I Survived Hell On Earth [Illustrated Edition]

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Text originally published in 1956 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

I SURVIVED HELL ON EARTH

LEON NIESCIOR

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

FOREWORD 6

PREFACE 10

THE ARREST 11

LUBLIN PRISON 12

OSWIECIM 15

CAMP REGISTRATION 17

FROM NAMES TO NUMBERS 19

WORK ASSIGNMENT 20

EVENING ROLL CALL 21

QUARTERS 23

MORNING ROLL-CALL 25

MORE ATROCITIES 27

STRASSENBAU—KOMMANDO 29

BLOCK NO. 11 31

PLACES AND INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE 32

MORE HARASSMENT 34

TRANSLATION OF A MEDICAL CERTIFICATE. 38

TRANSPORTS 39

THE WOMEN’S CAMP 41

LUNCH IN THE FIELD 43

STRAFKOMPANIE — THE PENAL COMPANY 45

PLANIERUNG—KOMMANDO (The Planning Division) 47

HOLZ—KOMMANDO (Wood Provision Detail) 49

LANDWIRTSCHAFT-KOMMANDO (Agricultural Detail) 51

LIQUIDATING THE SOVIET SOLDIERS 53

A DEFILADE BEFORE THE GALLOWS 55

WEEKENDS AT AUSCHWITZ 57

MARTYRDOM OF THE CLERGY 59

DESTROYING THE JEWS 63

THE GAS CHAMBER 67

THE CREMATORIES 72

CONDEMNED AND SAVED 74

BUCHENWALD 77

THE DELIVERANCE 81

IN CONCLUSION 82

AN EPILOGUE 83

ILLUSTRATIONS 87

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 151

Images Of The Holocaust 152

Views of the Shoah 153

Transportation 180

The Ghettos 187

The Einsatzgruppen 222

Mauthausen-Gusen 230

The Aktion Reinhardt Camps 240

Bełżec 240

Treblinka 255

Sobibor 261

Majdanek 266

Chelmno 275

Auschwitz-Birkenau 283

Dachau 307

Ravensbrück 315

The Architects of Destruction 319

Heinrich Himmler 319

Reinhard Heydrich 329

Adolf Eichmann 338

Josef Mengele 341

Maps 343

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the ashes and shadows of the innocent human beings exterminated in Hitler’s concentration camps.

LEON NIESCIOR

Author

FOREWORD

In order that there be easier understanding of the unrestrained atrocities perpetrated with German consent, atrocities which I saw and also experienced as a political offender in the Auschwitz (Oświęcim) concentration camp, I decided in this modest foreword to corroborate the statements made in this book as to statistics and as to the description of the brutalities which took place there.

Oswiecim (Auschwitz) is situated on the river Zola, a tributary to the Vistula, lying 50 kilometers west of Cracow in Poland.

This prison camp for political offenders quartered prisoners from every country in Europe. It was occupied and directed under German authority during World War II.

The most dreaded fixtures in that camp were the crematoria, which consisted of an enormous stove and huge gas chamber. The crematories had 46 burners which in 15 minutes disposed of 250 persons, a thousand per hour, and in 24 hours cremated twenty thousand bodies. The gas chamber, deceptively built to resemble a huge bath house accommodated 500 people. The shower baths had an installation of a gas Cyklon B (H. C. N.), deadly and fatal in a few minutes of inhalation.

To this gas chamber and crematoria a side track railroad spur was installed on which inclosed cars guarded by storm troopers ran, bringing prisoners from all parts of Europe.

In preparation for the gas ordeal, the prisoners were deprived of their clothing and of all their possessions, then all, men, women and children stood stark naked in an open area. In groups of 500 and at bayonet point they were driven into the gas chamber for annihilation.

Rather often it happened that at a time like this the stimulated, besottedly drunk S. S. troops selected from the naked throng, shapely, young lovely girls and violated them in the sight of their parents in a most bestial and perverted manner, which one with moral sense could not even describe or want to do so.

After gassing, special details of prisoners were forced to remove the bodies after having extracted gold crowns, bridge-work and valuable fillings from the bodies. Often during this operation the jaw bone was pulled out, too. Women’s long hair was cut off purposely. When this desecration was finished, other prisoner detail loaded the corpses destined to go to the crematory fires for disposal. If any oil from the bodies dripped down during the process, it was salvaged by running it into a reservoir to be used in the manufacture of soap. The ashes were fed to the fish and used mainly as fertilizer for soil enrichment.

In the year span 1941 to November 1945, 978,000 persons mainly Jews and Poles were destroyed, others were of Russian, French and still other nationalities.

In case the gas chamber and crematory were overtasked, machine guns were used in mass murder, killing the victims as they stood beside the trenches, which they themselves had been compelled to dig and into which their bodies fell. Naphtha was sprayed over the bodies and flame-throwers were used in the burning process.

Block No. 10 was another spot of torture and savagery. To the year 1943, mass sex assaults on the women prisoners were committed by the S. S. men, who selected the victims for themselves from this camp. Their victims were the shapely, nicely-featured girls prisoners of the ages 14, 16 and 18 years.

