Eichmann trial - Session No. 68 , 69

do you speak hebrew sir yes please place the skull cap on your head and put your right hand on the bible and please say after me i swear by god almighty that my testimony in this trial oh you are a merchant you are a writer i'm sorry yes you were born in poland yes and you are the author of the books salamandra and the house of dolls and two other books and the the book named they called him people what is the reason why you chose the literary pseudonym mr dinour this is not a pen name i do not regard myself as a writer writing a literature chronicle this is the actually of the auschwitz planet the chronicles of auschwitz myself was at auschwitz camp for two years the time there is not a concept as it is here in our planet every fraction of a second has a different wheels of time little and the inhabitants of that planet had no names they were not born there and they did not conceive they breathed and lived according to different laws of nature according to the laws of this world of ours and they did not die they were dressed in how shall i call it mr housener showing the witness a suit of striped clothes is that what you used to wear there at auschwitz yes this is the garb of those who lived on this planet called auschwitz and i believe wholeheartedly as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation to erase this evil as humanity has risen after the crucification of one man i the same as in astrology the stars influence our fate is there facing our planet and influencing radiating towards our planet i am able to stand here in this court before you and retail retell the tale of this planet i out of this planet of i believe with all my being that this is thanks to the oath i made to them their and this was the power the unnatural power above nature which sustained me so that after the period of auschwitz two years in auschwitz when i was a muslim to withstand me auschwitz they always they always took leave of me and the look in their eyes had the promise of my oath in them almost two years tummy i stayed there and i was always left behind i can still see them gazing at me please please listen to mr hausner but it is difficult to see from here unless the witness recovers mr house no i did not expect this of course to happen and i think it would be difficult for the witness to recover the witness's wife who is in the audience is now approaching him shift say yes president of court i do not believe we can go on we shall make it take a recess now and you mr attorney general will kindly inform us as soon as you find out whether the witness is capable of going on what's up foreign what's up so we were working there with those uh rolling wagon which we were drawing you entered the crematorium yes i entered the crematorium we saw the inside of the crematorium we had to go there in order to take the wood which was to be used for the burning we had to take some of the wood to the camp from the crematorium and when there was still time and when it was very cold the carpo of this undercommander took pity on us and said children it's very cold outside perhaps you can get warm in the gas chambers sometimes it would happen that when we arrived at the crematorium they said you can't possibly get in because there are people inside this was the crematorium in august 1943. um to use the ashes of the human being and to spread it on the roads yes what foreign the ashes who were with us were not jews and who gave the instructions to the blob they would get those instructions from their superiors try to rise i would go dizzy and see nothing yes we were taken at the end of march in april to a camp called laga conditions there where below any imagination people would prefer to sleep under the open sky rather than in the habits there was an air raid lager camp and i saw on the following monday morning people eating human flesh you saw cannibals actually yes i did yes let me say the victims of the air raid yes that is what i meant to say auschwitz and they were beating us and shouting at us we had to line up in a veteran prisoner came up to me and asked if i had any money or a watch because since i come from terrorism i may have some valuables on me without thinking without giving it a thought i handed over my watch and then in gratitude maybe he told me that here you have you come to ss men if he asks you what your profession is say you're a locksmith electrician or a mechanic if he asks your age make it five years less if he asks you if you are healthy say you are one should never be ill in this concentration camp when i asked him where are we he said you arrived at bear canal auschwitz and then you underwent this famous selection of um foreign foreign later the selection we advanced all in line there was a table with an ss man nearby and he asked each one of us profession and age before me there was a good friend of mine who my uh befriended at terezin he was one meter and 80 high and he was as she champion in his in home country in czechoslovakia he was asked profession he answered lawyer he was turned immediately to the right when my turn came they asked my profession i said a fine mechanic aid i said 38 although i was 43 at the time your health i answered perfect and then he examined me he because my clothes were dirty smeared with blood of the dead men next to whom i set i did not look in excellent condition because we were hungry and thirsty he asked how long was the journey how long did you work in your profession i said 24 years and then he sent me to the left those who turned to the left those paired we were some 200 210 or maybe 212 out of a transport of over 200 people the others were taken to be guest the train which arrived after us and the same transport was turned to the to be killed by guests directly now what happens is is when in terrorism we boarded the train which was to take us to bear canal we did not know at the time where two believed that i was very brave and did something that myself a good turn because i hurried and sat near a window