113 - Bearing Witness - Killing Centers

NARRATOR Surviving the killing centers was almost unheard of. The few who did—who were still living when liberation occurred and subsequently survived the challenges of displacement—were often the sole survivor of their families. They provide the eyewitness testimony to the daily atrocities of the killing centers. Siegi Izakson: "The best way I can describe the worst thing in Auschwitz to me was the fact that I saw death every second of the day. Whether you saw trucks passing by with victims to be exterminated, whether you saw transport after transport coming in and being exterminated. And you knew. You could smell the stench of the burning flesh from the crematoria and you knew what was going on…" NARRATOR Louise Joskowitz: "…They shaved us completely…they took away whatever we had…family pictures and letters…they took everything away." NARRATOR Ilsa Koch Seelig: "You slept in rows, sort of a big shelf and straw, and everybody slept in rows. I remember being hungry and cold, and lice infested…they were just everywhere…" NARRATOR Allen Wayne: "The sanitary conditions were a just a ditch…. If you wanted to go out at night to the toilet, you were shot because that meant you were trying to escape." NARRATOR Mady Deutsch: "We were counted every morning and every evening, and we were standing in front of these barracks from dawn, from about 4:00 in the morning for maybe three, four or five hours until the SS…would get to our barracks to in fact count us…some of us got horribly sick that we couldn't even stand up…when the SS came by to count us…the other people would help us stand by, you know, supporting us from the back or from the side…if we looked weak we would be taken out of the rows…and straight to be killed…" NARRATOR Witold Kuhn: "...Everybody got a piece of towel and told them you're going to take a shower... the gas chamber looked exactly like the shower because it still had a shower head on the top. After they put maybe 500 or 600 people in it, they locked the door, and through the roof they dropped that zyklon, that gas. Some of the German SS guards they even could look through the glass window and listen to that screaming. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they opened the door, got the ventilators, took the bodies out..."

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Holocaust Museum Houston

Holocaust Museum Houston is dedicated to educating people about the Holocaust, remembering the 6 million Jews and other innocent victims and honoring the survivors’ legacy. Using the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides, we teach the dangers of hatred, prejudice, and apathy.

 

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