https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/arti ... 85/2006312

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http://voices.iit.edu/interview?doc=pis ... iskorzB_en or https://archive.is/u69mxDavid P. Boder Interviews Benjamin Piskorz; September 1, 1946; Tradate, Italy
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: So they threw in also the dead people. In . . . in the wagón I was still feeling very bad. And also during the ride I was terribly thirsty. So there was there an acquaintance, a comrade of mine whom I begged, from the terrible thirst, [that] he should for me even . . . nu . . . I don't know how to say it, because . . . urine.
DAVID BODER: Yes?
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: He made urine into my mouth.
DAVID BODER: How? Directly?
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: In the wagon, directly.
DAVID BODER: What does it mean, he made directly into . . .
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: He made into my . . . directly.
DAVID BODER: He urinated . . .
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: Urinated.
DAVID BODER: From his . . .
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: From his . . . yes.
DAVID BODER: From his body?
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: Yes.
DAVID BODER: Into your mouth?
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: Straight into the mouth, because of the terrible thirst. This wasn't the first case, because all the people drank this way.
DAVID BODER: Hm.
BENJAMIN PISKORZ: And also . . . the . . . the . . . the relief was for me very great, because the urine absorbed the heat of the tongue . . . the heat of the tongue, and the tongue became . . . the swelling of the tongue went down.
From:My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many “experiments” they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature—people could objectify others—that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out.
'Jews peed into each others mouths on the train to Treblinka to relieve thirst'. What a noble story about their courage to survive.
Up to the 15th of August, the ‘death book’ officially registered 18,800 cremations. But apart from this official figure (inmates from Poland and the Reich), thousands of Jews from Poland, France, Holland and Germany died, as well as Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, even Italians; furthermore a certain number of Polish ‘resettlers,’ and finally Russian prisoners of war: of these, about 60,000 arrived in the course of the year, and none of them survived: they tested the effects of battle gases on them. The property robbed in the camp of the Jews from France and Holland exceeds the value of 60 million prewar Reichsmark; it consists of gold and valuables. According to the report of an SS man deployed at the electric chambers, the number of these victims unofficially amounts up to 2,500 per night. They are executed by an electric bath as well as in gas chambers. The camp dogs have also destroyed a large number of victims.
When the squad is sent to work, they [the doomed] are taken to the yard of the penal company, where the executions take place through the ‘Hammerluft’ [so in the original; “hammer air”]. The prisoners’ hands are tied behind their backs, and they are led individually into the yard. There the barrel of this air rifle is aimed [at the back of their heads], and a silent shot is fired. The hammer hits the lower part of the skull, and the compressed air crushes the whole brain. The corpses are thrown onto a pile, and then it’s the next vicim’s turn. According to accounts received, terrible scenes are taking place there.
Auschwitz. I lived in Auschwitz for a few weeks. I know the conditions exactly because I’ve been researching them and I have been there for that purpose. From those released from Auschwitz, I obtained extremely accurate information about what is going on there. When I left Auschwitz at the end of September, more than 95,000 inmates had already been registered, but there were also non-registered inmates. Among them were 20,000 Bolshevik prisoners of war who had been brought there in the summer of 1940 [sic; no doubt 1941 was meant], as well as large masses of Jews deported there from other countries. The prisoners of war died of starvation. The Jews were executed en masse. When I left, there were about 15,000 prisoners at Auschwitz. Of those registered, at least 60,000 had been murdered. Based on the certain information I obtained on the spot, I can assert that the Germans used the following killing systems:
a/ gas chambers. The victims have to strip naked, then they are jammed into the chambers and poisoned;
b/ electric chambers: These chambers had metal walls; the victims were led in, and they were exposed to high voltage;
c/ the system of the so-called Hammerluft [German in original]: This is an air hammer. There were special chambers where the hammer drops down from the ceiling, and where the victims were killed by the air pressure by means of a special device.
d/ shootings: This is mainly used as a form of collective punishment in cases of disobedience, with one in ten being shot.
The first three methods are used most frequently, the last more rarely. The Gestapo men, with gas masks donned, stood in a place higher than the gas chambers, cynically reveling in the mass killing of the victims. The Germans loaded the bodies [on vehicles] and took them away; outside of Auschwitz, they excavated graves and pits with the aid of gigantic diggers and sprinkled lime on the bodies. Cremation of the victims by means of electric furnaces is practiced less often because only 250 bodies could be burned in these furnaces within 24 hours.
“I said, ‘I can ask you the same question: Are you still alive? But I see that you are.’”
