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Joseph Gringlas - January 22, 1993

And then and you arrived in Birkenau in the day time.

Mm-hm, yeah, it was daytime.

When, when they opened the doors to the box car, do you rememberwhat you thought or what you felt, what it, what it was like to you-suddenly,the doors are open, what did you see? What, what feelings did you have?

The feeling was that, that that's, that's it. You know, we hadthe feeling that we are going. Altogether feeling, that this is the end, that'sthe end of our, of our road.

But what was it like when the light came in? I mean it musthave been dark in the car.

Yeah, the car was dark but there was some little opening, youknow.

And then suddenly the doors open.

Yeah, that would be it.

What did you hear, what did you see?

A lot of noise. A lot of noise. Eh, German, you know, "Raus,raus, raus!" to get out of because you're packed and it's hard to get up andyou-there's no room to get out. And with and with uh, with the dogs, you know.

What, what were your first impressions of the...

Impression was, the impression was that uh, that's, that's theend of it. That's the impression because we saw what was going on with SSstanding and, and, and a lot of us as we selecting to go on one side or onthe other side. So we knew that, we know that there's something going on withgas chambers.

Did you see the chimneys?

Chimneys, big chimneys.

What did you think the chimneys were about?

Chimneys uh, was uh, we knew that they were burning the corpse.

Was this?

Yeah, the smell was terrible. And at night, at night in the eveningwe saw mostly red sky from, from the smoke on the red-burning flesh.

You weren't with your brother at Birkenau? Not in the arrival.

No, no, in, in, in Birkenau I was not, my brother was in Buna,remember I told you.

Buna. So you arrived alone.

Yeah, I arrived alone at-in Blizyn.

Were you with any, was, did you have a friend, someone from...

My hometown? There were some few, yeah.

Did you talk to each other on the platform? Were there lotsof people?

Yeah eh, the people on the eh, from the, from the, in the train,I mean that what we, we, cattle train like, called that, it uh, we talkingabout that, we knew, but whether, it was, we talking about-there was no talkabout there's going to be out of it. We talked about another day or so andyou'll be gone, you know. There was no talk about, about, of life. It wasmostly of death.

Were there prisoners in uniforms on the platform? Do you rememberseeing any?

Yeah, there were prisoners already, yeah, for helping out, forthe-'cause they're helping other people pushing them where to, different directions,they helped out.

You didn't talk to any of them.

No, we didn't uh, didn't talk to them. But eh, no, in eh, eh,we from Blizyn, you see, we came already, men, so, there was. But other trainscame with kids, children. It was terrible. Separating, taking the kids outof mothers' arms. Anyway-torn, torn away like, like it would be like a pieceof bread. But at the time when we came we just were men from Blizyn.