Erlebnisse im K.Z. Theresienstadt - 'Experiences in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp' By Bruno Marcus. Published by J. Ebner, Ulm 1945. German.
Testimony of a Theresienstadt inmate who came to the camp at the age of 66. In the introductory chapters Marcus says that he stayed in the camp from January 1944 to July 1945. When he arrived at the camp he did not think he would survive and wrote the sentence for future generations: "Among these mountains where so many dead dwell, I too am old and tired I will sleep my last years". He tells how while in the camp 30 prisoners were housed in a room that was originally intended for only three. And horribly describes the area of the 'Little Fortress' in the camp to which Jews were sent, in which about 10,000 people died each year, describing the process of extermination, storing the bodies, burning them, and transporting the ashes to the outside of the camp. Marcus miraculously survived. He says that when he learned that the International Committee of the Red Cross was working to liberate the camp, he was on the verge of death because he had suffered from the violent dysentery virus called Andendritis, but he gained new strength in light of the rumor, and managed to survive despite his advanced age. Marcus personally thanks the commander of the Russian forces, Major Kuzmin, who first and foremost provided food for the thin prisoners, and in fact saved his life.
The body of the book is made up of thirty-four short passages, each written at a different time in the camp. Marcus describes what he went through and the prisoners around him, concisely in order to bring to the reader the essence of the atrocities in the sharpest possible way. At the end of each section is the date he wrote the words in the camp, as well as the date of testimony he brings from prisoners who were in Auschwitz and other camps, before 1944. For example, under the heading "Hunger" he describes how he ate potato peels - leftovers from another prisoner, and how he ate a piece of dirty bread he found in the ground: "I scrape the leftovers from the Plates and bowls of others. You do not think about hygiene when hunger strikes you day in, day out, hour in, and when you lose 20 pounds and feel the weakness in all your limbs ...". In another passage, he describes the execution of 25 prisoners, the youngest of whom is 16, and the censor concealed letters he wrote to his mother. Elsewhere he describes a difficult scene in which a young man was taken for murder, and his father asked to die in his place, but the Nazis insisted on taking the son. In another passage he describes what the Jews who were brought to the camp by train looked like after four weeks of traveling on sub-conditions, in terrible overcrowding, and without food and water, in spores of dirt and feces.
From the early evidence of what took place in Theresienstadt.
47 p. 21 cm. Good condition.
