Wednesday 13 June 2012

Day 102 - Continuation of the Buchenwald tour!

Disturbing content!!!


"There was a perfectly manufactured lift or elevator in good working condition which carried the executed ones up to the ovens and it had three powerful furnaces.  Everything worked so smoothly most of the time, without many interruptions.


The skull smashing mallet was laying nearby where they had dropped it.  Some evidence, for the victims, some of whom would have been partly alive after the prolonged slow suffocation on the strapping clamps or hooks - a last order would be given if there were kicking stupors!


There was the whipping block, the ashes and partly burned bones and bodies everywhere!  Unearthing a mass grave near the Bismarck Tower was enough evidence as to what happened to the transports which never got off...........!!!!!


All these places were opened and even Germans were made to have a good look and do the digging back in or carrying the corpses'.


I never saw Janeck and many others again, only Antonio, his Dad and Jose Dewever and a few others.  I figured that 1,200 to 1,600 of my transport had vanished as only two hundred had survived!!"


You can think that it was about the same for the other transports.  The health of the few who survived, like myself, left much to be desired.  A good many of the survivors died shortly after being liberated, others were handicapped and invalided.


We weren't given too much food when we first arrived, weaned like babies I should say, food was another hazard for our delapidated bodies.  Some people were worse off than others of course.


Elmer Luchterhand, Antonio, myself and another prisoner had our photo taken at the gate of the watchtower with "Yedem das Seine",
for Walter Poller's book called, "Medical Block Buchenwald".


We stood there like two bookends, with Antonio and Elmer hiding behind the two in front.  Walter Poller had been a former German inmate of Buchenwald and he was one of the first people back in the camp after liberation.




To be continued ....

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