The World at War (1973–1974): Season 1, Episode 20 - Genocide: 1941-1945 - full transcript

What we went through
will be difficult to understand

even for our contemporaries,

and much more difficult for generations

that have no personal experience
from those days.

The office of the National
Socialist Party in Munich in 1929.

The keen young clerk who now
comes forward has already been noticed.

He's marked for promotion,
for high responsibility.

He is Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler it is who refines
the philosophy of Nazism,

its ideas on politics and on race.

Hitler has appointed him
Reichsflihrerof the SS.



When I wanted to sign up,

the man in charge asked me, "Were
you a soldier?" I said, "Yes, indeed."

"In the First World War?"
"Yes, indeed."

"Do you have awards for bravery?"

"Yes, indeed."
"What do you have?"

Then I said,
"Iron Cross, First and Second Class,

and I served in the
Hessian Lifeguard Regiment.?

Then he said, "Well, just as there was
an elite guard in the Kaiser's time,

there is an elite guard now in the
new movement, and that is the SS."

"You should join the SS."

So I allowed myself to be persuaded

and thereby, if you like,
I came by fate to the SS

to be Himmler's adjutant.

Himmler's dream for his elite
guard had roots in the fabled past,



in the culture of an older,
Aryan Germany.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933,

he could put his ideas into practice.

Himmler had set out
to achieve a dream.

He would inspire a new awakening of the
Germanic race within the German people.

Youth would achieve
the dream.

Youth had the nerve and the strength
that would be needed.

Fresh air, exercise, good food,

to build blood and bone and marrow.

There were no limits
to what healthy youth could do.

And the dream
had a pseudoscientific base -

Neo-Darwinism,
propagated in films like this.

"Only the fittest survive."

"The weak go under."

That, after all, was the law of nature.

Farmers knew it perfectly well.

Horses were bred for pace
or for the plough.

Why not pedigree humans, too?

It was time to develop a new race,
a better one - a race of supermen.

There was no harm in that.

We must see how we
could return to a more natural law,

but only ever through
positive racial thought -

how one can improve something
and breed it.

Never with the thought -
it never occurred to us -

that we might arrogantly
talk about exterminating anybody

who didn't happen to have been born
with a white skin,

or who was culturally inferior to us
or was undesirable.

The SS -
the strongest, the purest, the fiercest.

They would do more than survive.

With Himmler at their head, they would
create a racially superior Europe.

The SS
was based on the Jesuit order,

which had been founded as
the elite guard of the Catholic Church.

And Himmler had taken much from this -

the hierarchy,
the strict selection and leadership,

and the punishments.

Himmler himself
exacts the oath of obedience unto death.

They were conditioned
to see themselves as the sons of light,

that they were engaged in a struggle
against powers of darkness,

and that it was their duty to feel they
were at all times on duty for the nation

and, in a wider sense,
for the new order in Europe.

"Arbeit Macht Frei."

"Work sets you free" on the gates
of Dachau, a model concentration camp.

The SS were Hitler's instrument of
terror in the creation of the new order.

It was only logical
that they should run the camps.

Their first prisoners
were dissidents of the Nazi state -

political and religious,
as well as racial.

The SS schooled themselves in brutality,

systematically reducing their victims
to total subservience,

depriving them of individuality.

No names.

Numbers.

September 1935. The Nuremberg Laws.

In the Reichstag, Goring spelled out the
purpose of the Reich Citizenship Act,

and the Act for the Protection
of German Blood and German Honour.

Pure must not mix with impure.

From now on, intermarriage was forbidden
and sex declared illegal

between pure Aryan and impure Jew.

Appealing to feelings and beliefs deep-
rooted in European Christian culture,

Nazi propaganda pilloried the dirty Jew.

Dishonest, scheming, money-lending
capitalist and subversive communist,

verminous, unclean, racially inferior:

"Jews are not wanted here".

But for leaders
seeking to unite a people,

they were mighty useful scapegoats
to unite against.

In schools, the Jew-boys
stood by the blackboard

as their classmates
pointed out the difference.

German schoolchildren were taught to
despise Jewish culture as soft and evil,

to be proud of their own strength,
their own purity.

From all over Germany,
the young converge on Landsberg,

the castle where, as a prisoner,

Hitler had first set out his theory
of a dominant Aryan race.

Hitler had dreamed of a youth
as fierce as animals,

with Christian tenderness and other
degenerate soft mutations cleansed,

burned out of them.

Now that youth
was growing up to manhood.

November 1938.

The synagogues burned on Crystal Night.

The morning after, Jewish males
were marched off to concentration camps.

The Jews were isolated, friendless.

It was time to get out, if they could.

Not many countries
opened their doors to the Jews.

In Germany, too, bureaucratic obstacles.

Emigrants paid stiff charges
when they obtained permissions to leave

from state officials
such as Adolf Eichmann.

I asked Eichmann,

"Why don't you make it easier
for people who want to get out?"

"You want to get the Jews out,
they want to leave of their own accord."

Eichmann organised it.

And they actually did it
as I had envisaged .

There was a representative
from the passport office,

one from the finance authorities,

one from the shipping offices,
and transport representatives.

And this man, this poor Jewish man
who now wanted to emigrate,

could make the rounds in two hours

and could get all his confirmations
and could get out.

And, as I said - I really must say it -
Eichmann said 10 me once:

"You were actually the inventor of the
Central Office for Jewish Emigration.?

January 1939.

Hitler threatens a new solution
to the Jewish problem.

If world Jewry drags Germany
into another war,

that will be the end of the Jews
in Europe.

September 1939.

Germany attacks Poland.

The victorious armies parade
through Warsaw.

Poland will be colonised. The population
are not Aryans, they're Slavs and Jews.

I remember in front,

there was a German band
with musical instruments.

For me, it was very nice.

I was happy.

I even remember that I clapped.

German soldiers, aided by
some Poles, beat up Jews in the streets.

Nazi rule in Poland
is based at once on ruthless terror.

Any who resist, object, answer back,
risk instant execution.

There are public hangings
by the thousand.

The whole of Poland is on the move
to be resettled on a racial basis -

those of German origin to Germany,

the Poles themselves
to designated areas,

a workforce without rights
in their own country.

At the bottom of the heap, the Jews.

By order, they will wear
the Star of David at all times.

There are heavy penalties
for not doing so.

Wearing it, they're easily identified.

"The Jews started the war."

"Now let them clear up the mess."?

German newsreel cameras
could show people back home

that Jews at last were being made
to do an honest day's work

to earn their daily bread.

My mother,
may her soul rest in peace,

asked me to go to the bakery
and stand there the whole night

to get a loaf of bread

so that there would be something to eat
at home the next day.

When I arrived, there were already
masses of people standing in line.

Among us, there were little children -
non-Jews, Poles - running around.

They pointed at each and every person,

"That's a Jew. That's a Jew.
Das Jude. Das Jude. Das Jude."

So that these people would be
taken out of line and not get bread.

My turn came.

I turned around and saw that the boy
was a friend with whom I played.

I said to him in Polish,
"What are you doing?"

His answer was, "I'm not your friend.
You're a Jew. I don't know you."

in 1940, Germany struck west.

The SS went too.

Here again, a brutal terror.

Less so, however,
than in eastern Europe.

Many in the west were Aryans too.

In Poland, in 1940 and '41,

Jews were ordered
into recreated medieval ghettos.

We took a small cart.
I, with my father,

built a small cart and we began to move.

Thousands and thousands, tens
of thousands of people, were walking,

taking their belongings with them, some
on their heads, their backs, shoulders.

There were children,
old people, babies, all of them,

like the exile of the peoples,

the exile from Egypt.

The ghettos were closed off
behind wire and long, high walls.

In Warsaw, a road divided the ghetto
in two

with a bridge over it
for the Jews to cross by.

There were
only two water pits in the ghetto.

The ghetto was small.

When they brought us into the ghetto,
they put three families into one room.

In one room, three families
with children. We never slept.

Starvation rations.

Harsh punishments for smuggling food.

For resistance or attempts to escape,

public execution.

June 1941.

Germany attacks Russia.

SS shock troops in the first wave.

Another racial war, more resettlement,

mass deportations, forced emigrations.

War against subhumans,
against Slavs and against Jews.

Millions of Jews.

We found a round figure
of three million Jews in Poland,

then immediately after that
came the Russian campaign

and we found another
five million Jews in Russia.

How on earth should we manage
to emigrate this eight million

by using these long and tiresome
official methods?

Now, with the war, we were cut off.
We had no way out.

To be rid of so many Jews...

kill them all.

The job was begun
by SS execution squads,

Einsatzgruppen.

They're shooting.

People are already lying dead.

