Seidenwurm Wrzos, Mary

Mary Seidenwurm Wrzos was a Polish Jewess who claims to have been incarcerated at the Majdanek Camp during the war. After the war, she emigrated to Sweden, where a book about her alleged experiences was published in 1945 in Stockholm titled De dödsdömda vittnar (The Doomed Bear Witness, edited by Gunhild and Einar Tegen). We read in it:

“We walked three kilometers from the labor camp in Lublin to the actual concentration camp [Majdanek], under guard by heavily armed SS men. We were taken to subterranean rooms that were very conveniently furbished. Each of us received a clothes hanger to put our things on. The shoes had to be properly tied together.

We went into the ‘shower room’ completely naked, carrying only a towel and a piece of soap. I immediately noticed that the doors were made of unusually thick iron. Since I did not push myself forward, it happened that I was the last to step inside the gas chamber. I looked at the ceiling. Besides the usual showerheads, I could see three large black holes. Now I knew where I was! The heavy iron door began to close, but slowly, very slowly. And about at the same time, gas began to pour out of the three large black holes!

With supernatural power I began to bang on the door, which had still not closed completely. ‘I am a German, I am a German camp police, I am a German transport guard’. I yelled these words over and over, and at the same time, I beat on the door like crazy. It began to open, but very slowly. Blood was dripping from my forehead, from my arms, from my knees. I lay there, all my weight put against the door, panting for air, while it slowly opened before me (it seemed to take an eternity). My whole body was covered in cold sweat. I am going to suffocate. Then the door is opened. Men wearing gas masks pull me out through the narrow opening. I hear a couple shots fired at the women who try to get past me. Air. Air. At last air. Everything is spinning. Then I lose consciousness.

When I woke up, the female German-Jewish Kapo stood before me. She helped me up and put me in order. (Everything had taken less than half a minute.) When I looked at myself in the mirror the next day, I saw that I had a gray stripe of hair on the left side.”

Unfortunately, no underground room existed at Majdanek, none of the claimed homicidal gas chambers is said to have had fake showerheads, none of them had three large black holes, none of the gasses allegedly used would have shown an effect within half a minute, and none would have led to bleeding foreheads, arms and knees, let alone grey streaks of hair. The witness also fails to tell us what the reaction of the SS was when they discovered that she wasn’t a German guard after all. Apparently, they let it slide. Finally, inmates were issued towels and soap only when actually taking a shower, which is probably the real background of her story.