The Testimony of Mosche (Moses) Feigenberg

Testimony 2

 

This document represents testimony of Moses Feigenberg made

as a deposition for the trial of Martin Weiss and other SS men in Germany in 1960

 

Translation from original German May 2001

[photos added to enhance the text]

 

Mosche Feigenberg

Testimony of Mosche Feigenberg

 

First name of the father: Hirsch

Address: Tel-Aviv, Sderot Ben-Zion 23, phone 26611

working place: Hospital Beer-Jaakow

Year of birth: 1909

Place of Birth: District Wilna

Profession: Urological Doctor

Family: married

Religion: Jewish

 

01.17.60, 5 pm in the apartment of the witness

 

Interrogator: 180 Sergeant Meir Warschawski

 

Through the force of article 2 (1) of the criminal-process-order I have written down the testimony of Mosche Feigenberg.

Meir Waschawski 180 Sergeant

 

I lived in the city of Wilna at the beginning of WW2 and I worked as doctor for urinary illnesses. I have lived in this city about 40 years until my emigration to Israel.

 

In September of 1941 my family and I were forced to live in the ghetto together with all Wilna Jews. I worked at the Jewish hospital in the ghetto but also as worker outside the ghetto where I cleaned railroads and chopped wood at a place called Sorok Tatari.

 

One week before the liquidation of the Wilna ghetto in September of 1943 the Nazi administration sent about 1500 Jews from the ghetto into a working camp called HKP and about 1500 Jews in another working camp called Kailis. My family and I came into the HKP camp but the Nazis liquidated both camps at the beginning of July 1944. The liquidation was carried out under the command of the SS and the SD. That happened two weeks before the liberation of the city through the Red Army.

 

Post war photo of where the HKP camp stood in Vilna

I want to remark that the two camps were located close to the city and that I worked as a Doctor in both of them. I had the opportunity to see all the actions the Gestapo and the SS carried out against the Jewish population, often with the help of the Lithuanian police. I was also there during the children’s liquidation action on March 27th 1944.

 

I see eleven pictures in front of me (the witness examines 11 pictures that were sent here from Ludwigsburg, the witness takes the picture of Heinrich Schmitz’s face). This picture reminds me of the man whose name I found out later was Heinrich Schmitz. About October 1943 a Jewish family composed of father, mother and a twelve years old daughter was caught when they tried to escape. They were brought back to the camp and hung in front of the public.

 

The whole camp population was ordered to see the execution. I remember that when the cord around the man’s neck tore, he fell down still alive. He was crying and beseeched the SS man to let him alive. But this man didn’t have mercy and he shot him instantly with his revolver.

 

The picture of Heinrich Schmitz that I see know corresponds with the identity of the man who shot the hung man. I remember that the SS man’s face was handsome and fine, it was like the face of an actor. About around the time of this incident I often heard at the HKP camp administration that the SS man who was responsible for the Jews was called also Schmitz. He himself was responsible for all kinds of actions against the Jews. I myself saw him shooting the fallen down man.

 

Martin Weiss

He looks very much alike the picture of the Heinrich Schmitz that I see now. On march 27th 1944 when I was in the HKP camp I saw the liquidation action against Jewish children that was carried out by SS and SD under the personal leadership of Martin Weiss.

 

The goal of this action was the final and absolute liquidation of all children in the camp. The scared Jews began to hide their children in different hideouts, for example in stoves, in toilets, in barrels and under beds. But the Gestapo carried out a very exact examination of all homes. With the help of axes and hammers they searched the walls and got many children. They brought them all into the backyards to load them on big cars.

 

The number of children that the Nazis brought out of the camp to send them to an unknown location was about 250. They never came back again. We were lucky enough to hide about a dozen children. I myself brought eight kids into a hideout that I prepared, including  my own twelve years old daughter whom I hid in a potato sack. Six out of the eight kids I saved during the liquidation action were brought later also to unknown locations.

