Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Saul Raimi - July 7, 1982

Camp Suicides

Were there any uh, suicides at the camp?

A lot of them. At my camp had two brothers. Uh, the most common suicide was running towards a uh, uh, electric fences. You came up, you got up in the morning, you could see uh, those bodies completely burned from those high voltage, uh...

Mm-hm.

...electricity on those fences. And beside was the guards and the guards uh, finished them off with this machine, machine gun. That was a daily scene when you got up in the mornings you went down to the roll call, you could see some of the bodies on the--laying around the fences uh, those were actually uh, those were ??? And I remember two of my friends were two brothers. That was really a shock to me. It was, after that--it really, it, it really--that such an impression on me that I myself was thinking about going there Monday and finishing it. Another thing I uh, I remember in Auschwitz when they sent you to a Entlausung, that means you had an infection.

Mm-hm.

They--you had to give your clothes--every uh, two or three words. All of your clothes, make in a bundle, bundle it up and they took it over with a uh, wagon and you had to run in the most cold nights, most freezing nights, just with your shoes, your wooden shoes, naked all the way to the ??? Then after you took the shower, in fact, you had to run back to the barrack...

Yes.

...naked almost. And I believe tons of people died from that kind of a running and some I think was about five or ten or fifteen or twenty below.


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