My daughter was in my arms
the whole time.

Somehow, I found the strength
to carry her.

She was so close to me that
I couldn't undress. She wouldn't let me.

She said, "Let's run away. They're
killing us. Why do we just stand here?"

"Why do people stand and not run away?
Why are they standing?"

I said to her...
l could not really speak.

I think I said,
"Where are we going to run to?"

Some people did start to escape,
but they didn't let them.

There were many Germans guarding us.
There were many Germans.

Not only Germans, they even
got non-Jews from the towns together

to guard that we shouldn't escape.

There were some sort of policemen there.

So we undressed.
There was no alternative.

There were about 500 people altogether.

Our turn came.

I came up and saw how my father went,

how my mother is shot,

how my sisters are shot.

My sister was very pretty -
absolutely beautiful.

The German looked into her eyes
and she pleaded with him to let her go:

"Don't kill me. Just let me live."

Nothing helped. She was shot.

Then I, with my daughter in my arms,
came up.

He told me to put her down.
I wanted to, but she wouldn't let me.

She hid her head so as not to see
what was being done with her.

He forcibly, as far as I can remember,
took her, stood her up.

He shot, or didn't shoot.

I neither saw nor heard.

Then he shot me.

I stood there and heard a shot.

It didn't touch me.

Then again, a shot.

I fell.

I am lying in the pit

and I feel that I do feel something.

I didn't believe - I couldn't believe -
that I'm alive.

I was lying in a pit of blood,

a pit full of blood.

This is how I lay the whole night,
under corpses.

In August 1941,

Himmler visited
a concentration centre near Minsk.

It was crowded with Jews,
Russian prisoners of war

and others who were to die.

The SSReichsflihrerasked to see
for himself how the killing was done.

And there,
an open grave had been dug.

They had to jump into this
and lie face downwards.

And sometimes, when one or two rows
had already been shot,

they had to lie on the people
who'd been shot

and then they were shot
from the edge of the grave.

And Himmler had never seen
dead people before,

and, in his curiosity, he stood right up
at the edge of this open grave -

a sort of triangular hole -
and was looking in.

While he was looking in,
Himmler had the deserved bad luck

that from one or other of those
who'd been shot in the head,

he got a splash of brains on his coat,

and I think it also splashed
onto his face.

And he went very green and pale.

He wasn't actually sick,

but he was heaving
and turned around and swayed.

And then I had to jump forward
and hold him steady,

and then I led him away from the grave.

After the shooting, Himmler
gathered the shooting commanders.

Standing up in his car so he'd be higher
and be able to see the whole unit,

he made a speech.

He could not relieve them of this duty.
He could not spare them.

In the interests of the Reich -
in this planned thousand-year Reich -

in its first decisive great war
after the takeover of power,

they must do their duty.

But shooting was messy,
distressing, inefficient.

So vast an undertaking
required careful planning.

At Wannsee in January 1942,

Himmler's deputy, Heydrich,
convened a conference.

Senior civil servants attended
from various departments of state.

There were representatives of the
ministries of justice and of transport.

Formal minutes were kept,
and lists of Jews, country by country -

in Poland, over two million,
in Norway, 1300,

England, 330,000,

Russia, five million.

Over 11 million.

Eichmann, with his experience
in transportation,

was appointed permanent administrator

for this final solution
of the Jewish problem.

It had been decided that all the Jews
in Europe were to be gassed.

All Occupied Europe
had a concentration-camp system

based on the model camp, Dachau.

The camps were not only
an instrument of terror,

they were an important factor
in war production,

each with its cluster of labour camps
attached.

Now, they were also to be the means
of the Final Solution.

In the occupied east,
new camps were specially built

and old ones
equipped with new industrial capacity.

They were to be machines
to kill human beings by the million,

utilise the by-products,
dispose of the waste.

The camps were sited on railway routes
to facilitate transportation.

Eichmann chartered rolling stock
from the state railways.

The biggest camp was built astride the
main railway line from Cracow to Vienna,

in the outskirts of the Polish town
of Oswiecim -

Auschwitz.

In summer 1942, Himmler visited
Auschwitz to inspect progress,

to see for himself
how things were getting on.

Work was under way.

Manufacturers' tenders
had been called for, choices made.

Plans and architects" drawings

for the new combined gas chambers
and crematoriums were ready,

with their carefully designed chimneys
and specially patented furnaces.

