Archive/File: holocaust/poland siedice.001 Last-Modified: 1994/10/18 From the diary of Hubert Pfoch, an Austrian infantryman who maintained a diary and photographs detailing his observations regarding the Holocaust... "Pfoch had no idea who these 7,000 people were. The night itself, he noted, was a sultry one, and the soldiers slept badly. But early the next morning, 22 August, the soldiers' train was shunted to another track, and they found themselves alongside the station's [Siedice] loading platform. It was there, Pfoch wrote, 'that we heard the rumour that these people were a Jewish transport.' His diary continued: They call out to us that they have been travelling without food or water for two days. And then, when they are being loaded into cattle trucks, we become witnesses of the most ghastly scenes. The corpses of those killed the night before were thrown by Jewish auxillary police on to a lorry that came and went four times. The guards - Ukrainian volunteer SS - some of them drunk - cram 180 people into each car, parents into one, children into another, they don't care how they separated families. They scream at them, shoot and hit them so viciously that some of their rifle-butts break. When all of them are finally loaded there are cries from all the cars - 'Water' they pleaded, 'my gold ring for water.' Others offered us 5,000 zlotys for a cup of water. When some of them manage to climb out through the ventilating holes, they are shot the moment they reach the ground - a massacre that made us sick to our soulds, a blood-batch such as I never dreamed of. A mother jumps down with her baby and calmly looks into a pointing gun-barrel - a moment later we hear the guard who shot them boast to his fellows that he managed to 'do' them both with one shot through both their heads." (Gilbert, 116) Work Cited Gilbert, Martin. Final Journey: The Fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979
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