Larry Wayne - 2005
Chelmno
And we were order obeying people, you know, uh, order ??? you know, they tell you to do it, you did it. If you didn't do it, they told you after five o'clock you can't be in the streets, you couldn't be in the streets because if they found you in the streets, they killed you. There was no code or anything, they killed you and that was it.
And people respect.
And people were starving.
Do you have any idea how many people died in the Łódź ghetto?
I had a idea, I just don't remember now.
Something like seventy thousand people.
Oh it must be more than that.
Well then they sent them off to Chelmno.
Yeah, yeah.
Chelmno. In 1942...
In Chelmno, in Chelmno they sent them off they used to gas them in trucks.
Do you remember when that happened?
They put them in trucks, yeah, and they put in the uh, uh, the pipes from the, from the...
Carbon monoxide.
carbon monoxide and then, and they used to gas them out.
Do you remember when they shipped off ten thousand Jews?
All the time. As a matter, my brother was in a, in a, in a, in, in, in a jail over there, they used to try to escape, but it used to be a jail. But before they sent them out, they took him over there, you know. And my brother was out there, but my, my mother knew somebody very important, she got kinda, got him out at the last minute.
She paid somebody to get him out.
No, it happened to be a, a friend from school, you know. He was head of the, of the uh, fire department in the Łódź ghetto.
That was good.
Yeah. And so she was able to save him. But every few weeks there was some, you know, transport, transports going away. But, you know, we, we knew, or we thought we knew that they're going to labor camps.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn