The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/czechoslovakia/slovakia-deportations.001


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Deportations from Slovakia
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project (CANADA)
Keywords: Auschwitz,Lublin,Slovakia

"The deportation of the Jews from Slovakia to the ghettos in the Lublin
district and to Auschwitz, which began on March 25, 1942, was based on an
agreement between the Slovakian and German governments. By October 20,
1942, about 58,000 Slovakian Jews had been deported, 39,000 of them to the
Lublin district, the remainder to Auschwitz. <1> The transports were
carried out in Slovak trains and under Slovak guard up to the border. At
the first station within the confines of the General Government, the train
and its human cargo passed into the hands of the Germans, who escorted the
train to its destination. In some of the ghettos to which the Slovakian
Jews were brought, there were still some local Jews left. In some places
they found empty ghettos; the former inhabitants had already been
annihilated in the death camps. A survivor of such a journey, who passed
through Sobibor and some labor camps but who succeeded in escaping and
returning to Slovakia, testified about his experience:

  On May 21, 1942, our transport, consisting of about 1,000 Jews,
  was deported from Sabinov via Zilinia, Cadca, directly to Poland.
  At the boundary we were told to line up. We were counted by the
  SS [men] on the station platform, while the women were counted in
  the carriages. Then we continued our journey for thee or four
  days until we reached Rejowiec-Lubelski [Lublin district], where
  we left the carriages... ... 

  On the next day, May 27, two transports of a size similar to ours
  arrived from Stropkov and Humenne, so that we were then all
  together 3,000 Slovakian Jews.

  On August 9, 1942, German police suddenly ordered a general
  lineup. The entire Jewish population, including all the Jews of
  the ghetto as well as the labor camp, all together about 2,700
  people, had to line up on the main square before the school with
  their luggage. All those who had not been able to obey the order
  owing to illness or exhaustion were shot in their quarters....

  We were taken over at Rejowiec railway station by the so-called
  `Black Ukrainians.' There we were squeezed into waiting cattle
  trucks, 120 to 150 persons per truck, without being registered.
  The doors were then closed from the outside, and the trucks were
  left standing at the station till 8 p.m. ...

  We arrived at Sobibor shortly past midnight, where SS men with
  nagaikas [horse whips] received us. There at last we got a little
  water, through no food. We were subsequently lined up in a pine
  alley, divided by sexes, and twenty-five men were told to fall
  out to clear luggage and corpses out of the trucks. We never saw
  those men again. In the morning we saw most of the women move in
  ranks of four to a yard some distance away. At 8 a.m. the SS
  lieutenant came to us and told all those who had previously
  worked at draining swamps to fall out. About 100 men and 50 women
  stepped forward, 155 in all, to whom the lieutenant remarked
  cryptically: `You are born anew.' From the remaining group,
  mechanics, locksmiths, and watchmakers were separated, while the
  rest had to follow the women to the yard n the distance, and
  shared their fate. ...

  Our group of 155 was brought to Ossowa, where we spent one night.
  We were very well received and fed there by the Jews. At Ossowa
  there were about 500 Germans and Czech Jews. Jewish Ghetto Police
  accompanied us to Krychow....

  On October 16 we were told that a certain proportion of workers
  was to be sent to the `Jewish City' of Wlodawa on the Bug, 25 km
  from Krychow.... Four days after they arrived at Wlodawa, the
  entire Jewish population was deported to Sobibor....<2>

From the 39,000 Slovakian Jews who had been deported to the Lublin
district, about 24,500 were murdered in Sobibor, 7,500 in Belzec, and 7,000
in Treblinka. <3>"

<1> Livia Rotkirchen, "Churban Yahadut Slovakia" (The Destruction of Slovak
    Jewry), Jerusalem, 1961, p.104
<2> Yad Vashem Archives, M-2/236
<3> Ruckerl, Adalbert, "NS-Vernichtungslager in Spiegel deutscher
    Strafprozesse, DTV Dokumente", Munich, 1977, p. 148

Excerpted from....---------------------------------------------- 
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA -  the Operation Reinhard Death Camps 
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987.  ISBN 0-253-3429-7


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