i sort of conquered a place for myself near the window and was very proud of my achievement uh just across there were two men from czechoslovakia and the german and one there were two people nearby three to a bench before we left we were told that it was strictly forbidden to open a window or throw anything out of the window after some 20 or 25 minutes after the journey started the check across the wagon opened his parcel the food he took for the trip and wanted to ss men jumped into the wagon there was one to each wagon to god correction to the interpreter by the and my back was towards the direction of the train he was behind me the ss men there was one to each wagon asked who is the man who opened the window there was silence no one replied then he asked once again asked my neighbor who opened the window when there was no answer he drew his pistol and shot at the check was sitting opposite me into his head and then he shot the man who was sitting near him through the neck judge alevi those who traveled with you the czechoslovaks and the germans uh were they not jews foreign i was facing the direction of the train and the ss man was behind my back the two men who were shot the one died immediately and the other was still alive for 12 or 15 hours we were not allowed to help him the dead man and his eyes were in a stare of fright surprise we had to tie him to the seat so that the body does not fall forward the other man he was whimpering and bleeding we had water and first aid in the wagon but we were not allowed to help him he bled to death then we had to tie this man as well to the seat so that he does not fall forward of course mr house now what is your next question attorney general and thus you reached auschwitz-birkenau with these two dead men vietnam on the concrete floor on the bare concrete floor it was very cold it was in november during the day we were occupied in this business or to dismantle the machines and the parts which were still fit for use to be taken by freight cars to glive it's during the day we were peeling potatoes for the following day we were extremely hungry and each one of us tried as we called it at the time to organize something for himself that is to get hold of a number of potatoes when we were coming out we were being searched the man next to me a man from czechoslovakia had six to seven potatoes hidden in his pockets i was not as clever i had only one potato in my pocket they took down our numbers the numbers which were tattooed into our arms and on the following day in the evening at the roll call for sabotage the sentence will be carried out immediately president of court why don't you have a drink of water mr oppenheimer foreign the this was a czech jew i speak of jews all the time this tattoo was hanged but not the usual way of gallows or hanging by a mounting a box or it which was uh drawn away later but the rope was put around his throat and he was dragged up then my turn came when the tie was already on my neck the rope the commander of the camp said this is the man who stole only one potato then the ss man replied yes i will have him hanging by his hands for two hours at that moment i would have preferred if they actually hanged me they tied my arms across my back and thus i was drawn up but it seems that nature is kinder than human beings i do not know how but i went unconscious for two minutes five minutes ten minutes or eight days i cannot tell but when i came to i was once again on the concrete floor of this big hall with a doctor trying to revive me and to put back my strained elbows he was applying cold bandages to my arms on the following day i had to go out and work once again i was in the transportation group and my comrades did there at most to make work easier for me to are in answer to the question by the president of court you had to work on the following day yes of course estelle's otherwise i would have been hanged mr oppenheimer m is foreign i could raise my feet anymore i do not care if i die here at blackheimer i'd rather die here in blackhair than on the road my two acquaintances decided to stay behind and not to join the march to stay with me we entered another hut not the hat we were in before decided to sleep all ss men were on their way with the others on the march the hats were empty only later we learned that there were a number of prisoners who stayed behind some 10 or 15 men and we went to sleep all of a sudden imagine what happened this afternoon we were asleep we did not know what was happening to us all of a sudden there was a call hurry the ss men are back excitement and the fear i felt no pain any longer i dragged my two friends and crossed to a place across the ground this was the public lavatories we stood there and peeped through the cracks to what was going on in the camp they started shooting towards the from the towers the watchtowers around the canyon where the people took shelter and where they were in hiding they stood facing the doors with machine guns and if anyone ran out of the burning hats they were shocked immediately by the ss men with those machine guns those who did not run were burned alive my friends and my self decided that they would be coming to the lavatories as well and set fire then we jump through the wood through the seat into the pit and this was the worst experience of my life when we entered those pits of the excrement sinking sinking slowly and one does not know how deep we were sinking the extremely excrement reached up to my chest and all of a sudden i felt solid ground and the half burned people those who were shot but were not dead they all were this terrible experience the worst i went through in those camps far worse than the moment when a sentence of death was declared against myself mr oppenheimer how long did you stay there how long did you hide in that place i cannot say foreign and and then the russian army came and liberated you i would like to get to the end now then the russian army came and liberated you mr oppenheimer is really a branch was a branch of auschwitz