Aaron Salzburg - July 24, 1984
Częstochowa
Do you remember the names of any of the people who were head of the camp--of the labor camp?
Yes uh, it was a man by the name--it was a person by the name, Albert. They killed a lot of, a lot of the--they came and go and went. They killed a lot of these uh, dignitaries, but Albert was the last one, which I remember. He survived the war--and I guess he settled in Israel. He was a fine gentlemen--very nice gentleman--he and his wife; however, we had a police leader by the name ???. He was from the city of Radom --a cold, blooded murderer. ??? I think he was from Radomsk--a cold blooded murder. As a matter of fact, as soon as our people got him, when they liquidated the ghetto--uh, the camp, sometimes in 1944 in July--middle of July or the end of July. And they were transported to some kind of a camp in Germany--these two were the first to be killed by our people. ??? survived and was a nice fine fella, and survived and lived in Israel. And uh, Częstochow wasn't uh, it wasn't a bad camp. We had all kind of stories, what from Częstochowa, what had happened before we got there. But when we got there and uh, they established--there were three camps there, too, I guess. There was uh, one camp, was called Peltzery. One camp was called Warta--named of a river going by, bypassing Częstochow, and uh, Czestochowianka. I think there were three camps there. I was in the Peltzery, and uh, we worked on--I hadn't witnessed what the people told me, which they have seen and heard uh, before we got there, there was a group of Jewish police people, and uh, the Germans were tipped off that either they tried to do something or whatever, and they found out--it was a Baumeister--a German fellow. He was not--he was not a guard, he was not a policeman. He was just a Baumeister, which it means a foreman or a specialist in building. One day, when they brought these people, they round them up--all the police, the Jewish police, they rounded them up, and bound them--bound their hands. And had a little hammer. He was a trained murder. He knew a location where to hit the brain. He knocked out the people momentarily. As soon as he hit them, they were knocked out. About t...twenty people like that, knocked them out and lowered them on, on, on uh, a wagon, and took them out to the cemetery and they were killed uh, finished up that way. I don't know the name of that German. And uh, in Częstochow, uh, in this particular camp uh, I don't remember of uh, of any in particular murder, which uh, we went through. We had to work hard in uh, very bad conditions.
What did you do there?
I did the same work what I did in Skarżysko, but the factory wasn't that sophisticated it was just, it was just uh, a makeshift uh, a secondary factory. Uh, the only time--the only thing at the end gotten bad is this uh, we couldn't come up to the norm--what they asked, to, to, to...
Quota?
The quota. To push out per day per shift. So at the end of the, of the day's work, they took us, what they call in German to the Wache--and that meant to uh, to the guards. To the quarter--or the headquarter where the guards guarded the uh, the factory. They had--they had a little build up, maybe three feet high or less. It was built like four walls and a fountain of water on the top coming down, spraying down this way, and they would give us sometime fifty on the rear end, sometimes twenty-five, sometimes 100, whatever the mood was of the people--of the leaders, for not being able to come up with the quota. Now if the person received that in one shot, it wasn't too bad, but sometimes, they put it up in turns. They would take twenty-five in the mornings and twenty-five in the afternoon, and that was even--the pain was much worse. I remember one thing, one episode. We were hit by rubber night sticks, and this, those people doing that, they were Ukrainians, special dressed in black. I remember when a Ukrainian tried to t...took off his uh, belt with ammunition. He figured that the night stick wasn't too painful, and he start to hit with that. Now we had a German Meister, which uh, wouldn't let him do that, and went on to uh, direct him to hit, to hit with a night stick. It was going on for quite, for a quite a while. Uh, the reason for that we couldn't come up with a quota was very simple. The, the shells we built were eight millimeter shells for, for rifles. Those shells, ordinarily, are built all over the world with copper. The Germans didn't have copper. They had to use steel. Steel doesn't, doesn't work that easy and the material wasn't good enough. And we took the blames instead of these bosses themselves to take the blames--just to protect them, so they can hold on to their, to their jobs. Not to go out and to fight for their Fatherland. And that was going on to the last minute, until they liquidated the uh, HASAG--the same abbreviation in Częstochow.
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