Survivors of Maidanek Testify at Eichmann Trial on Killing of Jews

Three survivors of the Nazi holocaust–two who lived through the atrocities at Maidanek, and one who had been at the notorious Sobibor camp–testified in the Adolf Eichmann trial here today, piling more gruesome details upon the earlier grisly reports of Nazi horrors.

One of the witnesses, Yosef Resnik, testified that Nazi army bands played lively music at Maidanek, while Jews were marched to mass graves. “The bands kept playing all the time, ” he told the court, “and the inmates did not know what was going on. At the graves, the machine guns were working all the time.”

Another witness, Yaacov Friedman, a Polish-born Jew who “passed” as a Christian but who was, nevertheless, imprisoned at Maidanek when he was suspected of being a member of a Polish partisan group, identified Eichmann as “one of the leaders and planners” of the Jewish annihilation program.

Friedman said Eichmann came to the camp as the apparent head of ten SS officers inspecting the installation. Although he did not know who Eichmann was, until he returned to his hut, Friedman said he noted that it was Eichmann who acted as leader and “asked all the questions.”

“Can you recognize the man here today?” asked Attorney General Hausner.

Friedman took a hard look at the prisoner in the bullet-proof, glass-enclosed cage in the courtroom, and replied: “His features have not changed.”

Friedman told the court he was freed, “with other Christians,” in the spring of 1944, and warned to forget everything he had seen and heard at Maidanek. “However,” he said, “no Jew was ever released from Maidanek.” Mr. Hausner entered a document, furnished to the Israel Government by Poland, showing that about 200,000 Jews were annihilated by the Nazis at Maidanek alone.

WITNESS TELLS DETAILS OF DRIVING JEWS INTO OPEN MASS GRAVES

Details of the mass-murder program at Maidanek were told the court by Resnik, now a resident of Israel. A Jew, Resnik was fighting with the Polish Army when he was captured by the Germans in 1941. He told how Jews from the entire area of Lublin, Poland, were rounded up and brought to Maidanek in 1943. On November 2 and 3, he said, entire columns of Jews were marched into open mass graves, while German bands played.

Resnik said he had been one of 240 Jewish slave laborers forced to build the death factory at Maidanek. After being assigned to huts, he and the other “strongest and healthiest” were taken in trucks in the direction of Chelmo, to an area known as Vorky Forest. For two weeks, he said, “we did nothing.” Then the Jews were ordered to “start digging.”

“After removing three spadefuls of earth,” he testified, “I hit the skull of a human being. There was a terrible smell all around. We had hit a mass grave. It was 170 meters long, and there were some 10,000 bodies in the grave. They burned the bodies. A special machine to grind up the bones was brought. The ground material was sifted, and the gold was removed. Then the ground material was scattered, and grass was planted atop.

“One of the graves remained open all the time. Trucks would bring warm bodies, which were tossed into this open grave,” Resnik said. Ultimately, Resnik and three other Jewish inmates managed to escape from Maidanek by digging a tunnel under the bunker to which they had been assigned.

Dov Freiberg, who testified he had spent 17 months at the Sobibor death camp, said he was only 15 years old when he arrived at Sobibor. He said he was assigned to a work detail whose job was to sort the personal effects of inmates, and some times to cut the women’s hair, before the victims entered the gas chambers.

Jewish inmates at Sobibor, according to Freiberg, were deliberately misled by the Nazis, being told, though they were only a few feet from the gas chambers, that they would be reunited with their families for work in the fields of the Ukraine. Many members of his work detail, Freiberg told the court, committed suicide. He said he was on the verge of suicide once but “after a struggle with myself, I rejected the idea.”