One cannot describe the orgies in this place. Suffice it to say that these sex acts surpassed the understanding of even sex perverts. The innocent victims of these outrages later stood before the firing squad and were cremated or gassed and cremated. During two years of these barbaric violences thousands of young and lovely innocents of many nations became the victims, however most of them belonged to Jewish families.

At the beginning of 1943 this same block was renamed The Educational Institute, in which experimental research, supposedly medical, was done on the prisoner population. This research in as far one could call it such, was divided into four divisions:

First — Tuberculosis and cancer experiments;

Second — The impregnation and sterilization of women;

Third — Experiments on humans in the area of flight;

Fourth — Experiments in serums and blood disorders (hematology).

The institute director was Dr. Glauberg. His assistants in the endeavor were doctors: Wirth, Enters, Weber, Schmidt, Rode, Koenig, Thilo, Klein, Fisher, Mengele, Larg, Deintsbach, Heschel and Wutke. Besides these mentioned, many practitioners of the prison body were forced to assist them.

The victims of these experiments, as well as the physician prisoners involved in this work and who knew too much about it, got their reward before the firing squad or were gassed or were given a phenol injection to the heart. Dr. Samuel, a professor of medicine at the University of Prague, came to his end by this means.

A general estimate of the victims of both sexes in the above noted experiments at Oswiecim alone, involved 3,272 individuals of which a very small number remained alive.

Block 11, the penal block, another fearsome place, was situated in an isolated part of the camp. It was especially well guarded. In it were confined the intelligentsia, scholars, the religious, community leaders, officers and influential persons. Under no pretext could the prisoner leave the block. His special insignia of distinction was a red wheel patch on his chest and back easily distinguished for at least thirteen meters distance.

To these people was given a less than meager diet. Breakfast was a quarter liter of unsweetened, so called coffee. Dinner consisted of three quarters liter of watery soup made of nettles and most often without any stock or fat. Supper gave him twenty grams of bread with a quarter liter of the usual insipid coffee.

However ill fed these people were, hard labor was expected of them. Hard, exhausting and non-productive work calculated to pass the time and wear out the spirit to the tune of beatings, if the overseer’s mood was such. Most often these persons were forced to drag a several ton roller for road leveling at a gallop. If one fell exhausted or hurt by a beating the roller went on over him crushing him to a pulp.

Sleep was limited to six hours maximum and as often as not an alarm was rung for physical exercise such as stretching up and down, jumping, rolling over on the ground unclothed, despite the weather. Several hours were spent in this way.

These same prisoners slept on a cement floor, nude, with one blanket to cover four. If anyone had nature’s call during the night, he was forbidden to use the toilet. If it so happened that he relieved himself where he slept he was murdered by strangulation, a heavy wooden pole placed on his neck as he lay in a prone position, this pole held down by the weight of the S. S. men who stood on each end of it and who were usually amused at his misery.

Depending on their mood, another such unfortunate found his death at the hands of the S. S. guards by having water pumped into his body through the rectum by means of a rubber tube until the bowels were perforated and death ensued. Thousands of valuable lives were ended in this block of atrocities.

Monthly inspection was another and fourth dread. A so called medical commission came monthly to make their selections and health examinations. On this day all the prison occupants stood naked before this commission, which divided the assembly into groups, left and right, at the beckoning of a finger. If the prisoner was emaciated, his skin tightly drawn over his bone structure, or had the skin broken by lice bites or ulcers, such an one was undesirable, a wastrel, and was shunted to one side, condemned to death. This monthly review meant the annihilation of nearly ten thousand souls. Those suffering from tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria or other disease were subjected to the same radical treatment. In fact, in reality there was no medical treatment as such in the camp. The prisoner physicians, knowing what awaited the patients, hesitated to advance a diagnosis knowing well the outcome.

It happened, also, that a woman in pregnancy was brought to Oswiecim. There she delivered her child under most adverse conditions. If she was fortunate enough not to die of blood poisoning, she then had to witness the death of her baby by an injection to its little heart.

These are only a few of the brutalities that came from German hands in the concentration camps during World War II. And these were not just haphazard happenings, but a menacingly well thought out system, of genocide, which aimed not at the conquest of Europe alone, but to that of world conquest by mass extermination of those nations whose pretension menaced the rule of the Death’s-head and the Swastika.

The astronomic scale reached in these German atrocities outstrips the confines of all feeling, thought and understanding. It gives food to the thought that the entire German nation was infected in a high degree with pride and arrogance and deeply convinced that a rotten, mouldy, abjectly ruthless world needed a rebirth by their German Kultur, discipline, strict governmental control by elevating political schemes to binding principles which acknowledged the cult of Might makes Right.

One proof of the above assertion is the fact that eleven years after the war’s end, Germany, democratic Germany, has not made a step to give rehabilitation or restitution or material recompense to their political prisoners whom Divine Providence has preserved in life.

We all are witnesses that in this democratic Germany there has arisen a nationalism based on Hitlerian principles, which again dreams of supremacy of Teutonic stock in the rule of all Europe, if not of the world.

An ironical whim of fate is seen in the seeming blindness of contemporary political leaders who now