An Auschwitz murder camp survivor declared for the first time that transports to the camp included in 1943 a group of Jews with United States passports.
The disclosure was made in testimony at the Auschwitz trial here by Dr. Otto Wolken of Vienna a survivor of the camp. The Vienna physician had given detailed testimony implicating defendant Stefan Baretzki in a number of murders. A defense attorney challenged Dr. Wolken to identify Baretzki.
As a hushed silence fell over the courtroom in the Frankfurt City Council chamber, Dr. Wolken walked slowly down the aisle of seats occupied by the defendants. He stopped in front of the desk where a balding, greying man of 44 was sitting and pointed to him. “That is he,” Dr. Wolken said as Baretzki’s face turned white.
During hours of virtually uninterrupted testimony, Dr. Wolken told dramatic stories of courage of some of the millions who perished at the huge Auschwitz-Birkenau murder complex. One of them involved a transport of Jews with United States passports which arrived at the Birkenau camp on October 25, 1943.
“One woman in this transport suddenly realized where she was and began screaming ‘This is Auschwitz,’ “Dr. Wolken related. “An SS man named Scheldinger tried to calm her. Suddenly she grabbed his pistol, shot him dead and wounded another guard before she was overpowered. In revenge,” Dr. Wolken added, “the other guards started shooting wildly into the group. I don’t know how many were killed that day.”
Once in 1944, he said, he watched a group of Polish Jews being led to the gas chambers, among them many children and teenagers. “A boy of about 14 stopped in front of a group of SS guards and said defiantly to them ‘Don’t think you’ll go unpunished; some day you’ll go to the same place we are going,’ “Dr. Wolken said.
The witness-survivor said that the chances for survival of prisoners who were not sent to the gas chambers were not much better than for those who were gassed. After the camp’s liberation by the Russian Army in 1945, Dr. Wolken testified, he found some documents which told the details of 15 transports which arrived between April and July of 1942.
In specific charges against Baretzki, Dr. Wolken said that the defendant and some other guards shot and killed 11 prisoners on the inspection grounds after one of them tried to flee and another sought to protect himself from a beating. Dr. Wolken also testified that in April, 1944, Baretzki beat an inmate, Mihail Liszka to death with a club. The doctor said he was “about six yards from the scene. I brought Liszka to the barracks building where he died. Death was definitely due to the beating.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
