Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-064-01
Last-Modified: 1999/06/07

Session No. 64
21 Sivan 5721 (5 June 1961)

Presiding Judge: I declare the sixty-fourth Session of the
trial open.

Attorney General: I call Mr. Joseph Reznik.

Presiding Judge: Do you speak Hebrew?

Witness Reznik:   I do speak Hebrew, but I wish to speak
Yiddish.

[The witness is sworn.]

Presiding Judge: What is your full name?

Witness: Reznik, Joseph.

Attorney General: You live in Tel Aviv, Ibn Gabirol Street
94?

Witness Reznik:   Yes.

Q. And you are the owner of a store?

A. Yes.

Q. When the Second World War broke out, you were in the
Polish army.  You were taken prisoner by the Germans, were
taken through all kinds of prisoner camps, and finally were
brought to the notorious camp at No. 7 Lipowa Street in
Lublin.

A. Yes.

Q. Then you were put to work, together with other Jewish
prisoners of war, to erect the Majdanek camp.  Correct?

A. Yes.

Q. When was that?

A. That was in 1942.  They took us, two hundred and forty
men - we had also been there in 1941 - in order to erect the
camp.

Q. When were you employed in building the Majdanek camp?

A. They started building the camp in 1941.

Q. There were various sections in the camp.  What did they
call those sections?

A. In 1941, they built the first field.  Jewish prisoners of
war worked there.

Q. When did they erect the other fields?

A. Usually work proceeded from one field to the next field,
then to the third, fourth and fifth.

Q. What was that fifth field?

A. The fifth camp was called, in 1943, the "death camp."

Q. Why?

A. Because beyond the camp, there were large trenches, which
had been dug by the Jews themselves.  I saw that with my own
eyes.

Q. I do not ask what you saw with your eyes.  I ask: Why was
that called the "death camp" or the "death field"?

A. It was called the "death camp" because there were large
trenches which had been dug, and we called it the "death
field."

Q. When were you transferred to live at Majdanek?

A. I was at Majdanek for the first time in 1941, as a
labourer, a prisoner of war.  Later I was there in 1942 for
a few weeks.  I was fortunate.  Our Scharfuehrer Schramm and
the Sturmfuehrer Morfinkel came back, and took us back for
labour at Lipowa 7.  Only us, the prisoners of war.

Q. When you were at Majdanek, before they returned you to
Lipowa 7, did they kill people there?

A. Yes.

Q. In what year was this, 1941 or 1942?

A. In 1941 they did not kill people. In 1941 they shot only
those people who were lagging in their work; they were left
there in the trenches.

Q. And in 1942?

A. In 1942 there were already more fields, and from time to
time labour gangs were sent to work in Lublin.  Then more
people were shot.

Q. You saw people there from various countries?  From which
countries?

A. In 1941 I saw in Majdanek Russian prisoners of war.

Q. Were they Jews or non-Jews?

A. They were high-ranking officers, both Jewish and non-
Jewish.  The Russian Red Cross was there before them.  But
this was for the Russian prisoners of war.  They were
maltreated there.

Q. After that, they brought you back to Majdanek again.
Right?

A. Yes.

Q. About when was this?

A. This was on 3 November 1943.

Q. Were you the only one who was then brought to Majdanek?

A. No.  At that time, there came to Lublin from all the
camps in the vicinity units of the SS, extermination squads
they were called.  They came from Cracow.

Q. And they were taking Jews.  From which localities?

A. From Lublin, from Lipowa 7, and from all the surroundings
of Lublin, from all the camps, and the remnants of Jews who
were in Majdan-Tatarski, near Lublin.

Q. Where did they take them to?

A. All were brought to the same camp, the fifth field in
Majdanek.

Q. What did they do with all these people on the 2nd and 3rd
of November, 1943?

A. Right away, when those people were brought to the camp,
they were at once transferred to the fifth field, column
after column, in rows, and went straight into the pits.
They were brought in through the rear gate and went straight
to their deaths, and beautiful music was being played, the
finest hit tunes, beautiful slow fox-trots were being played
with the nicest music, and this confused the people
completely, so that they would not realize that they were
being led to their death, and at the pits the machine guns
were playing.

Q. An SS officer turned to you and asked what was your
occupation?

A. Yes.  I said I was a carpenter, and he said: "Heraus"
(Come out).

Q. Were other people also taken out of the line?

A. Yes.  Three hundred men; they selected from the lines the
healthiest and strongest men.

Q. Were women also selected?

A. Three hundred women.

Q. Where did they put those three hundred who had been put
to the side?

A. They took them in groups of ten or fifteen.  In each
group were SS men, Scharfuehrer, Unterscharfuehrer,
Rottenfuehrer, and they led everybody into barracks, in
groups of ten or fifteen, until three hundred men had been
brought there.  We stayed there until late at night.

