South Carolina Voices: Lessons from the Holocaust

Teaching Lesson Five (cont.)

HANDOUT 5C: PINCUS AT AUSCHWITZ

(In 1942 Pincus and his brother were taken from the Bochnia ghetto where they had lived for around two years to the Auschwitz (Ow-Switch) concentration camp in Poland.)

When we left the ghetto, they put us on cattle trains. They packed 100 to 120 people into a sealed car. There was no food on the train. Fortunately it took us only about two days to get to the concentration camp. Train from places farther east or south, like Greece, sometimes took ten days. Many of the people on these trains did not survive the trip.

When we got to Auschwitz, we had to undress completely and line up before the gate. We had to line up in fives. A Nazi officer was pointing left, right, right, left. I was fortunate. I went to the right. The ones to the left went to the crematorium. The ones to the right went into the camp.

It was dark, but I could see the people to the left were mostly elderly or young children, so I realized that we were going into the camp. Inside the camp first they shaved our hair. We were stark naked and they tattooed us. I am 161253. They gave us cold showers. It was November. Bitter cold. Then they put us in striped uniforms and took us into Birkenau (Beer-Kin-Now), the killing center at Auschwitz. I was fortunate. After I had been there four weeks, they picked several hundred men to go to Bunno, another part of Auschwitz. It was a labor camp and they gave us a little better food. The barracks were a little nicer. There were about 300 or 400 men to a barrack. We had double or triple bunks. The bunks were actually single beds, but two people had to sleep on one bunk.

The capos woke us at five o'clock each morning. The capos were prisoners who were in charge of the barracks and the work groups. They were mostly Germans, Poles, and some Jews. The Nazis assigned them to guard us. In the morning they gave us one piece of bread mixed with sawdust to eat. We also got a piece of margarine and a cup of coffee. It was not real coffee. We had to work until the evening. In the evening we got soup. If we were fortunate, we might sometimes find a few potatoes and a piece of meat in the liquid. Most of the time it was just hot water and a few potatoes. For that we had to work 9 or 10 hours a day. When we first came there, we worked unloading gravel and coal from trains. If you didn't finish your assigned task, you got a beating.

The first few months I thought I wouldn't make it. For me at Auschwitz the worst enemy was the cold. It was bitter cold. There was also hunger and there were the beatings. But the worse thing was the cold. I had one striped jacket, no sweater, just an undershirt and a thin, striped coat. We worked outside when it was often 10 to 15 below zero. People just froze to death.

The hunger was also terrible. We used to search for a potato peel and fight over it. We were constantly, 24 hours a day, always hungry. We would think about food and dream about it.

To survive in Auschwitz you had to get a break. My break came when I met a friend of mine from my hometown. He gave me the name of a man who had been in Auschwitz for a long time and was a good friend of my family. At Auschwitz, he supervised other inmates. I went to see him and asked if he could give my brother and me different jobs. Lucky for me, he gave us work making metal cabinets. Our job was to carry things. We were not cabinet makers, but we did the lifting. It was indoors. I don't think I could have survived the winter doing more outdoor work. I think he saved my life.

Every few months we had what they called a selection. They came into the barracks and picked out the people who looked very skinny and couldn't work anymore. They looked you over, and if they didn't see much fat on you, they put down your number. The next morning they came with trucks, picked up these people and put them right in the crematorium. It was heartbreaking.

In January, 1945, the Russian offensive started. When the Russians came close to Auschwitz, the Germans took us from the camp and marched us west away from the approaching army. They moved us out in a dead march. We marched a whole night to the Polish city of Gleiwitz, about 70 miles away. My brother kept saying to me, "Let's escape." I kept telling him that this was not the time because I knew we were still in German territory.

I said, "Where are you going to hide? The population, they are not friendly." But he wouldn't listen. Suddenly I didn't see him anymore. Since then I lost him. I was with him the whole time in Auschwitz.

They put us on a cattle train in Gleiwitz and took us to Germany. It took 10 days. They packed us about 150 people to a car with no food. Fortunately for us the cars were open. Everybody had eating utensils. I had a string. At night while the German guards were sleeping, we attached the string to a plate and scooped up snow. That kept us alive. You can live without bread for a long time but not without water. Finally we got to Nordhausen, a large German concentration camp. We were there about 10 days, and then they sent us to a camp called Dora in the mountains. The Germans were making V2 missiles there. We did hard labor, digging tunnels into the mountains. We worked there from the end of January until April, 1945.

HANDOUT 5D: RENEE IN A WORK CAMP

(In 1941 Renee was taken from the Kozenice ghetto to a labor camp in a Polish town called Skarzysko (Scar-Jess-Ko). In this camp, the men and women were separated. Renee worked in an ammunition factory. She and her mother stayed in this camp for three years. They were able to keep Renee's younger brother with them. Next they were sent to the Polish city of Czestochowa (Chest-Ta-Hoe-Va). In this reading she tells about her life there.)

