A. This is the characteristic smell of cyanide. It was very slight but we smelled it - exactly like bitter almonds. And when I opened my eyes, I found myself lying down, in another block obviously, and my colleagues were giving me artificial respiration. The question that interested them especially was: "How was it? As that is going to be our end, we would like to know if it hurt?"

Q. And you knew they used Zyklon B in the crematorium?

A. Yes, it was in tins. Each tin, in my estimate, contained five kilograms. On it there was a label which said: "Zur Ausrottung von Schaedlingen und Ungeziefer" (for the extermination of pests and vermin).

Attorney General [Shows the witness a book and points to one of its pages.] Can you identify this?

Witness Beilin: Yes. But here one cannot see the colours. The tin was painted in gold colour. That is to say, it was given a covering with some material which had the colour of gold or copper. It shone.

Attorney General: I submit this book. This is the German translation of the Polish Report on Auschwitz. We did not prepare a Hebrew translation, as we knew there was an official German translation, I shall submit it at this stage and refer to it later.

Witness Beilin: I would like to draw the Court's attention to the fact that, if this should be produced as evidence, there are two kinds of containers here. One kind which has a folding top is made of cardboard, and the second kind is of tin. I saw the second kind.

Presiding Judge: On what page does it appear?

Witness Beilin: Page 152.

Attorney General: Did you hear the expression "Pappendeckel" (cardboard cover) applied to these containers?

Presiding Judge: Do you have another copy?

Attorney General: We shall give one to Dr. Servatius.

Presiding Judge: What about the two judges?

Attorney General: We do not have any. There are two copies at Yad Vashem, and we were given these two booklets. I am sorry.

Presiding Judge: This will be marked T/1329.

Attorney General: These were cardboard containers, you say?

Witness Beilin: I saw the other kind - of tin.

Q. You saw the tins, but not the "Pappendeckel?"

A. No.

Q. When you were in the Gypsies' camp did you see Jewish boys on whose sexual organs experiments had been conducted?

A. Yes - on one occasion they were brought to us, and this was an exceptional case, for generally they did not treat non-Gypsies, nor did they come into the Gypsies' camp; this was an exceptional case in which they brought forty Greek Jewish boys - very handsome and very young - evidently they had been specially selected; the area around their genitals had signs of burns - these were X-ray burns.

Q. What camp did they come from?

A. From Auschwitz 1. And then I heard from them, for the first time, the name of Dr. Schumann. This name was mentioned by them as the one who had performed it on them; at any rate they came to us for treatment and were placed in a special Stube (ward) - it was not a room but part of a block with bunks, and there we tried all the limited standard ointments in our possession, for even in normal times X-ray burns did not generally heal. Some SS doctor used to come together with Dr. Mengele and they would come from time to time and order us to remove the bandages so that they could inspect the condition of the wounds. One day they took them to a truck, wrapped in blankets, and in this way they disappeared.

Q. Where to?

A. I don't know, but a naked person on a truck, wrapped in a blanket in Birkenau invariably meant gassing.

Q. Do you also know about cases of castration?

A. I saw a healthy boy at work, and he told me that he had been castrated; he even allowed me to examine him. I told him that there was no possible help in such a case, but he said: "I want you to see what they are doing to us."

Q. Do you remember a Rapportfuehrer by the name of Schillinger, an SS man?

A. Yes.

Q. What did he do?

A. This Schillinger - in all the atrocities that existed in Birkenau he was the limit - he was simply a murderer who killed his victims with his own hands, and in particular, as I have related, when food was distributed; he apparently also took part in the reception of transports to the crematorium, because something happened and it filtered down to us via the Sonderkommando.

I have only to point out that the Sonderkommando was a closed unit with which we had no contact apart from the doctor. The doctor had permission to move around and he came to the clinic to put medicine into his knapsack, and he used to accompany the Sonderkommando each time at its work. And this doctor used to bring us news, and brought us information that Schillinger had been killed by a woman from one of the transports which, according to accounts, was a transport of foreign nationals who had been gathered together in Warsaw, in the Polonia Hotel, and ultimately they came to Auschwitz.