Q. At night an SS officer came in there.  Do you remember
the event?

A. At night  - it was already quite dark, I did not know the
exact time, I did not have a watch - he came in - I must
repeat here some coarse words.  He came in and said: "All
that Scheisse (shit) are already kaputt (done away with),
only you remain, you are the selected Jews, you are going to
stay alive."  We did not believe him, we knew that in the
end we, too, would die - if not after some weeks, then after
some months.

Q. But you knew who he was?

A. His name I don't know.  I only knew the high-ranking
officer Rolfinger, the one who selected the three hundred
men.

Q. That officer who came in, was he wearing clean clothes?

A. No.  He was dirty.  He was filthy all over.  I did not
look too close.  Maybe he was also bespattered with blood.
His boots were as filthy as with the biggest murderer to be
found in the world.  He was drunk.

Q. You stayed in that barrack some two weeks?

A. Yes, we remained in that barrack for about two weeks.

Q. And they gave you food and drink, and then they took you
out to work?

A. Yes.

Q. What kind of work did they take you to?

A. On that day we were taken out to work.  We were made to
stand in line by that officer, and he came out and said: "As
of today, you are no longer considered to be prisoners of
war, you are Jewish prisoners, and you no longer have any
right to live."  This is what he said to us.  After that, we
were put on buses.  Where exactly we were going, we did not
know, since the buses were closed.  They gave us new
clothes, new tools, and we were on our way.  We did not know
where to.  In the end, they told us that we had been brought
to the Chelm forest.  The forest was called Borki.

Q. What were you told to do in the Borki forest?

A. For two weeks, we did nothing and did not know what was
going on.  Later, they started bringing logs.  Each log was
one metre long.

Q. What did you do?

A. There they took us to pits, to some sort of trenches.

Q. And they told you to dig?

A. Yes.

Q. Did they tell you where to dig?

A. Yes.  "This place, from here to there," this is what
Rolfinger said.

Q. Did he have any plans or maps or notes in his hand?

A. He was holding a piece of paper.  I didn't know whether
it was a sketch or a map, but he knew exactly where they
were and what was lying there.

Q. And then he told you to start digging?

A. Yes.

Q. So you started digging, and what did you find?

A. I was digging with my spade; I hit the earth once or
twice, and, all at once, the spade slipped, and I realized
that the spade had struck a human head, and such an evil
smell came out of the earth.

Q. And then you wished to stop working, and Rolfinger jumped
at you and screamed?

A. Then Rolfinger screamed at me and said: "Why did you
stop?  Don't you know that there are bodies lying here?"

Q. So you opened a mass grave?

A. Yes.

Q. How many corpses were there?

A. There, in the first trench, which was 150 or 170 metres
in length, there were about ten thousand corpses.

Q. You took out the corpses, and they told you to burn them?

A. Yes.

Q. They brought a grinding machine there?

A. They brought a mill for grinding the bones.  Our people
sifted the bones, so that the gold could be extracted, if
there was any in the teeth.  The bones were brought to the
grinding machine, and the ground bones were later brought to
the fields and scattered there.  There was such a stench
that one could not keep one's mouth open.

Q. And you worked there opening graves for a long time?

A. For three months.

Q. How many graves did you open during at that time?

A. There were eight or nine; I cannot tell exactly.  And one
trench they kept open for more people.  All that time, they
were bringing in new people in trucks.  The persons that
were brought, the dead bodies - I do not know whether it was
from gas or from the air - were still warm, with no clothes,
like Adam and Eve.

Q. The graves you opened, could you tell if these were
graves of Jews?

A. We knew that they were Jews, because we found documents
there.  There were Jews with beards, and also a ritual
slaughterer.

Q. How could you know he was a slaughterer?

A. We were digging in one of the trenches and took out a
certain number of corpses.  The number was reported to
Rolfinger who supervised the work.  He looked at his notes
and said: "Here five or eight more Jews are still missing.
You must dig and find them."  So I put in the spade again,
and suddenly a wall collapsed, and there were another seven
or eight corpses, and next to one of them was a ritual
slaughterer's knife, and he still wore the Star of David.
Rolfinger knew exactly how many corpses were in each trench.

Q. Did you see a woman with a baby in one of the graves?

A. When we dug up one of the trenches, we saw a horrible
picture.  On a woman's body, there lay a little child two or
three years old, wearing white shoes, a white coat, and the
mother was lying face to face with the child.  This sight
sent a shock through us, worse than everything else, because
we, too, were fathers of children, and we imagined our own
children thus.

Q. The gold from the teeth and the silver rings from the
fingers, who took these?

A. Rolfinger and his deputy, Raschendorf, took all of them.

Q. What unit did Rolfinger and Raschendorf belong to?

A. They belonged to the "Vernichtungs-Kompanie"
(extermination company).

Q. What uniforms did they wear?

A. The extermination squad wore SS uniforms, such as  the
extermination-SS wore.  There was the extermination-SS and
the Sturm-SS.  They wore SS uniforms.

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