wheelbarrows and shot.
Final murders at Treblinka
For the “next room” was a series of large square concrete structures, each about one-quarter of the size of the bath-house, and, unlike it, had no windows. The naked people (men one time, women another time, children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes - about five yards square - and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box - and it was completely dark there, except for a small skylight in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door - the process of gassing began.
'Unbelievable' horror of Majanek
Images that last fractions of a second. Images of eternity. In the distance, a long line of little lights, and in the fog immense pylons, like skeletons. A sea of mud, a plain of mud. A freezing, dark, muddy madness. I feel as if I had entered a dimension where nothing is human, that is utterly hostile to everything human, a dimension that has absorbed even its own creators, becoming a cold machine, muddy and dark, fatal and inexorable, topped by a small flame that I see for an instant as in the distance it breaks the darkness, as if the sky were burning: I don’t yet know what it is.