While Ladny spent about 60 years thinking that Tafilin had been killed in Birkenau (sometimes called Auschwitz II), Tafilin always assumed that because Ladny never came home, he had been killed on the Russian front.
In a picture of them together, taken earlier this year, the 5-foot, 7-inch Ladny towers over his old friend.
In getting reacquainted, Ladny told Tafilin how he survived. While working on a prison farm in Germany, Ladny escaped. It was his third try. A German woman hid him and fed him, at the risk of her own life. The two eventually married. In 1951, they left Poland for America and settled in Springfield.
Tafilin’s story might be even more amazing. Nazi commanders at Auschwitz ordered him to build a roof on one of the crematoriums used to dispose of prisoners’ bodies. They chose him for the job because, as small as Tafilin was, he could maneuver in tight spaces under the roof as he built it.
As a result, Tafilin knew every inch of space under that roof — knowledge that saved his life. He escaped the camp by climbing up the inside of the crematorium’s chimney and out the top.
“He peeked over the top of the chimney,” Ladny says, “and saw soldiers so he slid back down. He kept peeking until the coast was clear, then he jumped down.
“He said he was so dehydrated that he just bounced when he hit the ground. He said he could hear his bones rattling when he ran.”
https://www.sj-r.com/article/20090812/NEWS/308129861
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-new ... 967935.amp or http://archive.is/fNTfiBoris, at 106 the oldest known survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, recalls the moment in his extraordinarily poetic memoir, Necropolis.
He wrote: “The body loves the countless warm tongues that lick it and the memory of the night mountain air vanishes for a while.
“We forget that beneath the shower room is an oven and that night and day a stoker heaves human logs into it.
“Even if the bodies think that soon they might be used to heat the water, the pleasure offered by this wet warmth is not lessened.”
A.N. Field wrote:Is there a book collecting these absurd tales or one collecting the Nuremberg tales about "death camps" inside Germany? Thanks.
http://archive.is/yjlOm or https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNew ... =worldNewsJanuary 20, 2020 / 12:54 PM / 6 days ago
"I stayed alive to tell" - Auschwitz's dwindling survivors recount horrors of Nazi death camp
Maayan Lubell
...
Aged six, Vera and her twin sister were subjected to the pseudo-medical experiments of doctor Josef Mengele, who used prisoners at Auschwitz as research subjects, earning him the name “Angel of Death”.
Vera and her sister were two of the few children to survive his cruelty. She tells of how she was kept naked in a cage, given painful injections directly into her spine, and beaten if she cried as she saw many other children suffer and die.
“Why did I stay alive? It was for a reason. Did I stay alive to keep silent? No – to tell.”
Dresden wrote:Moshe Peer, the little boy who survived 6 gassings, "because children resist better".
The man(I forgot his name) who survived the gas-chamber by breathing through the key-hole!
https://www.timesofisrael.com/auschwitz ... ses-scars/ or http://web.archive.org/web/202001221617 ... ses-scars/Auschwitz survivor who was just 2 at liberation still nurses scars
Eva Umlauf arrived at notorious death camp days after Nazis, facing defeat, stopped gassing children; her life has been haunted by the absence of family members who perished
By Kirsten Grieshaber
22 January 2020, 2:10 pm 2
MUNICH (AP) — Only 2 years old and so ill she had to stay on for weeks after liberation, Eva Umlauf was one of the youngest prisoners to be freed from Auschwitz.
Although she has no conscious memories stretching so far back, her early childhood in the Nazi death camp was to cast a dark shadow over her entire life.
“Auschwitz is deeply burned inside my body and soul,” Umlauf said on a January day almost 75 years after Auschwitz was freed by the Soviet Red Army. A petite woman with a pageboy haircut and eyes as blue as the camp tattoo on her arm, the 77-year-old doctor reminisced about her post-war childhood.
...
It’s a miracle that Umlauf survived the death camp in German-occupied Poland. More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered there by the Nazis and their henchmen. In all, about 6 million European Jews died during the Holocaust.
When families from across Europe reached Auschwitz in cramped windowless cattle trains, the Nazis selected those whom they could still use as forced laborers. The others, old people, many women and especially children and babies, were gassed to death soon after arrival.
But the gassing stopped two or three days before little Eva, her pregnant mother and father arrived in November 1944 from the labor camp Novaky in Slovakia. Germany was losing World War II and the Red Army was drawing ever closer to the camp.
“Our transport was the first one that didn’t go straight to the gas,” Umlauf said.
She was still tattooed on arrival — and promptly fainted. The blue number on the inside of her lower left arm remains visible today: A-26959.
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