At the end of 1943 the Bochnia ghetto was basically done with, liquidated. They took everything that was still there to the trains. Everything went to Germany, all neatly packed up. During the ghetto liquidation there was a case where a Jewish policeman escaped from the ghetto. His mother lived there, Mrs. Rothkopf, a very elderly lady. And so the camp commandant, Müller, took her out and killed her. Oberstrumführer Müller. Those were the two incidents when he personally shot someone. That time, and the case of the woman who wasn’t supposed to be in Ghetto A. [“That’s not true, Dad.” Müller, although he was a nothing, is well known to Attorney Perl. People testified that he shot lots of people. True, he wasn’t as murderous as some others, he was just a minor and obedient SS man who did not take his own initiative or commit extraordinary acts, but he did his job. When necessary, he shot people.] It’s fate, the way one person is saved just because someone else isn’t. Since the son had run away and Müller had killed the mother, he was missing two people to make the numbers work, and numbers were important to the Germans. Just then they caught a woman I knew, Mrs. Schwimmer, and her daughter, who were hiding. They wanted to shoot them right then and there, but Müller added them to the group to replace the missing two, so it worked out all right for him. And that was how Mrs. Schwimmer was saved, and she lived in Israel with her daughter until she was a hundred and three. Fate, that’s what it is. But another son of hers was killed back in the first Aktion. He was an ordained rabbi, and during the Aktion he ran to the Judenrat as if it were an embassy that could save him. They shot him on the steps, and his glasses broke and pierced his eyes. He lay there like that. On the steps, face up.
In any case, they liquidated the ghetto. They put us all into one big house. One fine day they said, “Everybody out.” They put us into train cars and took us to the Plaszow concentration camp. That was at the beginning of 1944, the winter of ’43–’44. When we arrived in Plaszow, they put me and my father to work in the paper mill, and my mother and sister worked as seamstresses. They separated the men from the women, and only occasionally would we see my mother and sister behind the fence. At some point they needed lots of tools on the front, like pickaxes and spades. So they transferred all the men from the paper mill to the carpentry shop. The food was indescribable. There was hardly any of it. There was constant turnover of people. Some they sent away, some they killed.
The camp commandant was Goeth, Amon Goeth, who had an ‘illustrious’ career. He was huge, almost six-five, a sadist and a murderer. They said he was even crazier before we arrived. By the time we got there at the end of ’43, he had already calmed down. Not that it helped us — he put the fear of death in us. I was a boy and I couldn’t look at him…I just couldn’t. He was truly the Angel of Death. The minute we saw him walk outside, we knew it would end badly. He was…simple…and he had assistants who were no less cruel than him. Sometimes all sorts of senior officials would come to the camp, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. They came and went. [Sometimes I think it is because he went through the Shoah that Dad finds it difficult to understand. He survived on instinct, not thought. Germans who shot were bad; Germans who didn’t — didn’t count. But he gave no thought to a German who passed by in his car for a moment, looked around and drove on without a word. Dad couldn’t pay any attention to whoever wasn’t shooting or abusing him. That German in the car scanned the square and thought to himself something like, “There are two hundred more than the estimate here. The train cars won’t be big enough. If Spauser had worked faster with the transport from Jeklowicze we could have added another car, but now it’s too late. We’ll have to knock off a hundred here and squeeze in the rest. We’ll send another telegram to Spauser and a reminder to HQ. We can’t have things held up here.” My father was too close, too persecuted, and the evil that concerned him was the simple kind, the obvious kind. But my thoughts go to that other evil, the one sitting in the car wearing wire-rimmed glasses.]
We worked in the carpentry shop. The foreman, I don’t know his name, but he was known as ‘Mongol.’ He was a character. When we worked the night shifts it was good because there were air-raid sirens. The Allies were already bombing, and we hardly worked at night because when they bombed the lights were turned off and we couldn’t work. But the work was very hard and very high-pressure. Next to the carpentry shop there was an execution area. They used a very nasty word to refer to it, ‘Chujowa Gorka,’ which means “Dick Hill.” And that’s where they held executions. We saw a lot of them. At some point they started burning the corpses there. At first they buried them, but when the front got closer they started burning them because they wanted to hide that anything had happened there. They started taking the bodies out and there was an awful stench from the rotting corpses and the fire. We worked very nearby, about fifty yards away. Then they moved the execution place to a different area, on the other side of the carpentry shop.
One day I wanted to take a little rest and I hid in a pile of chopped wood. They used to put the logs out to dry and there was a gap inside the heap, where I sat. And then I saw that they were bringing…it must have been Germans. First, a German company in brown uniforms brought someone and shot him. A German in a brown uniform. Then came a company in black uniforms and shot someone in a black uniform. It was some sort of internal execution, but I almost died of fear, because if they had seen that I was watching it could have ended badly.
On May seventh, 1944, there was a big Selektion. We stood naked all day, and a doctor came, whose name I can’t remember. [Attorney Perl remembers his name. He was Doctor Blancke, Hauptsturmführer Blancke.] He stood there in a huge fur coat and we stood naked all day, and it was raining, and he pointed with a little pencil and said, “Links, Rechts, Links, Rechts”—left, right, left, right. I, of course, went to the Links because I was a runt. The ones who went to the left were put on the list, and that was it, they were listed for the transport. The transport was a week later, and whoever was listed had to go. Somehow on that day they also wrote my mother down in the Selektion in the women’s camp. And I got a cold that day. The Germans didn’t mess around — if you had a cold, you went to the hospital. They were afraid of epidemics. After two or three days in the hospital, I felt better. I was just a kid, and one of the Germans, Doctor Kalfus, was building himself a fish pond next to his office. I came out and started bringing him cement and rocks. I later found out that he was the number one murderer in the hospital. He would inject kerosene into patients’ veins to kill them. Yes, a real criminal.
The fifteenth of May arrived, a week after the Selektion, and everyone who had been listed was called to come to the transport. Of course my name was called out too, because I was on the list. They called and called and called but I was saved because I was in the hospital. Then they came and took the whole hospital away. When they came to get me, there was a Jewish doctor there who really liked me. Well, I was a kid, and he said something to Kalfus. Kalfus remembered that I had helped him, so he said, “He’s still young, he can work,” and they let me stay. Now, you see, if I had been healthy they would have taken me to begin with. If I had been sick they would have taken me from the hospital. There were about nine hundred people there, and out of all those people I was the only one who remained.