Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Henry Konstam - October 25, 1991

It was still uh, that they, when the Germans first came in and uh, they uh, gathered the people, and they told the mothers to put their babies down.

This is where now?

It was in...

Łódź?

Yeah. Yeah.

In Łódź.

And uh, they just put the babies down, then they took machine gun, just killed those children. Otherwise they took, there were cases where they took uh, babies by their legs and just hit 'em against the wall.

Were you there when this happened?

Well, I know the ca... yeah, cases. They just barbaric, you know, terribly barbaric.

But when they did this in the early days...

No.

did you see that?

Yeah, yeah. And uh, or when the people came to the camps with the children. Children were just, they just, they were just like... They were bugs, you know, they just killed them.

You must have been what, eighteen, nineteen.

Yeah.

So what did you think when you saw babies being machine gunned?

This is the worse, that is the worse thing that can happen to you, to see taking a baby and treated just like a chicken uh, just like, like a chicken, take it and uh, hit it against the wall.

This also happened in Łódź? Or was this in Auschwitz?

It was in camps already. Uh, it was, the... These sights were, were the worst thing that ever, give you nightmares, you know. How they, how they treated little babies, you know. They, on one of the camps, it was Posen, just uh, just pitiful, there was this boy that was from my hometown. Uh, they told him to uh, dig a, dig a hole in the ground. And he went in there, they covered him up, up to his chin, you know. And eventually uh, suffocated, you know. Beautiful little boy. Was a only child from parents. These incidents that just stick out in your mind, you know. And then on the marches uh, I uh, remember that uh, he took, the soldier took a boy, told him to kneel down in the field. And he went there about oh, about a couple hundred feet away and just uh, like a target practice, see whether they can shoot it. I saw that. I, I, I was right there so. A boy sitting there on his, on his knees and he stay with the gun and, and target practice.

And he shot him.

Uh, yeah. They, they didn't, they, they didn't treat like, like this human being. Or, or, or just like a can, a beer can, and, and shoot at the beer can, so they shoot at the, at these boys. I don't know, I never forgot that.