Free The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert

merely obeyed the law of nature; it rose in shining splendour and its rays fell on our tortured bodies and aching hearts.
    I was jolted from my thoughts by the command: ‘Attention!’ A group of sergeants and Ukrainian guards, headed by Franz with his dog Barry stood before us. Franz announced that he was about to give a command. At a signal from him, they began to torture us anew, blows falling thick and fast. Our faces and bodies were cruelly torn, but we all had to keep standing erect, because if one so much as stooped over but a little, he would be shot because he would be considered unfit for work.
    When our tormentors had satisfied their thirst for blood, we were divided into groups. I was put with a group that was assigned to handle the corpses. The work was very hard, because we had to drag each corpse, in teams of two, for a distance of approximately three hundred metres. Sometimes we tied ropes around the dead bodies to pull them to their graves.
    Suddenly, I saw a live woman in the distance. She was entirely nude; she was young and beautiful, but there was a demented look in her eyes. She was saying something to us, but we could not understand what she was saying and could not help her. She had wrapped herself in a bed sheet under which she was hiding a little child, and she was frantically looking for shelter. Just then one of the Germans saw her, ordered her to get into a ditch and shot her and the child. It was the first shooting I had ever seen.
    I looked at the ditches around me. The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 metres. I stood over one of them, intending to throw in one of the corpses, when suddenly a German came up from behind and wanted to shoot me. Iturned around and asked him what I had done, whereupon he told me that I had attempted to climb into the ditch without having been told to do so. I explained that I had only wanted to throw the corpse in.
    Next to nearly every one of us there was either a German with a whip or a Ukrainian armed with a gun. As we worked, we would be hit over the head. Some distance away there was an excavator which dug out the ditches.
    We had to carry or drag the corpses on the run, since the slightest infraction of the rules meant a severe beating. The corpses had been lying around for quite some time and decomposition had already set in, making the air foul with the stench of decay. Already worms were crawling all over the bodies. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away. Thus we worked from dawn to sunset, without food or water, on what some day would be our own graves. During the day it was very hot and we were tortured by thirst.
    When we returned to our barracks at night, each of us looked for the men we had met the day before but, alas, we could not find them because they were no longer among the living. Those who worked at assorting the bundles fell victim far more frequently than the others. Because they were starved, they pilfered food from the packages taken from the trains, and when they were caught, they were marched to the nearest open ditch and their miserable existence was cut short by a quick bullet. The entire yard was littered with parcels, valises, clothing and knapsacks which had been discarded by the victims before they met their doom. 15
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    Meanwhile, in the part of Poland which had been annexed to Greater Germany, the deportations spread, preceded by scenes of terror. At Lask, on August 24, the Jews were locked into a church. One woman gave birth to a baby. Both she and the newborn child were killed. Three Jews managed to escape. Of the rest, about eight hundred were sent to factories in the Lodz ghetto, more than two and a half thousand to Chelmno, where they were gassed. 16
    That same day, at Zdunska Wola, 1,100 Jews were driven to the Jewish cemetery. Dora Rosenboim was with her brother. ‘Being illwith a lung inflammation and very weak and not able to run, he