 

I as the camp doctor had the right to walk in the backyards and so I was able to see the whole details of the action. I remember a woman called Zukowska who didn’t want to separate herself from her daughter. She  was lead away some meters from the backyard and shot personally by Martin Weiss. Of all the pictures here I recognize also the one that shows Max Gross whom I saw often in the ghetto as well as in the HKP camp. He participated each Sunday in the count of the forced workers during the roll call. He also participated in the children action like many other Gestapo and SS men.

 

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/feigenberg.html

 

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

 

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2011

ESCAPE FROM THE BELZEC DEATH CAMP!

SAVED BY A PAIR OF HEELS
By
Julian Cohen

Incorporating the Narrative of Hanna Cohen (Szper),
Transcribed and Translated from the Polish
 

Hanna & Julian 1947

 

When the German army punched into Poland on September 1, 1939, my mother’s family still had three weeks before the Nazi conquerors would seize the ancient city of Lublin. The family had lived in Lublin and its environs for centuries. It was a large, learned, middle class family, integrated in Polish society and culture to the degree that Jews were allowed to integrate. My mother, Hanna, lived in a big old townhouse with her parents, her older brother, the customary live-in domestics, and extended family and friends dropping by at all hours of the day.

 

As the Germans were approaching, my grandmother begged my mother to flee east, to Lwow, to relative safety. Lwow had just been occupied by the Soviets, by prior understanding with Hitler. Although life under the Soviets was harsh and perilous, compared with Nazi domination it was considered the lesser of two evils.

 

Hanna, twenty-four and a teacher of German literature, was reluctant to leave, but she could not ignore her mother’s entreaties. She took the train to Lwow.

 

Her travails under the Soviets would end in July 1941, when the Germans, breaking their pact with Stalin, pushed east. Within hours of their entry into Lwow, the Germans sicced Ukrainian mobs to large-scale pogroms of Jews. Later, they decreed that all Jews must relocate to a ghetto.

 

My mother would have none of it. She decided to escape to Warsaw. On the train to Warsaw, the German Railway Police arrested her.
 

At this point, the commentator had better move aside, leaving only the translator. Those who saw the face of Chiron while being rowed across the Styx, and who swam back to the shore of memory, have a right to tell their story that cannot be usurped. They have a unique insight, too. The survivor of a holocaust possesses knowledge about the human species that the rest of us are rarely privy to, for he has seen people’s character alloys melting even at the periphery of the evil furnace, revealing their true proportions of base and noble metals.

 

————————————————————–

 

“They stopped the train and called one of them, a fat German wearing a helmet. ‘Get off the train with her now. You’ll take her on the first train back to Lwow, to the Gestapo.’

 

When we got off, I started asking that he let me go. I say to him, ‘What benefit is it to you that they kill me; I am young, what I have with me I will give you.’ And he answers, ‘I would gladly let you go, but if I do that, they will kill me too.’
 

He hugged me, this old German, and started stroking my hair. He says, ‘Child, I know one hundred percent that you will survive this war, but I will not.’ And he took me on a train to the local police headquarters. I spent the night there, in jail. In the morning, they took me away, and he accompanied me.

 

At the jail, they conducted the first interrogation: who I am. He sat to the side. There was an officer and two sergeants, and they conducted the interrogation. At a certain moment, the officer takes a carbine off a wall rack and orders one of the sergeants: ‘Take her downstairs.’ And the fat one with the helmet winks at me, so that I won’t be afraid. Then he got up, poured and gave me a glass of water. This was a man with a heart. And in the morning, he transported me to the Gestapo, and there I had a real investigation.

 

I only remember that there was a large commission. One of them walked me to the window and said, ‘You see that tree? From that tree you will hang.’ Everything was in German.

 

Then they threw me into a small cell where there were already some thirty people, Jews. Suddenly they opened the door, and threw in a young Polish woman. She cries, ‘Woe, they caught me, woe.’

 

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/belzec/belzecescape.html

 

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

 

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2011

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