Appendix 2 - Testimonies

"Finally they brought us to Pietrasze field, a big group of Ukrainian hooligans forced us to run to a field, they tortured us, and beat us mercilessly… took off boots from the dead people. They pierced the women with spears; many choked from the oppressive and dense condition. If one person fell then the entire group collapsed on the person, and tanks surrounded us. It was impossible to escape. […] The next day the murderous Nazis gathered all the small children in one spot, and whoever ran back to their parents was caught by his neck with a hooked pole and thrown to the ground… the screams of the children and their mothers still echo in my mind. They ran the children like a flock of sheep back to the ghetto, and kept them there for two weeks."
Phina Korovski (Bialystok Jew)

"Before the final action , the authorities demanded that we supply one thousand two hundred children. I collected children from orphanages and other places, and we traveled together with them, fifteen nurses and myself. […] We received sacks of bread from the Judenrat as provisions for the journey. I said to the children: If the train travels northwards, jump off and try to run away. If it travels westwards, stay. The train traveled to the west. During the journey, I gave the German guards money and valuables in exchange for hot water. The train arrived at Teresienstadt and the children entered the camp, but the Germans refused to accept the small child and she remained with me. We adults were sent back to the train, and it was then that the conductor said to me: you are going to Auschwitz. […] In Auschwitz, I worked in the camp office and was able to see the list of names of persons who were arriving. One day, a transport arrived with "our children". They were all led to the crematoria".
Hadassah Sprung-Levkowitz (a Jewish nurse traveling with the children on the train)     

“We didn’t know exactly how many children there were. It was impossible to count them because of  the chaos around and the children’s cries and despair. Finally, we managed to put 30-40 children in each room (of the school). The were laid down on hospital sheets, mattresses and anything else at hand. […] With the help of my co-workers we organized something to drink and some bowls with warm porridge. The older children helped us to feed the younger ones.”
Tobias Citron (a doctor taking care of the children in the school in Bialystok)

“At some point an order arrived to put the children in pairs, the older children were supposed to take care of the younger. Thus formed group set off towards the railway station ‘Polesie’. The adults didn’t help the children, they were walking separately. At the end of the transport there were a few primitive horse carts with the smallest children, and the whole group was surrounded by the Ukrainian-Byelorussian police guards. The children were given a few stale loaves of bread for the trip. Nobody cared about anything to drink for the children, not even water, and the August that year was very hot.”
Tobias Citron (a doctor taking care of the children in the school in Bialystok)

“They led us to the railway station where there was a special train waiting. We got on, they handed out the bread for everybody and the train moved. After two days of journey we arrived in Theresienstadt [Terezin]. There the children stayed in the carriages. The adults were moved to a different train supposedly to prepare a camp for the children. We were taken to Oswiecim.”
Hadassah Sprung-Levkowitz (a Jewish nurse traveling with the children on the train)   

“Prior to the children’s arrival, there was a great deal of rushed work done outside the walls of the Ghetto, in a place called Kreta. A special group of male inmates, constantly accompanied by 55 guards, was putting up wooden barracks for an unknown purpose.

With the Ghetto under strict curfew, the best doctors and nurses were picked out from among the inmates of Terezin, all those chosen having worked until then with children of the Ghetto in some capacity. They were rounded up and taken outside of the Ghetto walls to the newly erected barracks, to meet these strange children — that had arrived no one knew from where.”
Hanna Greenfield ( a Jew from Theresienstadt ghetto)

“I was told that a newly arrived transport of approximately a thousand children from Poland was to be processed. The night-time schedule did not seem too unusual, because the bathing schedule at the Zentralbad for the regular Theresienstadt camp inmates was always fixed many months in advance and fully booked well ahead of time. So this extra-curricular schedule made sense.
I was quite excited to be a part of this special intake procedure, anxious to see the strange Polish children. It was a treat and a privilege to have been asked, a break in my dreary daily routine.”
Charlotte Opfermann (a Jewish nurse helping the children to wash in Theresienstadt)       

