Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
Jerzy Fijołek |
English translation:
When I went to school on Miodowa Street in 1943, first of all the teacher taught us how to hide our Polish language exercise book down our trousers or under our skirts. After all, our mother tongue was forbidden. More fear.
There was a day when, on my way to school, I was forced to watch an execution. Ten hostages were shot on Miodowa Street. I was only six years old. And more fear, terrible fear. 12th August 1994, Auschwitz station. I was eight years old. On the loading platform at Brzezinca, my dad said, “We won’t leave here alive”. A capo drove us on to the wagon – women separately, men separately.
I went with my father and my sister – with my mother. They took us to the baths. There, we had to strip naked, leave all our valuables, they even asked who had gold or silver teeth, Then the disinfection took place and we were given numbers – I was given the number 192610. We stood, naked, for half the day, then they split me up from my father. I remember that I clung fiercely to him, arms round his neck, I didn’t want to let go, I was crying. Fear. I was only eight years old.
All the children wound up in a camp barrack where the capo was the mistress of life and death. The nights were the worst – the crying of the children and the capo continually yelling “Ruhe!”. Sick children, having no help from anywhere, died in the arms of other children, small and defenceless prisoners.
You couldn’t admit to sickness, because that meant going into the camp hospital, where there was a doctor by the name of Mengele. He gave only one treatment – injections. That treatment was called “szpilowanie”. He injected phenol or benzine. Instant death. I was in danger of the same thing happening to me. But I was lucky, because my mother sought me out. She came with another woman and helped us get better. First and foremost, don’t display sickness or weakness. That torment lasted a very long time.
Another recollection. It was just before Christmas, 1945. After the evening assembly, the Germans read out my number and fifty other children. They took us to a barrack by the crematorium. We thought that we’d be going to the gas chamber in the morning. Every child prayed as best they could. At daybreak the Germans came and ordered us to undress. They gave us civilian clothes with a red cross pained on them. They took us to Oświęcim station. I met my mother there. They loaded us on to a train made up of goods wagons on which there was the property which had been seized from the prisoners. We travelled under an escort of German soldiers. We arrived in Berlin.
We dragged out some kind of existence there until 9th May. At the end of the war, with other prisoners, we then set off on foot in the direction of the Odra, to our beloved Poland. I survived, my mother survived, the rest of my siblings. We sought traces of my father for thirty years. Only after that did notification arrive that after Auschwitz, he’d wound up in Flossenberg, where he died on 12th December 1944. His concentration camp number was 192609. He wasn’t so lucky.