The Holocaust Read Free Page A

downwards. An SS man with a machine gun shot at their heads. The man with the whip screamed: ‘The devil, get dressed quickly!’
    We dressed quickly and took the shovels with us. We were counted and escorted to the lorry by gendarmes and SS men. We had to put the shovels away. Then we were counted again and pushed into the lorry.
    The journey to the Schloss took about fifteen minutes. We travelled together with the men from Klodawa and talked very quietly together.
    I said to my colleagues: ‘My mother wanted to lead me to a white wedding canopy, she won’t even have the experience of leading me to a black one.’ We cried softly and spoke in whispers so the gendarmes sitting at the back shouldn’t hear us.
    On the first day the following happened: it was ten in the morning. A certain Giter from Bydgoszcz, a fat individual, resident in Izbica during the war, belonged to the group of ‘eight’ and was unable to keep up with the speed of the work. The SS man with the whip ordered him to undress. He flogged him and others till they lost consciousness. His body looked black as spleen. He had to lie down alone in the ditch where he was shot.
    It turned out that there were many more rooms in the Schloss. We numbered twenty in our room, with fifteen more in the adjacent one. There weren’t any other enforced grave diggers. As soon as we came into the cold and dark cellar we threw ourselves down on the straw and cried about everything that had befallen us. The fathers wept from pain at never seeing their little ones again. A fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Monik Halter embraced and kissed me. Weeping, he said to me, ‘Ah, Schlomo, even if I die a victim, my mother and sister should at least stay alive.’ Meir Pitrowski, forty years old from Izbica, my neighbour on the straw, kissed me and said, ‘I have left my dear wife and eight children at home. Who knows if I’ll ever see them again, and what is going to happen to them.’
    Gershon Prashker, a fifty-five-year-old from Izbica, said, ‘Wehave a great God up in heaven and must pray to him. He won’t desert us—that’s why we must all now together say the prayer of confession and penitence before death.’ Amid great pain and tears we recited the prayer. It was a very depressing sight. The sergeant-major knocked at the door, shouting, ‘Quiet, you Jews or I shoot!’ We continued the prayer softly with choking voices.
    At 7.30 in the evening they brought us a pot of thin kohlrabi soup. We couldn’t swallow anything for crying and pain.
    It was very cold and we had no covers at all.
    One of us exclaimed, ‘Who knows who among us will be missing tomorrow.’ We pressed close together and lapsed into exhausted fitful sleep haunted by terrible dreams. We slept for about four hours. Then we ran about the room freezing cold and debated the fate that was in store for us.
    Thursday, 8 January 1942
    On Thursday, 8 January, early in the morning, the gendarme knocked and asked maliciously: ‘Ah, you Jews; did you sleep well?’ We replied that we had been unable to sleep because of the cold.
    At 7.30 the cook brought us hot but bitter coffee with dry bread. We got the coffee in a large cauldron, which we had to scoop out with our cups. Some of us drank it but most didn’t want that breakfast. They said they were close to death anyway.
    At 8 o’clock we heard the arrival of many people. They were high-ranking SS men. The gendarmes reported to one of them that the Jews had remained quiet throughout the night. The SS man ordered him to open our cellar door. (The door had three locks and a chain.)
    The officer screamed, ‘All Jews clear out!’ and remained alone in the corridor. (We had assumed the SS would be afraid of a desperate reaction on our part.)
    As we left the cellar, our numbers were checked. In the courtyard we had to line up in double file. The second SS man checked the number of grave-diggers once again. Then we had to board the lorry. (Two vehicles always