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Kasriel K. Eilender, M.D.

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THE BARBER OF GOERLITZ - A MEMOIR

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Chapter Ten

According to present

 historical data, 

Hitler and his cohorts 

did establish 

250 

concentration camps

 and annihilation

 facilities 

all over occupied 

Europe.

After the victory at Kursk, the Russian army started to move faster to the west and also appeared to endanger the Ukrainian city of Charkow, in the south of Mogilev. The order of evacuation came for only the Jewish prisoners. It was the beginning of September 1943 when we bid a tearful good-bye to the Russian co-prisoners. Some of them who worked in the kitchen gave us food for the road.

We were put in cattle wagons. It was surprising and moving to see Gentile Russian wives voluntarily joining their Jewish husbands for this journey into the unknown, which actually was the road to suffering, destruction and death.

Most of the guards had been a cross section of the local population and they served as an auxiliary police force cooperating with the Germans in any of their cruel endeavors. They not only betrayed their blood-soaked fatherland and their families, but also were considered subhuman in the final analysis. They wore black uniforms with gray trimmings around the collar and on the end of the sleeves. There had been, of course, SS officers and noncoms who had been in charge of everything.

The train moved slowly and cautiously since it was already September 1943, at which time there were very large groups of well-armed partisans in the surrounding regions. After the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, the war in the east was practically lost.

On the second day of the journey, our train suddenly was stopped, and we were ordered to get out of the cars, and while we were sitting in the field on the ground, another train going east passed by and also stopped. Some of the workers from the other train, who had been going from Poland toward the front as forced laborers to help out with many chores, told us that there was a campaign to destroy all the Jews of the occupied territories in Europe, especially in Poland. They said the people were killed by gassing. This was a surprise to me and to other prisoners, although we knew that Nazis were shooting most of the Jewish inhabitants of all the communities. However, we had never heard about this other method, of the mass destruction.

According to present historical data, Hitler and his cohorts did establish 250 concentration camps and annihilation facilities all over occu-pied Europe. Some of them were very notorious like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Tremblinka, Matchausen, Gross-Rosen, Dahau, Bergen-Belzen, just to mention a few and many of them were smaller and not so notorious.

We had been ordered back into the cattle cars and were on the way till we reached the very important and large railroad junction of the city of Orsha. We stayed here overnight. As the SS officers and other guards went into town to have some fun, we stayed with the auxiliary Slavic guards. They opened the doors of the cars and they were standing with their weapons on the ground. I was lying on the floor of the car at the wall facing the open door, when one of the Jewish prisoners screamed. The guard walked into the car, approached me asking, "Why did you scream?" I said, "I did not." He ordered me out of the car. I did not answer and did not move. I was surprised that he did not kill me. However, it seems to me, that if I had gotten out of the train, he would have shot me under the pretense that I wanted to escape. It was known that the Germans always reprimanded the auxiliary police if they beat or killed some of the prisoners without orders or permission. This was probably a reason why the guard did not make any more commotion, being afraid of a reprimand.

Well, this was a close call for me. It was the middle of the night when the SS leadership returned from the city and we had been on our way west early in the morning. As we arrived at the railroad station of the city of Minsk, the capital of Soviet White Russia, we were ordered to detrain and were transported to a camp at the outskirts of the city. We remained there for about a week or 10 days without a warning as to what our future fate would be. I met there a granddaughter of one of the rabbis from Suwalki. Her name was Altman. She worked there in an office. I asked her what happened to her family? She said that everybody had perished. She gave me a loaf of bread, which I shared with one of the inmates. We were on the way again toward the Polish border, arriving at the station of Lublin. "The reception committee" was composed of tough and rough Estonian SS guards. They brought us to the very notorious concentration camp of Majdanek. The camp was located about one and a quarter miles south of Lublin. Originally, the SS established it as a prison for prisoners of war composed of the Polish intelligence and political leaders, as well as Polish Jews and Soviet prisoners of war.

The Jews had been arriving from Slovakia, Holland, Belgium, France and Greece later. This concentration camp gradually progressed to become a very notorious "five-star" extermination facility. One section of the camp had two gas chambers where cyclone B gas was used as in Auschwitz. The killing process was accomplished by mass shootings of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. On July 24, 1944 Majdanek was liberated by Soviet troops who found only 700 survivors.

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