Outside, construction workers -
slave labourers -

were striving to keep to their schedules

in the warm summer weather.

The gassing would be done
with poisoned pellets

developed from a commercial pesticide,
Zyklon B.

The pellets were shaken
through a roof grille.

Exposed to the air,
they gave off cyanide gas.

In the occupied territories,
the roundups began.

In some countries - this is Holland -
no stampede.

The Jews gathered for resettlement
in orderly fashion,

the order of their going
worked out by their community leaders.

Behind it all, the SS and the Gestapo.

Jews everywhere were told -
and they were ready to believe -

they were being transported
for resettlement.

In the starving ghettos of the east,
those who volunteered to go got bread.

To escape starvation, they willingly
paid railway fares for the journey.

Bewildered, under armed guard,
they walked to the station.

The cattle trucks were waiting.

There were soldiers on the platform.

They climbed aboard.

The minute we got in, the
minute they closed it on us with a bolt,

terrible cries began inside

in Polish, Yiddish, German -

pleading, requests:

"There's no air. We're suffocating."

"Suffocating. Suffocating.?

Here suddenly you had a hell on wheels,

and people suddenly stopped
to be preoccupied

either with the past or with the future,

but with surviving the journey.

The first to faint were
children, women, old men and women.

They all fell down like flies,
exactly like flies.

Father was standing next to me.

All of a sudden, I see that
he is falling. He has collapsed.

I cried, "Father, Father!"

Then I found a piece of wood
on the floor of the wagon.

I got up and began to beat
with the piece of wood.

It was a club or something.

I began to beat the people who were
standing around me in the wagon

so that they would make room for Father,
so that Father could get up.

I remember that I didn't care
about the suffering of others,

their cries, their threats,

only that Father should get up.

We had read the name of Auschwitz
on the label on the trucks -

in the trucks or the wagons. Trucks.

But nobody of us knew
what Auschwitz meant.

I could see two rows
of barbed wire

which were obviously electrical.

And then I saw a row of people
with carbines

and a row of dogs -
very disciplined dogs.

And I was more amused than uneasy.

I didn't think they would shoot me
because I couldn't see a reason for it.

The car was opened.
They undid the bolt.

The first moment it was opened,
there was a sudden gust of air.

It was good.
We began to throw out the dead bodies.

But all of a sudden, there were voices:

"Raus, raus. Schnell, schnell, schnell."?

"Quick, quick. Out, out, out."

I was afraid then for the first time,
and you know why?

There were flames until the sky

and a strange smell.

The smell ll remember from home when
my mother burns on Friday a chicken.

On the platform to greet
them, an SS reception committee.

New arrivals were divided
into two columns.

A quick medical inspection
by the camp doctors.

Those fit to work were put to one side.

In the other column, all the rest -

the old,

the sick,

the lame,

pregnant mothers,

women with children.

Some suspect the worst.
Most have no idea.

The idea of a mother being told,

after this terrible journey,
that her children are going to be gassed

was an utter outrageous idea
in her mind,

because after all that she'd suffered,

here comes a gangster
who wants to increase her suffering.

So she was tempted to go immediately
to the next neat officer

and say, "This man says, sir, that
my children are going to be gassed.?

And he says, "Madam,
do you think we are barbarians?"

Those to be gassed
were told they would be deloused

in the showers before starting work,

then they would rejoin their families.

They waited their turn,
sometimes for hours.

Hbblinger said to me,
"You are interested in the actions?"

I said, "Yes, very interested indeed."?

He said, "I'll take you with me
this evening."

The new arrivals had to get undressed.

When a certain number had gone inside,
they shut the doors.

And that happened three times.

Every time, Hoblinger had to go out to
his ambulance and they took out a tin.

One of the SSBlockfiihrersdid that.

Then he climbed up the ladder
and at the top there was a round hole,

and he opened a little iron door
and held the tin there and shook it.

And then he shut the little door again.

Then a fearful screaming started up.

Approximately, I would reckon, after
about ten minutes, it slowly went quiet.

I said to Hoblinger, "Can we get nearer
when they're taken out?" We went closer.

They opened the door - that was
the prisoners' squad who did that -

then a blue haze came out.

And I looked in and I saw a pyramid.

They'd all climbed on top of each other
until the last one stood on the top.

All one on top of the other. It was a
pointed heap. It all came up to a point.

And then the prisoners
had to go in and tear it apart.

They had to tug and pull very hard
to disentangle all these people.

