Leon Niescior - I Survived Hell on Earth

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHINGwww.picklepartnerspublishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books picklepublishing@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1956 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

I SURVIVED HELL ON EARTH

LEON NIESCIOR

Contents

This book is dedicated to the ashes and shadows of the innocent human beings exterminated in Hitlers concentration camps.

LEON NIESCIOR

Author

In order that there be easier understanding of the unrestrained atrocities perpetrated with German consent, atrocities which I saw and also experienced as a political offender in the Auschwitz (Owicim) concentration camp, I decided in this modest foreword to corroborate the statements made in this book as to statistics and as to the description of the brutalities which took place there.

Oswiecim (Auschwitz) is situated on the river Zola, a tributary to the Vistula, lying 50 kilometers west of Cracow in Poland.

This prison camp for political offenders quartered prisoners from every country in Europe. It was occupied and directed under German authority during World War II.

The most dreaded fixtures in that camp were the crematoria, which consisted of an enormous stove and huge gas chamber. The crematories had 46 burners which in 15 minutes disposed of 250 persons, a thousand per hour, and in 24 hours cremated twenty thousand bodies. The gas chamber, deceptively built to resemble a huge bath house accommodated 500 people. The shower baths had an installation of a gas Cyklon B (H. C. N.), deadly and fatal in a few minutes of inhalation.

To this gas chamber and crematoria a side track railroad spur was installed on which inclosed cars guarded by storm troopers ran, bringing prisoners from all parts of Europe.

In preparation for the gas ordeal, the prisoners were deprived of their clothing and of all their possessions, then all, men, women and children stood stark naked in an open area. In groups of 500 and at bayonet point they were driven into the gas chamber for annihilation.

Rather often it happened that at a time like this the stimulated, besottedly drunk S. S. troops selected from the naked throng, shapely, young lovely girls and violated them in the sight of their parents in a most bestial and perverted manner, which one with moral sense could not even describe or want to do so.

After gassing, special details of prisoners were forced to remove the bodies after having extracted gold crowns, bridge-work and valuable fillings from the bodies. Often during this operation the jaw bone was pulled out, too. Womens long hair was cut off purposely. When this desecration was finished, other prisoner detail loaded the corpses destined to go to the crematory fires for disposal. If any oil from the bodies dripped down during the process, it was salvaged by running it into a reservoir to be used in the manufacture of soap. The ashes were fed to the fish and used mainly as fertilizer for soil enrichment.

In the year span 1941 to November 1945, 978,000 persons mainly Jews and Poles were destroyed, others were of Russian, French and still other nationalities.

In case the gas chamber and crematory were overtasked, machine guns were used in mass murder, killing the victims as they stood beside the trenches, which they themselves had been compelled to dig and into which their bodies fell. Naphtha was sprayed over the bodies and flame-throwers were used in the burning process.

Block No. 10 was another spot of torture and savagery. To the year 1943, mass sex assaults on the women prisoners were committed by the S. S. men, who selected the victims for themselves from this camp. Their victims were the shapely, nicely-featured girls prisoners of the ages 14, 16 and 18 years.

One cannot describe the orgies in this place. Suffice it to say that these sex acts surpassed the understanding of even sex perverts. The innocent victims of these outrages later stood before the firing squad and were cremated or gassed and cremated. During two years of these barbaric violences thousands of young and lovely innocents of many nations became the victims, however most of them belonged to Jewish families.

At the beginning of 1943 this same block was renamed The Educational Institute, in which experimental research, supposedly medical, was done on the prisoner population. This research in as far one could call it such, was divided into four divisions:

First Tuberculosis and cancer experiments;

Second The impregnation and sterilization of women;

Third Experiments on humans in the area of flight;

Fourth Experiments in serums and blood disorders (hematology).

The institute director was Dr. Glauberg. His assistants in the endeavor were doctors: Wirth, Enters, Weber, Schmidt, Rode, Koenig, Thilo, Klein, Fisher, Mengele, Larg, Deintsbach, Heschel and Wutke. Besides these mentioned, many practitioners of the prison body were forced to assist them.

The victims of these experiments, as well as the physician prisoners involved in this work and who knew too much about it, got their reward before the firing squad or were gassed or were given a phenol injection to the heart. Dr. Samuel, a professor of medicine at the University of Prague, came to his end by this means.

A general estimate of the victims of both sexes in the above noted experiments at Oswiecim alone, involved 3,272 individuals of which a very small number remained alive.

Block 11, the penal block, another fearsome place, was situated in an isolated part of the camp. It was especially well guarded. In it were confined the intelligentsia, scholars, the religious, community leaders, officers and influential persons. Under no pretext could the prisoner leave the block. His special insignia of distinction was a red wheel patch on his chest and back easily distinguished for at least thirteen meters distance.

To these people was given a less than meager diet. Breakfast was a quarter liter of unsweetened, so called coffee. Dinner consisted of three quarters liter of watery soup made of nettles and most often without any stock or fat. Supper gave him twenty grams of bread with a quarter liter of the usual insipid coffee.

However ill fed these people were, hard labor was expected of them. Hard, exhausting and non-productive work calculated to pass the time and wear out the spirit to the tune of beatings, if the overseers mood was such. Most often these persons were forced to drag a several ton roller for road leveling at a gallop. If one fell exhausted or hurt by a beating the roller went on over him crushing him to a pulp.

Sleep was limited to six hours maximum and as often as not an alarm was rung for physical exercise such as stretching up and down, jumping, rolling over on the ground unclothed, despite the weather. Several hours were spent in this way.