Theresienstadt: Living Corpses
In March 1979 the President of Austria placed a wreath in Theresienstadt in memory of the dead Jews. Did he also spare a thought for the Germans and Austrians who had been tortured to death there?
Very few survived the Theresienstadt camp of post-war days. Physician Dr. Emil Siegel reports: “Gassing failed to work for technical reasons, and so what remained for us was a slow torture-to-the-death. In the first weeks no-one was granted the mercy of a quick death. Already at the admission we were told that we would be slowly tortured to death. ‘No-one who comes here will get out alive.’ And that’s how it was. It was not until the Russians intervened that things got better.”
This physician is one of the few who survived that death camp. We shall not repeat all his descriptions of the gruesome torture here. But the following account of Dr. Siegel’s is representative for Theresienstadt.
When typhus broke out in the camp, he was sent to serve as doctor in the ‘sick cells’: “The ill were crowded so closely together that they could not lie on their backs, only on their sides. Among them were many who came from the last battles and who had only just been amputated; most of them were leg ie. upper-thigh amputees, some were also missing an arm. Almost all of them were young fellows aged 16 to 18 – allegedly SS-men. They lay on the bare concrete floor squeezed together like sardines, bumping into each other with their amputated stumps. The bandages were wholly soaked with pus, stank horribly and crawled with fly maggots. On some, the bandages had fallen off and the bare, pus-covered wound or bone stump showed. They begged to be bandaged, and I will never in my life forget their faces, lined with dreadful pain and endless despair, as they lay there squashed together on the floor and constantly bumped into each other’s wounds. These poor souls were the biggest joy of camp commandant Prusa and his accomplices, who reveled in their agony.
“In my role as doctor I was forbidden either to apply a bandage or to speak so much as one word to these young fellows. While checking their wounds I was restrained by the arm, and I was told that if I said even a single word to the amputees I would join them there on the floor. The martyrdom of these poor souls lasted several weeks. I saw them one more time – as dead bodies, showing evidence of having been beaten, especially on their amputated stumps. I don’t know whether they were beaten to death, or strangled ‘Theresienstadt-style’.
“Everyone in the typhus camp suffered from raging fever. In their stupor they would be forever leaving their pallet, they did not react to being spoken to, and in a very short time the entire room and the lavatory were smeared all over with diarrhea, as were the straw sacks that constituted the pallets, and the patients themselves as well. Added to this were the hordes of fleas and flies that came over from the mortuary opposite, where many corpses were often left lying around naked for days. There was no end to the bedbugs. Since there was nothing to drink the patients would totter out to the water toilets where they drank the water out of the toilet bowls.
“The commandant’s daughter, Sonja Prusova, was a sadist. I was told that she had personally helped to beat 28 people to death. She tore women’s hair out, beat them in the face or belly with her fists or feet, and flogged them; women who had suffered at her hands told me this themselves. I always knew, when I saw her running to Yard 4 with glowing eyes and greedy mouth, that now there were more people being tortured, and that blood would flow again.”
.”Murder Factory” Theresienstadt
nurse who later died told Dr. Emil Siegel in the camp: “During the registration process I was beaten to the point where they knocked out one of my teeth. The wife of an SS-man was beaten together with me. I was taken away, and the SS wife was shoved rear-down onto an SS dagger. I heard her scream dreadfully as the sharp knife cut into her intestines.“In my cell I had to strip naked in front of everyone, and was beaten again. Since I was covered all over with blood, I was given some water to wash up. Naked as I was, I had to stand on a flag all night long. The next day we were given prison clothing.
“Every day for four weeks I received 25 blows with a truncheon, cane, strap or whatever else the guard happened to get his hands on. He was a very young fellow, and he constantly tried to rape me; but because I desperately fought him off, I would always end up being flogged by him instead, until I collapsed unconscious. After these four horrible weeks I was put into a group of SS men (I was the only woman among them) and put to corpse-carrying duty. They were the bodies of typhus victims.
“I was beaten during this work, and also had to watch how SS-men were beaten until they died. Whenever I passed out from the stench of the dead bodies, a bucket of water would be poured over me, and I had to dig on. In this way I repeatedly fell into one of the mass graves, onto the bodies. On one of my feet I had a wound that became badly inflamed. They gave me a shoe, and I had to dig on. With bare hands and no protection whatsoever we had to dig these bodies out and place each into a coffin. It is beyond me how the body toxins didn’t kill us.”
Eduard Fritsch reports about Theresienstadt: “One day, I and some others were ordered to clean up the single-cells where the bodies of those lay who had been beaten to death. Clotted blood was layered several centimeters deep on the floor; cut-off ears, knocked-out teeth, chunks of skin, hair, dentures and the like lay everywhere. The stench of the blood etc. soon made it impossible for us to continue washing the cells and hallways. After two or three days many of us developed terrible swellings on our back, neck, head and arms. I was ordered to report to the sick-ward, where I saw something terrifying: patients were stripped to the skin and laid on a stretcher and the doctor then injected them with a fast-acting poison. These people died within one minute.”