The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps//auschwitz/urbanowicz-01


The following passage is from _Call Us to Witness:  A Polish 
Chronicle_, by Hania and Gaither Warfield.  New York:  Ziff-Davis 
Publishing Company, 1945, p. 421.

[Dr. Urbanowicz, who was released from Oswiecim after payment of a 
very large bribe, is talking to Hania Gaither in May/June 1942 
and describing his time in the camp:]

	"I want to tell you about the night of September 5," 
continued Dr. Urbanowicz.  "You must remember that date:  the 
fifth of September, 1941.  In the morning seven hundred Russian 
war prisoners were brought in.  I don't know whether they were 
civilians from workmen's battalions or soldiers, because they 
were driven on foot from the railroad station completely naked.  
When evening came these Russians and three hundred of our Polish 
prisoners were packed into bunkers--the underground cells.  They 
were rammed in with rifle butts.  The ramming broke their limbs, 
ribs, and collarbones.  When the last man was inside, the doors 
were closed and locked, and poison gas was turned on.  No one 
slept that night in the camp.  We remained on our feet, listening 
to the groans from beneath.  It seemed to me that the very ground 
I was standing on was heaving with the throes of death.  In the 
morning we were ordered to remove the bodies to the crematory in 
lorries which we ourselves had to draw.  They were so heavily 
loaded that we could hardly drag them.  One platform broke down, 
and the greenish corpses spilled all over the ground.  It was the 
first time gas was used in our camp."


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