In 1944 when the Russians started coming into Poland, the Nazis moved the ammunition factory I was working in to a camp in a Polish city farther from the Russian front and closer to Germany. The factory made parts for machines that made bullets. I worked on one of these machines. The type of work I did was one of the things that saved me. I was not a very strong person, physically. If I had been forced to work 14 or 15 hours a day, I would never have lived through it. But they picked me to do a job that was very precise, and I was not allowed to work more than eight hours a day.

We had to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning. But we came out of the barracks at five o'clock because they began the roll call then. They were counting and counting and counting. We had to stand in the snow for hours. If one person was missing, they started the count over from the beginning. We didn't sleep in beds. They had bunk beds, three rows high. The beds were just boards with straw on them.

We had soup twice a day. They gave us some dried turnip cooked in water and once a day a slice of bread. We'd get a small loaf of bread for ten people. How can you slice ten slices exactly to the crumb? Maybe once a week a little pat of margarine. That was it—lunch, dinner, and breakfast.

To survive we had to look presentable. At the time we didn't have any clothes except what we wore. But we tried to have our hair combed and put a little bit of lipstick on because if you looked bad or tired, that was the end of us. In the morning when we came out, they counted each person and looked at our faces. If you didn't look good, out you went. We never saw those people again.

We had to wash our hair to keep it looking clean, but we didn't have any hot water so we washed it with warm coffee. If we had to wash our hair, we didn't drink the coffee. We saved it. We washed our hair because if our hair was not clean, they cut it off. In the camp we had a wash room. We didn't bathe there. We could just brush our teeth and wash our faces and a little of our bodies. They took us to a shower once a month.

As a part of my job, I used a crayon to measure the openings in the machine in which the bullets were made. I wore cotton gloves for this work. We received new gloves every day, so I was able to make a little collar out of the old gloves. I pinned it on my dress, combed my hair, and used the crayon for lipstick.

The only time we were happy is when we had to go to the bomb shelter when the Allies were bombing. The Germans were petrified, but we had nothing to lose. Anything would be better than what we had.

HANDOUT 5E: BLUMA IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP

(Bluma Goldberg was born in Poland in a small town called Pinczow (Pin-Shawv). When the Nazis invaded her town in 1939, they set fire to most of it. Bluma's house was destroyed and the family moved in with an uncle. In 1942, the family heard rumors that the Germans were rounding up all the Jewish people. Bluma and her sister spent several months hiding in the dense forests near their village. After learning that someone had informed on them to the Nazis, they decided to turn themselves in to Nazi authorities. They agreed to go to a labor camp where the sisters spent the next two years working in a factory where bullets were made. In 1944, as the Germans began to lose the war and the Russians moved toward Germany from the east, Bluma and her sister along with the other prisoners working in the factory were moved to a city closer to Germany. Here they continued to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Three months later they were moved again to the Bergen-Belsen (Burg-In Bell-Sen) concentration camp in Germany. In this passage, Bluma describes her life there.)

One day the Germans put all the camp inmates on trains. The Russians were coming closer, so they decided to take us to Germany. We had no idea where we were going. When we arrived in Bergen-Belsen, they stripped us of all of our personal belongings. They gave each of us prison clothes. They consisted of a striped dress, shoes, and socks. They didn't care if the clothes were too short or too big or too long. Any jewelry that we had was taken away from us. They took us to the barracks. These barracks were just empty rooms. There were about 40 girls in one room. It was winter and very cold. There was no water and no bathrooms.

Every morning they got us up at five o'clock and they counted us. After this roll call, they gave us a cup of coffee. For lunch they gave us watery potato soup made of potato peels and a piece of black bread. In the evening, we received only a cup of black coffee.

In Bergen-Belsen diseases spread quickly; many people became sick with typhoid fever. Some people just went crazy. They started talking to themselves. They walked back and forth. The Nazis just wanted people to die there from hunger and disease.

The only work we had was to carry a pile of junk from one end of the place to another. We all lost a lot of weight. We were there for three months and if we had been there for another three months, I don't think anybody would have survived. We had lice all over us. There was no way I could get rid of them. I cried a lot. I didn't want to live any more—the cold, hunger, and disease.

One day we got lucky again. A German military commission came. They were looking for workers for an airplane factory. They looked us over as we went by. Some were told to go right and the others to go left. I was lucky. I went right and finally my sister also went right. They took us out of Bergen-Belsen and we went to Burgau. They made airplanes there. My job was painting the number on the airplane. It was much better there than at Bergen-Belsen.

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Overview V—Resisters

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