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Hershl Sperling
Personal Testimony of the Treblinka Death Camp
Hershl Sperling and his family lived in the Czestochowa ghetto on Wilsona
Street near the ghetto wall.
What follows below is his account of the deportation and incarceration in the
Treblinka death camp
Czestochowa Wartime Town Map showing Wilsona Street (click text to enlarge)
In September 1942, the deportation of the Jews of Czestochowa began. We had
already sensed it coming weeks before. The town was surrounded by SS units.
We are all woken from sleep before daybreak by the noise of wild shooting,
vehicles and people screaming and wailing.
We look out into the street and see the SS men savagely bursting into
people’s houses and driving the occupants out into the street with blows
from their rifle-butts. We watch them arbitrarily dividing up people after a
superficial glance... (more)
Fritz Hensen
Report of My Activity by the SS Special Detachment in Kulmhof (Chelmno)
[photos added to enhance the text]
Rheinberg the 13.7.1945
SS and German workmen at Chelmno
Name: Fritz Hensen
Nationality: German
Date of Birth: 29.11.1920
Profession: Police File Sergeant
From 25.4.1940 to 2.7.1940 Police Training Battalion in Pohrlitz
2.7.1940 to March 1941 SS Police Division at Katscher Oberschl.
25.3.1941 to January 1945 Police administration in Litzmannstadt
From the Police administration I was assigned in July 1942 to December 1943
to... (more)
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The Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Baltic States
Eyewitness Statements - 1941 -1943
Tadeusz Zaderecki a Polish writer who lived in Lvov recalled:
A Jewish woman is terrorized and beaten in Lvov
A rabble of drunken farmers flowed in from the countryside in Lvov. Something
was about to happen and it was planned. The prisons that the Soviets left
behind opened and dozens, hundreds of mutilated bodies of political prisoners
were revealed.
Who carried out the murders? The Jews! The fact that the murdered included
Jews made no difference to anyone. In front... (more)
Dr Elchanan Elkes chairman of the Kovno Judenrat
Letters to London
1943 - the chairman writes to his children about life in the Kovno ghetto
Dr Elchanan Elkes of the Kovno Judenrat
My beloved son and daughter!
I am writing these lines, my dear children, in the vale of tears of
Vilijampole, Kovno Ghetto, where we have been for over two years. We have now
heard that in a few days our fate is to be sealed. The Ghetto is to be
crushed and torn asunder.
Whether we are all to perish, or whether a few of us are to survive, is in
God’s hands, we fear that only those capable of slave l... (more)
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Sobibor survivor Thomas Tovi Blatt confronts Death Camp Commandant Karl
Frenzel (forced labour section) in 1983
Thomas Tovi Blatt (left) and Karl Frenzel meet in a hotel room in Hagen
Germany in 1983
Thomas Blatt: Here you are drinking beer. With that smile on your face you
could be anybody’s neighbour, anybody’s fellow sporting club member.
But you are not anybody. You are Karl Frenzel, the SS commandant. You ranked
third in the chain of command at the extermination camp of Sobibor. You were
the commandant of Lager 1. Do you remember me?
Karl Frenzel: Not exactly ... (more)