Statement
Written with Benjamin Lewin, born 17. 8. 1926, residing in Prague I., Benediktská 4., former prisoner of the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Čechovice, Gross-Rosenu, Buchenwalde, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, and Belzig concentration camps. Profession electrician, nationality Jewish.
On September 28th, 1944, I left on the first men’s labor transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. After 3 weeks in this hell, we were transported again, this time to the labor camps in Čechovice in Silesia. The transport contained 300 people. Here, we worked 12 hours a day clearing away the rubble after bombings. Housing was slightly better than in the other places. We lived in a former stable that had central heating pipes running through it. The work, besides the long working hours, was very hard, and there was very little food. We received 1 soup, 50 dkg of bread, and 2 dkg of margarine a day. That was all. Clothing was threadbare, few people had shoes, and we worked outside in the freezing cold with no shoes on our feet. By coincidence, I managed to get myself accepted as a stubendienst because I was young and I can say with certainty that this saved my life. Out of the entire transport of 300 people, only 14 survived and only those who worked at home. My father also died in Čechovice from pneumonia, as did so many others. The front was approaching, and the Germans wanted to evacuate. And so they did. On January 15th, they led us away from Čehovice and we walked for 120 km. We made it to Loslau, also in Silesia, where we were loaded onto train cars and then we rode on. After 5 days, we arrived in Gross-Rosen. The journey was awful. 120 of us were stuffed into 1 car, they didn’t give us any food, and we stayed alive only because we begged or stole food from people at the train stations. In Gross-Rosen, they brought us to a house where we slept on the bare earth since there was no floor. After 4 days, they transported us to Buchenwalde. Compared to the journey and the troubles we had already faced, we fared better here. After 3 weeks, they transported us again. I found myself in the convict Hermann-Göring-Werke commando in Halberstadt. This was a convict camp for the Berlin Moabit prison, which was bombed, and when they ran out of convicts to add to the labor group of former thieves and murderers, who perished in high numbers here, they simply replenished it with Jews. We worked in a tunnel. We went to work early in the morning when it was still dark, there was no daylight in the tunnel, and we returned from work in the evening when it was dark once again. This was the hardest work ever. We were hungry and freezing. We didn’t see any light for 2 months. Due to my youth I was again able to get easier work. I tricked the Steiger by denying that I was Jewish and so I was given lighter work, during which I was able to observe the work in the tunnel. The work was closely monitored. If someone was too weak or tired to continue, they were thrown into a barrel of water and left there until they drowned. They told us that they had committed sabotage and that sabotage had to be punished. After several hours, the barrel was loaded onto a cart with rocks and dumped together with the rocks into an embankment, which was then flattened. Hundreds of people were buried here. I was the only one from our transport to survive.
They evacuated us further away ahead of the approaching front, and the former convicts and I, the only one from our transport, made it to Magdeburg, where we were forced to search for unexploded bombs after air strikes. Thankfully, we were soon moved, and in Belzig, which was our next stop, we were liberated.
As a result of my troubles, I became a so-called Muselmann. After liberation, I became ill and spent several months in a hospital. By the time I returned to Prague nobody imagined that I could have survived.
Lewin Benjamin
Statement accepted by:
B. Gerzonová
Signature of witnesses:
Alex. Schmiedt
Helena Schicková
On behalf of the Documentation campaign:
Scheck
On behalf of the archive:
22. X. 1945
Alex. Schmiedt