Two Polish-Jewish women who were among the few persons to return from Oswiecim testified today at the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 S.S. guards charged with murdering thousands of prisoners at Oswiecim and, later, Bergen-Belsen.
The first witness was Dr. Ida Bimko, a physician from Sosnowice, who said that of the 5,000 Polish Jews who arrived at Oswiecim with her, 4,500 were gassed immediately, among them her parents, brother, husband and six-year-old son. Dr. Bimko said that German doctors examined the prisoners and decided which of them were to be spared for forced labor and which were to be killed. Asked if she could identify any of the doctors, she named five, including Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the defendants.
Sophia Litwinska, the other witness, told of how by a “miracle” she escaped from a gas chamber after having been in the notorious “shower room” at Oswiecim.
Dr. Bimko has been working in the Belsen camp hospital since her liberation. Her work was warmly praised recently in London by a British physician who toured the camps.
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