Survivor of Buchenwald, My Personal Odyssey Through Hell by Whitlock Flint & Gros Louis

Author:Whitlock, Flint & Gros, Louis [Whitlock, Flint & Gros, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Which reminded me: I was thirsty. But no, it was the Krema, that great meateater, devourer of human beings, Minotaur of modern times, a destroyer of everything, even hopes and dreams, that suddenly started spitting enormous blood-red flames.When you saw the fire, you imagined you were thirsty. Huge waves of sticky smoke rolled angrily down on us, carrying the unbearable smell of burning flesh. I started choking, longing for a drink. But we were not allowed to drink, and we were not allowed to cough, especially not because of the smoke! Oh, my dear Saint-Ex, if you could see your stars now through this diabolical smoke! How right you were to invent for us a peaceful planet, a tender flower, and a graceful Little Prince! Down here, you know, no one is the Little Prince, there are no flowers, there is no grace; it is impossible even to recognize your planet.

“Oh, look, a shooting star!” It was for real! One day, perhaps, other sorts of stars would come and annihilate the camp, like they would the factory; destroy the dreadful Krema chimney and break up this sick, incurable hive.The English squadrons bombed at night.The flames from the Krema must have been visible from miles away.They would attack the unclean beast, the dreadful dragon, and they would destroy it forever.

Thoughts ran on unchecked; they might take me into enchanted places or they might take me down to an unimaginable hell.The Krema did this to all of us. It was almost as if they had put it there on purpose, at the top of roll-call platz, to make its own roll call of tragedy and human lives.

The furnaces at Ravensbrück were built on the edge of a magnificent lake, where they could be easily seen from the romantic village on the opposite bank. “Oh, you who dwelled there, men high and men low, did you not smell the smoke rising from the chimney in that camp, women and children going up in smoke, their ashes scattered over your lake?”The Krema, in any camp you care to name, was the factory where the dead were consumed. It was the place where all illusion was destroyed and all hope annihilated, burnt to a crisp, nothing left but ash.

The very special Topf und Söhne ovens inside our Krema––built in nearby Erfurt––were designed with high technical specifications to perform at the maximum efficiency. An elevator took the corpses from the underground execution chamber to the upper floor where the ovens were. For there was not just one oven, but three groups of two, six in all, which often functioned all at the same time and sent enormous clouds billowing out of the chimney. Each oven had a steel door sealed into the brick surround. The bodies were fed into the flames on long, shiny metal plates mounted on rails and casters, so that three bodies could be shoveled in at a time. It was just like bread being put into the oven at the baker’s, except

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