“Suddenly, a column of bedraggled children appeared, hundreds of them between the ages of four to twelve years, holding each other’s hands. The older ones helped the small ones, their little bodies moving along in the pouring rain. A column of marching ghosts, with wet rags clinging to their emaciated bodies, accompanied by a large number of SS men.
Were these the enemies of the Third Reich to be so fiercely guarded? The children were led to a building where disinfection and delousing of inmates was performed. Suddenly they started to shout and cry: "Gas! Gas! Gas!" They huddled together, refusing to be washed or have their wet rags changed for dry clothing. Nobody understood the children’s reaction. What kind of children are these? Where did they come from? What are they talking about?
The children, looking like scarecrows, refused to undress. They held on to their dirty clothing, the older stepping in front of the young ones, protecting them with their bodies, clutching their hands and comforting those that were crying. Their clothing permeated with lice, their bodies full of sores, these children refused to wash.”
Hanna Greenfield ( a Jew from Theresienstadt ghetto)                          

“Food, clothing, and medicine were immediately delivered to the children, all under the supervision of the SS men. No one was allowed to talk to them. Yet as time went by, the children told their horror stories to the doctors and nurses, who, in time, defying German death threats, smuggled these stories back to the Ghetto.[…].
The children came from Bialystok Ghetto in Poland. They spoke Polish and Yiddish. They were terribly frightened and in a state of shock.”
Hanna Greenfield ( a Jew from Theresienstadt ghetto)

“And then, one day, they all disappeared in the same way they had arrived. In the morning of the 5th of October, 1943, the wooden barracks at Kreta were empty. Again, through the Ghetto grapevine, we, the inmates, learned that all the doctors and nurses, on leaving the Ghetto in an exchange deal, had been ordered to remove the yellow stars Jews wore on every garment and had been forced to sign a pledge of silence as to what they had seen and lived through, and were on their way to Switzerland to be exchanged through the Red Cross for German prisoners of war.”
Hanna Greenfield (a Jew from Theresienstadt ghetto)

“The assisting personnel didn’t open the carriages’ doors, they remained locked. The inside was deathly silent so first we thought there were some goods for the SS inside. The doors were open at last during lunchtime when the food was brought. The picture we saw exceeded our expectations to a great deal. Then we could see it was a children’s transport, but what these children looked like! These poor creatures consisted of skeletons with the faces of old people, who were hardly able to stand straight. And their clothes! They were just torn rags hanging from their small bodies. Really the picture of poverty and despair! The ones who brought the food were to leave it in front of the train and go back. Only the children were allowed to go out and eat. But you could not call it ‘eating’. The children swallowed the food like animals, the stronger pushed away the younger to get faster to the thin soup. It was the sign of how hungry the creatures were. After the meal the doors were locked. The was a guard in front of each of them. What was that all about? At midnight the children were let off the train.”
Dr. Karl Loesten-Levenstein ( a doctor in Theresienstadt ghetto)

“The ones that were suspected of being ill with infectious diseases were taken by the SS-men to the ‘Small Fortress’, the prison 10 minutes away from the ghetto and killed there. We found out about it later from the doctors whose duty was to check if the orders were carried out”.
Hanna Grreenfield ( a Jew from Theresienstadt ghetto)

“When they reached the bathing place, the bigger children didn’t want to go to the shower room and pushed the weaker so that they checked the showers. However, after checking them and finding that they were safe, they agreed to be washed. In time, they became more trustful and whispered the stories from before a few days when Germans gathered all Jews in one market square and after a while randomly shot them dead. The few who supposedly survived, were locked in a building called ‘Bath House’ and gassed there. The children described other horrible things and only then we could understand the reasons for their deathly terror.”
Dr. Karl Loesten-Levenstein (a doctor in Theresienstadt ghetto)

"When he was after an operation (Mr. Tabak, a member of Sonderkommando in Birkenau), in secret he told me that on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1943, the biggest Jewish holiday, arrived a children’s transport at the crematorium, with no adults. All of the children were taken straight to the gas chamber and then burnt on a field near the crematorium. This fact became a huge burden to all who knew about it.”
Tobias Citron (a doctor taking care of the children in the school in Bialystok)

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