Q. Jews?

A. Yes. Jews possessing foreign citizenship. And this Schillinger told the women to undress, and one woman said she did not undress in front of men. In consequence of this he raised his whip, his cane - he always walked around with a cane - and he wanted to strike her. At this point, she drew a revolver and killed him with one shot. From the time we received this information Schillinger never appeared in the camp, naturally, because he had been killed. It was one of the doctors who told us this.

Q. Was that Dr. Globersohn?

A. No, it was Dr. Pach.

Q. Was Dr. Globersohn the doctor of the Sonderkommando?

A. The second, yes.

Q. Tell us the story of Dr. Globersohn.

A. The commander of the Sonderkommando was Hauptscharfuehrer Moll. He also received the transports for bathing in the famous "Sauna" and he would beat those amongst them who possessed too much jewellery and gold. I was with them and heard him say: "As much as these Jews have been persecuted - they nevertheless have too much money." He was in charge of crematoria Nos 1, 2, 3 and 4. Every three months, when there was a roll-call before him, he would make a selection - every three months he would liquidate the Sonderkommando and choose a new Sonderkommando.

Q. Were those the men who dealt with the burning of the bodies?

A. Yes. Once I saw Hauptscharfuehrer Moll in the Gypsies' camp from a distance - everybody recognized him for each person knew that if he were to be selected that meant three months and no more. On the other hand, the doctor of the previous Sonderkommando had been lucky, in some way, in being discharged from the Sonderkommando and he was transferred with a transport to some kind of transport for work. He vanished from the camp but we regarded him as one who had been discharged from the Sonderkommando.

In the Gypsies' camp I saw Moll walking and then I knew that while he was going to select a Sonderkommando he was not going to select it from among the Gypsies, for only Jews were selected for that; apart from that there was no time for a roll-call and he was not going just to seize anybody in the blocks - he made his selection in an organized way at the roll-call - but I nevertheless preferred to hide. I hid in the toilet. When I came out, I was told that Dr. Globersohn had been taken by Hauptscharfuehrer Moll as the doctor of the Sonderkommando. He asked him: "What are you doing here, doctor? Come with me."

A. Two days later Dr. Globersohn, who had been a doctor in Belgium, a native of Pinsk, who had studied and had his practice in Belgium, was brought to us, poisoned and unconscious. We knew that he had taken an overdose of sleeping-pills and he bore signs of having received blows, terrible signs of hemorrhages and wounds. When they brought him to the camp he was dying - there was no need to strike him - he would have died anyhow. Moll came there and beat him to death saying: "You want to avoid your duties and to die, you Jewish swine (Saujude)?" That was how Gobersohn died.

Q. Do you remember what happened in January 1945?

A. After the camp was liquidated and after the Hungarians were also no longer there, I was transferred to Section (Abschnitt) F. This was opposite Section E where the Gypsies were. That was the Krankenbau for all the other camps. I worked there until 17 January 1945. I found there many Polish medical colleagues, many friends whom I had first met at university, fellow-students; amongst them there were also some who today are in the Polish Government. On 17 January 1945...we knew that on 11 January the last Russian offensive had begun and they had crossed the Vistula. We thought that we were not far from the Vistula and that we would be liberated, but that was a vain hope. On 17 January 1945 they woke us during the night: "Alle Pfleger antreten" (All medical orderlies are to report). Of course we all reported and immediately they ordered us "Rechts um, Marsch!" (Right turn - march); it was at the height of the winter.

