Our Crime Was Being Jewish by Anthony S. Pitch

Author:Anthony S. Pitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

I will never go to hell because I’m living it already.

—Lilly Appelbaum Malnik in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*0020

Every ten days in Mauthausen, a different barrack was gassed. The whole barrack of four to six hundred people would go on tiptoe in deathly silence. Everybody was given a piece of soap and stared at the showerheads, because sometimes, instead of water, little granules of hydrogen cyanide came out and your goose was cooked. When water came out it was bedlam, with people jumping, yelling, shouting, laughing, and hugging one another. We never knew which barrack was going to be chosen, which made us apprehensive. But if you got out, you exclaimed, “Yay, I’m going to live another ten days!” They chose up to fifty prisoners to take the bodies to the cool chamber, a kind of underground tunnel. With a little flatcar, we pushed to the cool chamber, next to the crematorium. Sometimes burning the dead took too long, but the cool chamber could hold about two thousand bodies. We did this willingly because we got an extra bowl of SS soup or peas, perhaps beans mixed with pork. Oh my God, that was heaven! We abhorred it, but we went along. Whatever took place was normal for that time and place.

—Stefan Czyzewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0387

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