Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Fred Ferber - September 11 & 25, 2001

You worked in Płaszów?

Yeah.

Or outside?

In. I worked inside Płaszów. You--number of books were written about a place called chuja of gorka, which is not a nice word. It's, uh...

Hill of...

Pardon me?

Hill of Pricks.

Hill of Pricks, right. The Prick Hill, that's correct, okay. Now let, let me just tell you. Where I was at the Metalgemeinschaft our windows faced a particular chuja of gorka. That was a little bit of a hill with a valley eh, kind of hill from both sides eh, in a valley maybe uh, twenty, or thirty, forty feet deep kind of. Nice green grass. It was a just a natural uh, the way the land was uh, constructed, the way the land fell. The Germans used this particular part for killing and burning people. As the time progressed, more and more sometime daily our Jewish people who were found outside the, outside the Płaszów were brought in, undressed, shot and burned. Many, many Polish people supposedly political, genuine Polish people, not Jewish, were brought in there also. Undressed, told to undressed, sometimes we see cries, sometime people were crying. Uh, uh, uh, each behavior was different. They were told to undress. Machine gun. Eh, from uh, twenty, thirty feet away eh, shot them all down. Sometime no machine guns, sometimes just people with eh, with machine guns in their hands uh, shooting down one at a time. People fell in, not all of them died. Gasoline was poured over it and ignited and a bad smell and a cloud came out of it steadily. Sometime you seen people going back. We were not allowed to look through the window. We were not--but nevertheless you can't help it. We did see it. There were a whole number of windows out of this cooperative. Sometime you see people like ghosts uh, coming out of the smoke. Let me tell you, there's always Germans waiting for this eh, eh, eh, enjoy it, enjoy to shooting down, to kill 'em, and push 'em down the hill. Uh, as far, looking at the Germans, we never seen anything that would express to us that they're sorry or they feel bad about it. It was eh, it, it was [pause] they, they were, they were willing and happy to do the job and sometime we heard kind of jokes to each other from far away. And maybe not even, we didn't hear it, but we just eh, we've seen uh, how, how they talk to each other uh, and especially their faces. Yes, we were very close to this particular place. We could see faces, easily. So once again, we uh, the, every barrack had anywhere from 500 to a thousand people, 800 people, depending on the size of the barrack, there were uh, uh, people were uh, sleeping uh, on three different levels. There were different evacuations. There was also an Appellplatz, you probably heard about Appellplatz.