at the moment i was released just because they are jews they said i we didn't do anything why do you remember the case of the dutch doctor i'm a physician for epidemic diseases i was a physician for epidemic diseases in the city hospital in bialystok and in the ghetto later a dutch physician came once yes of course and he asked me he was fresh in why do you ask me this question and he said we were told on the ramp at birkenau the those who are fit for labor are going to a separate camp and the children and the women are going to another camp they will get better treatment and after two weeks there will be a reunion so that the families could be reunited for some time and he asked me when will this reunion take place and how will it take place and you told him that there were no beatings no getting too much i told him the truth but then i was sorry and he told me small wonders that the germans accused the jews of atrocities stories it is impossibly said it is impossible what you are telling me here because i showed him the crematoria it was 300 yards out of our camp and i asked him do you see that building what do you think it is and he said this is a bakery it was made of bricks red bricks he committed suicide later two weeks later i happened to meet him again he called me i wanted to evade this meeting i saw him from afar he came up to me it was very embarrassing to me and he said colleagues you were right it and i later learned from his dutch colleagues that he had committed suicide by hanging himself and this was the most popular method of committing suicide in birkenau the technical term used there was people are climbing on the wire the department and i remember them well dr bailey what was this muslim medically and psychologically muslim this is a word which was created in auschwitz that was president of god we already heard the explanation from uh mr covner i believe or dr peretz was it a previous witness i don't know we had no muslim man in the ghetto only in birkenau this muslim endowed was the last stage of undernutrition undernourishment the first symptom that's interesting was that people who entered the stage of muslim menship that was a psychological apparition they began speaking about food usually this was a taboo two things were taboo crematoria and food food that was a reflex the conditioned reflexes because whenever people spoke about food the secretion of digestive acids would increase and people tried not to speak about food as soon as a person lost that self-control and began remembering the good food which he used to have at home in the good old times such a talk was called as muslim and conversation and that was the first stage and we knew that within a day or two he would enter the second stage there was not such a rigorous division but he would stop taking an interest in his surroundings and his motions would become very slow his face frozen like a mask he would no longer have control over his bowels he would relieve himself where he was he was not even turning over when he lay down and thus he it was a skeleton with bloated legs and these people because they wanted to drag them from the blocks to the roll calls so they were placed forcibly next to the wall with their hands above their heads their face to the wall for support and it was a skeleton with grey face leaning against the wall swaying back and forth they had no sense of balance that was the typical muslim men who would be taken afterwards by the skeleton commando with the real bodies and we had forgotten on the eve of the day of atonement 1944 that it was a day from the grabber's calendar the meaning of that is that on every saturday and every jewish holiday including purim they would always empty the infirmary take all the sick people out and they would empty their muslim men blocked they were taken to the guest church take them to the gas chambers that was a man is screaming very hysterically foreign president of court we'll see now whether we can continue with the presence of the public now and i said president of court i said we'll now see whether we can keep this up with the public witness and this was in the middle of the call lee dre prayer provision instead of giving it giving them the food gradually to grow make them accustomed to normal food they began overeating and they got diarrhea and all in all only 60 of people survived from the 25 000 who live together with you precisely i merely wanted to say that i lost consciousness three days i was in semi-consciousness i became a muslim man i began seeing visions i knew this was the sign hallucinations and when i was already in this state of semi-consciousness the dim consciousness they did not take me to the construction gang anymore i had to polish and rub the sweep the floor and scrub the floor and i was sitting on the floor one day and i saw boots ss boots approaching me of course automatically i got up mid up head off and i saw mengele he recognized me in that state even though i did not resemble myself and this was three days before the liberation he knew that the war was lost to the germans and he asked me what are you doing here i said and i was sure although i had this dim consciousness semi dead i did not feel the tips of my fingers my nose or my my cheekbones my legs were bloated i knew these phenomena well i knew he would search me he would want to remove a witness who was present when the gypsy camp was liquidated and i do not know whether he was looking for me or not because they took me on that evening to the starken block to the dying block block of the dying men i was in the municipal hospital in gablons on the nice when i was liberated four i was in the room of the medical personnel a separate an extra room with a that's when i woke up in a clean bed with flowers near my bay who liberated

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Keywords: Eichmann, trial, State, Archives, משפט אייכמן, גדעון הואזנר, holocaust

Id: m3-tXyYhd5U

Length: 52min 15sec (3135 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2011