Then we went back to the hall and it was
the turn of the last lot to undress -

the ones who'd managed
to hang back a bit all the time.

The prisoners had to check where small
children had been hidden and covered up.

They pulled them out and opened
the doors quickly again and whoosh,

they threw all the children in
and slammed the doors.

"Oh, ugh! I'm going to be sick," I said.

"I've never seen anything like it
in my life. It's absolutely terrible."

Imagine, when they threw the children
in, how the people inside screamed

because then they suddenly realised
what was happening.

And I said, "Karl, can we leave soon?
I can't stand it any more."

And he said,
"You do get used to anything in time."?

A few - the strong,
the young -

would work till they died.

Some would die of exhaustion,
some were beaten to death,

some, too weak to work another day,
were gassed in their turn.

And prisoners had other uses -

medical experiments.

Some, their hearts broken,
chose to die on the electrified wire.

Outside that wire, SS men,
free to go home to their families

at the end of the day's work.

And I remember when we passed
10,000 naked women on a frosty morning,

already sorted out, you see,
and put on the lorries.

And they knew -
they were all prisoners already -

and they knew that they are now going
to the gas chamber, and they were quiet.

Somehow, people were accustomed
to live with the moment,

with the knowledge that death will come.

But when the motors started -
you know, this noise -

this created a panic between the women,

and a terrible noise
went up from those lorries, you see.

The death cry of thousands
of young women

who were already reduced
to skeletons, and their...

their futile attempts, which they knew
by any logic that they can't succeed,

to jump out from the lorries
which take them to the gas chambers

which are only, perhaps,
less than a mile away,

and which were already stoked and the
fire was coming out from the chimneys.

This means everything was prepared.

This was the moment
when the rabbi's son spoke to his God:

"God, show them your power."

"This is against you."

And nothing happened.

And then he said, "There is no God."

We used to say, "Where is
the world? Where is the United States?"

"Where is Russia?"

"Do they know what is happening here
in the extermination camps at all?"

There had, of course,
been only too much evidence

of the persecution of the Jews, before
the war began, in Hitlerite Germany.

And then, as the war progressed,

some horrifying reports
began to come out.

At first it was very difficult,
naturally, to assess their accuracy.

They were, indeed, so horrible that it
was hard to believe they could be true.

Among the working prisoners,
a resistance movement.

They smuggled out photographs with
a plea to the great powers for help.

The evidence was so extensive,
one could hardly fail to give it credit,

and we decided that
one of the things we must do

was to make a joint statement

in each of our capitals
at the same time,

declaring what our information was

and what this horror was
that was being perpetrated,

and also making plain
our detestation of it

and our determination
that those responsible for it

should be punished
when the war was over.

And that we got agreement upon
after some negotiation,

and it was near the end of 1942

when I made the statement
in the House of Commons

with, I must say, a dramatic effect far
exceeding anything that I'd expected.

And the Speaker -
a very fine speaker, Algy FitzRoy -

he got up and he said,

"It is for the House to rise if it
so wishes to express its feelings."

And the whole House got up. Lloyd
George came to me afterwards and said:

"In all my years in parliament,
I have never seen anything like this."

He was deeply impressed, and so was .

Well, that was something
that we could do.

In April 1943,

the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose,

led by young men and women
who knew the truth about resettlement,

and determined to fight.

They had pitifully few arms.

They fought bravely.

It took the Germans 33 days
to crush the ghetto.

The survivors were marched off
to share the fate of those who had gone,

unresisting, before them.

Theresienstadt.

The Nazi cover story - resettlement in
the east - was elaborately documented.

This propaganda film made in 1943

was designed to show the German public
and the International Red Cross

what conditions in the resettlement
camps were really like.

By the time this film was released,

most of the people seen here
were already dead

in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

By 1944, the Germans
were losing the war.

The SS speeded up the rate of killing.

The railway tracks
now led straight to the gas chambers.

And still the trains rolled in
from Italy, from Greece, from Hungary.

They took us
to Crematoria Ill and IV.

There we saw hell on this earth -

large piles of dead people,

and people dragging these bodies
to a long pit,

about 30 metres in length
and 10 metres in width.

There was a huge fire there
made of trees.

On the other side, fat was being
taken out of this pit with a bucket.

We immediately had to begin working.

Four people would take hold
of one dead person.

But the SS came and said,
"No. Each one of you will take one."

He showed us how
with a simple walking stick.

