Aaron Salzburg - July 24, 1984
HASAG
Do you know the name of the company that you worked for in Skarżysko?
Yes uh, that uh--Skarżysko was made up of three camps. All by the HASAG. HASAG is uh, for shortening uh, abbreviation--made up uh, Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft Metalwarenfabrik. There was a camp A, camp B, and a camp C. The camp A, it was the best camp. The people were in much better uh, health and little better treated than in the other camps. Camp B were the next best, next best. Camp C was a dead camp, a camp for--it's unbelievable. I, I, I've been in uh, German concentration camps--I haven't seen anything like it. They used to bring the people--you can imagine--German hospitality, for the other two camps, they had to come to our camp to bathe. There was no...
Which camp was your camp? A, B or C?
A. I was in Camp A. They used to bring the people from Werk C to, to our, our place to bathe. The people coming there, they were called canaries, canaries. They look like the yellow birds. Completely yellow. And uh, they worked with a, with a product which was called, at that time trotil. I guess it's the same name in English--trotil. It's uh, it's an explosive, which the heavy gun--the heavy shells were filled. This--actual what they did--they filled the heavy shells. The heavy shells were made in Werk A--were sended--sent over there to be filled with that trotil, with the explosives. Without any masks, without any ???, without food these people worked and served their jobs. Now since, since these jobs, what they did, were not that mechanically, so the people--the fore...the f...foreman's didn't need much education either so they just brutal people off the street. And they run the business, and they systematically killed these Jewish uh, prisoners. Where in Werk, in Werk A was a little bit different because we had all kinds sophisticated machine...machinery. As a matter of fact, all the machinery came from the United States and England. Like lathes and other uh, sophisticated machinery which was uh, bought by the French and the Polack--and Polish uh, the Polish government. So they uh, they were--bosses were a little more educated and were a little more kind to us, better than in Werk C. That's why it was so terrible, beside that uh, that trotil which uh, it was very dangerous and uh, a lot of people died.
[interruption in interview] This is uh, this is the only time we, we, we could get in touch with the various uh, people which uh, when they came to have a bath in our place.
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