Q. Where were you taken to?

A. They led us to the Stammlager (main camp) which was in Birkenau, at a distance of some five to seven kilometres, and that was where I saw Drechsler, the woman supervisor of the women's camp. She also stood there with a SS group, and there they gathered together a group of 15,000 persons. That is to say, there were ten groups of 1,500 each. In each group the proportion of the guard to the group was one in twenty-five, which means that there were 600 SS men in charge of these groups. Along the road where we began walking, the first station was Gleiwitz - we were walking through Lower Silesia. The second station was Ratibor and then we were joined by prisoners who had been evacuated from camps in the vicinity - from Laurahuette, Koenigshuette, Jaworzno, Janina, Czechowitz...

Q. Were all these branches of Auschwitz-Birkenau?

A. Yes.

Q. In your opinion how many people did this complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau contain, with all its satellite camps?

A. In my modest estimate, about 160,000. My calculation is based on the number of groups that were evacuated. In my group there were 25,000 persons, I heard, after the liberation, of other death marches containing 25,000, and the women's camps. In my opinion there ought to have been there - that was also the number generally accepted amongst the prisoners - 160,000 in constant rotation. After all, everything was in transit - transports departed and new ones arrived.

And here began the tragedy of those 25,000 people of whom I was one.

Q. Perhaps you could describe it briefly?

A. Those who could not walk were shot. That was called a "mercy shot"; a man would leave the ranks, sit down at the edge of the road and he would be given a "mercy shot." In Auschwitz, generally speaking in Birkenau, they were not shot - they said "it is a pity to waste a bullet on a Jew," but on the march - they were shot.

And we started to count the shots. The column was a long one, 25,000 persons. We could only judge by the number of shots, and we knew that each shot meant a life. There were days when the number of shots reached five hundred and the further we marched, the number of shots increased. We had no strength left, we were without food, we slept in stables and not only in stables. And there were people who had been through all the seven stages of hell and who were on the verge of liberation. On one occasion they put us into a certain bunker in Landeshut in Lower Silesia - today it is called Kamienna Gora in Polish. On the entrance to the bunker it said "Entry forbidden by order of the Police." Since it was almost sunset we did not notice this sign - we did so only on the morning after the tragedy. It was a very long bunker like a labyrinth with lanes leading off to the sides.

Presiding Judge: A bunker for what - against air-raids?

Witness Beilin: A concrete bunker.

Q. But a bunker for what purpose?

A. We subsequently learned that this was a bunker for uranium mines, but we only learned that later, after the tragedy. Half-an-hour after we entered - the door was closed and locked, it had a very narrow door - we began feeling that we had no air, that there was a lack of air there. The groups which were far from the door felt this much more and then the tragic shouts began - "Luft" (Air) - and naturally the SS men did not open the door until six a.m. We remained shut in there until six in the morning. We were then about 5,000 out of the 25,000.

Q. Did they put all 25,000 in there?

A. By then we were only 5,000. And the next morning, when they opened the doors, we removed 1,000 bodies from there. It was truly death by suffocation, in horrible positions, naked, on their knees and with their mouths on the concrete floor, where they tried to breath in air, since the concrete was porous - amongst them there were many doctors. In our transport, when we set out, there were twenty-seven doctors; three of us remained and all of us are in Israel. Very few survived from this entire transport, since we left, along the way, many frozen to death; many were shot and died on the way. This I learned subsequently, for I was separated from this transport in a group of chemists.

I saw that if I continued with this transport it would be the end of me, and I decided to get away from this wretched march. At one of the places, the commander of the march called for chemists, and I said that I was a chemist. He asked me: "What is the formula for water?" I replied to him: "H2O," and he said "That's fine - you may go." In this way I became a chemist. The transport commander was Hauptscharfuehrer Schultze and he annihilated these 25,000, he and his men, he and his guards. After we had removed the bodies from this bunker, a police officer arrived and I heard how the police officer, a lieutenant, shouted at the transport commander: "How could you dare put people into a bunker on which it says expressly 'Entry forbidden by order of the Police'?" He said this in great anger. The commander of the march answered him with a smile: "Lieutenant, they are only Jews." And then he said: "I see - that's in order," and he went away.

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