One was to take the body under the chin,

put the stick on the neck
and drag the body to the pit,

like you would drag a rag
or a piece of wood.

At the edge of the pit, were still more
people who pushed the dead into the pit.

Some of our group threw themselves
and jumped into the pit alive.

They apparently thought it better to be
burned alive rather than do such a job.

There were only four or five SS men
altogether.

They were so well-organised that there
were just four or five of them with us.

But there were electric fences, and
beyond this fence there were SS guards.

Escape was impossible.

After a week, they suddenly
took me one night to Crematorium 1.

There, the whole job
was more mechanical.

All around, there were
water installations as if for showers.

Everyone crowded around these showers.
They still didn't know.

Some who did not dare to believe
that they were going to be poisoned.

They would put about two thousand,
two and a half thousand people in there.

If there wasn't room,
the small children would be thrown

on top of the people's heads.

There were invalids.

They would take out their service cards
showing that they had fought in WWI

with all kinds of distinctions and
medals which they had from that time.

They shouted, "We fought for Germany,
now they're going to burn us, kill us."

"This is impossible.
We protest against such a thing.?

But everyone just laughed at them.

They didn't take it seriously,
these SS men.

They laughed at the whole thing.

There were invalids I helped to undress
as they couldn't do it by themselves.

There were many of us who helped.
I would talk to these people.

There were cases
where I saw acquaintances.

My heart wouldn't let me walk over
to them to let them recognise me.

No one who hasn't gone through such
a thing can imagine the will to live,

what a moment of life is.

Every person, without exception,

is capable of doing the worst things
just to live another minute.

Many women miscarried
during the poisoning.

People hit each other.
People scratched with their nails.

There were fingernail marks on people.

Everyone wanted to survive,
but it was impossible there.

We went in to take out all the corpses.

We took them up by lifts to the ovens.

Near the ovens upstairs, there was a man
who removed gold teeth and false teeth.

They would shave the women's hair

and look for valuables in
the most intimate of places,

especially on the women.

In the oven,
it took 15 minutes to burn them.

Only a few ashes were left
from all those corpses.

The industry of death
had useful by-products.

Women's hair was packed in bales,
gold teeth melted down,

artificial limbs and spectacle lenses
recycled for the German war machine.

It all helped.

In July 1944,

the Russians liberated Lublin
in eastern Poland.

Close by, they found
the extermination camp at Majdanek,

where tens of thousands had died.

The proofs of horror were all too clear.

Only 170 miles away,

the ovens of Auschwitz
were busier than ever.

There were two shifts
at work,

from six in the morning to six at night.

I was present when they brought
the Gypsies one night for burning,

for poisoning.

It was a terrible sight.

There were cries to the sky.

The cries in the bunker,
in the crematorium,

in the gas chamber, were horrible.

Horrible.

I still wonder today
how God didn't hear these cries.

The German army
was now retreating on all fronts,

leaving fire and destruction behind.

It tried to destroy evidence
of the camps,

pulling up railway lines,
dismantling equipment.

Yet even now, Himmler urged
the master race to fight on.

Defeat was unthinkable,
their task unfinished.

Eichmann said at that time
six million people had been killed,

four million in concentration camps
and similar setups,

and two million by shooting -
Einsatzkommandos.

And he told me at that time...
It was fantastic, really.

I had thought a lot of people
had been killed, but six million?

Well, he said - and just imagine,
that was still too few for Himmler.

Himmler said to me,
"There must be more than that.(Trademark)

And he set up his own statistics unit -

today, one would say computer people -
who were to check up on this.

The Russians reached
Auschwitz in January 1945.

The Germans had moved most
of the surviving prisoners back west,

into Germany.

Some, too old or too sick to be moved,
remained.

And there were the relics and belongings
of those who had been brought here.

Then rescuers reached
the camps in Germany itself,

where, by now, the survivors of the
extermination camps had been abandoned.

They found the stench
of rotting corpses, cholera, typhus.

Many who were rescued
were too weak to survive.

Some lived to bear witness.

When the Americans entered,
I weighed 42 kilos.

I was skin and bones.

I walked around the camp naked.

I had a belt with a plate,

spoon and revolver.

This was all my property
after the liberation.

I bless every day
that I continue to live,

because every day that I live
is pure profit.

I could say that today I'm 27 years old.

The years before the camp don't count,

as I was dead in the camp
and reborn after the liberation.