The Dr. Rath Health Foundation is the Receipient of the “Relay of Life and Remembrance” from the Auschwitz survivors
- The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’
- European Constitution “For the People, by the People”
- Sign Petition online “For the People, by the People”
- Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
- From Nuremberg to Brussels – Lecture by Dr. Matthias Rath
- Two Auschwitz Witnesses – August Kowalczyk and Kazimierz Albin
- The Auschwitz Hospice Foundation
- Photos of the Event
Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
Artur Krasnokucki |
Next Testimonial » |
English translation:
After the German invasion, the Jews were ordered to wear a yellow shoulder band. People thus marked were hunted in the streets, we were beaten and humiliated. I remember terrible fear. I remember how several uniformed thugs came to our flat on Narutowicza Street and threw us out, only letting us take what the three of us, my mother, Elżbieta, my father Abraham and I, could carry.
At the end of January 1940, the perpetual fear was joined by a feeling of terror as to what had happened to my father, who’d left our new accommodation in the future ghetto and hadn’t returned. We never saw him again. All trace of him had vanished. Even now, I don’t know what happened to him.
The Ghetto
A period of hungry and hopeless inertia began in my life and my mother’s. In 1941, deportation from the ghetto to the extermination camp at Chelm-on-Ner. Universal starvation was taking an ever-heavier toll. People were dying of hunger in the streets and at home. I spent four years of my youth in the ghetto and they are irrefutably associated with fear, hunger and filth, with an all-embracing cold because there was no fuel whatsoever, with the indelible sight of corpses and people still alive, but so debilitated by starvation that they awaited their own deaths with utter indifference.
In October 1943, wasted by hunger, my mother died in my arms. All I could do was watch impotently. It’s difficult to forget.
In March 1944, I was taken to the “Buchenwald-Außenkommando” concentration camp at Częstochowa . My new attire was striped; trousers, top and cap. We were as hungry here as we had been in the ghetto. In addition, we were forced to perform hard labour for twelve hours a day. The work was beyond our strength. Without gloves, in winter, we dragged the engines from wagons. We transported them to the workshop and there we would hammer in concrete. Frostbitten and injured hands were the norm.
In August 1944, the sub-camp at Częstochowa was liquidated and the prisoners were transported to the mother camp at Buchenwald , where I received the number 83827. After a month of torment, I was taken to Außenkommando in Sonnenberg in Thuringen, where I laboured and starved in just the same way.
On 14 th April 1945, I managed to escape from the ‘death march’ column. I jumped into a sewage canal, from which I emerged the following morning. In the evening, I reached a village which had already been taken by the American army. That was the end of the war for me. Of my family, only my brother, Fryderyk, who lives in Israel, and I survived. I lost my mother, my father and my brother, Leon. I survived. But why only me?