Witness

Rajzla Sadowska was a Polish Jew deported to Auschwitz. During the investigations leading up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial, she testified that at one point while at Auschwitz, she suffered such a serious work-related accident that she could not work anymore. She feared “selection” and then gassing, but instead she was taken to the…

Maurice Schellekes wrote a brief report in Israel in 1981, almost 40 years after his claimed experiences at Auschwitz, hence inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during those decades. He even mentioned that events at Auschwitz have been described “in so many papers and books” that they need not be repeated. His motivation to write…

Deszö Schwarz was a Hungarian Jew deported from Vienna to Auschwitz in late 1943. He spent two months in quarantine there, and was registered on 25 February 1944 (reg. no. 174438). After the war, he made an undated deposition at Nuremberg that received the document number NO-2310. In it, Schwarz stated that Birkenau had four…

Ignacy Schwarzbart was a member of the Polish National Council. He reworded and spread reports received by the Polish government in exile in London from the Polish underground about mass executions at the Belzec Camp using electrocution chambers, which is rejected as untrue by all historians today. Schwarzbart’s reports were subsequently spread by major Jewish…

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…

Kazimierz Skarżyński was a Pole living in the village of Wólka Okrąglik near the Treblinka Camp who testified twice in front of a Soviet investigative commission about the Treblinka Camp, once on 22 August 1944, and then again one day later. In his first deposition, he claimed to know from Jews incarcerated at Treblinka that…

Roman Sompolinski was a Polish Jew who was arrested in 1939 and, after staying at various camps, ended up in Auschwitz at the end of 1943, where he claims to have worked inside Crematorium II as a member of the Sonderkommando from December 1943 until February 1944. From Auschwitz he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in…

Elisa Springer (12 Feb. 1918 – 19 Sept. 2004) was an Austrian Jewess who married an Italian and moved to Italy in 1940, living under a false identity. She was betrayed in 1944, arrested and deported to Auschwitz, arriving there in early August. After three months she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Camp. She went…

Szymon Srebrnik (10 April 1930 – 16 Aug. 2006) was a Polish Jew who, during an interview with Judge Bednarz on 29 June 1945, claimed that at age 13 he was arrested with his mother and taken to the Chełmno Camp. He is one of only three Chełmno inmates who have testified about their alleged…

Franciszek Stanek was a Polish employee at the Auschwitz railway station during the war. He was interrogated by the Soviets on 3 March 1945, during which he helped fill in the information gap caused by the lack of documents on transports by claiming vastly exaggerated numbers of deportation trains arriving at Auschwitz: 150 transports in…

Ursula Stern was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. According to a deposition summarized and published by the Dutch Red Cross, Stern claimed that there was one gas chamber at this camp into which the gas was fed through showerheads. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into a space below….

Yakov Steyuk was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. On 18 August 1943, he was taken from there to Babi Yar, a place where tens of thousands of Jews are said to have been shot and buried by the Germans in mass graves in late September 1941 (see the…

Oskar Strawczyński was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp, where he claims to have arrived on 5 October 1942. He was interviewed about his experiences on 7 October 1945. His knowledge about the claimed exterminations occurring at that camp are all from hearsay: “From the accounts of Hersz Jabłkowski, who was a blacksmith…

Adele “Deli” Strummer (née Aufrichtig, 2 May 1922 – 25 July 2016) was an Austrian Jewess who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, then a while later for eight days to Auschwitz, from where she was sent to a labor-subcamp of the Flossenbürg Camp. Toward the end of the war, she was evacuated to the…

Jan Sułkowski was a Polish Jew who claimed to have been interned at the Treblinka Camp. He claimed in a post-war deposition published in 1948 that one way of murdering Jews at the camp consisted of forcing them to climb up a “death bridge,” a scaffold built for that purpose, then shoot them down as…

Franz Süss (or Szüsz, born 12 April 1902) was a Slovak Jew deported to Auschwitz in late May 1942, where he claims to have been assigned to the Sonderkommando. He made a deposition in 1964, the protocol of which was filed in Israel at the Yad Vashem Archives. Süss’s account is one of the very…

Eugenia Szajn-Lewin (1909 – 1944) was a Jewish journalist who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and kept a diary of important events during this time. She was killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. On the rumors circulating about Treblinka, she wrote in her diary in late 1942 (Szajn-Lewin, pp. 83f.): “The worst thing is…

Stanisław Szmajzner was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In 1966, he was interrogated by the German judiciary, when he claimed that exhaust gases were used at Sobibór only initially for mass gassing, but were later replaced with Zyklon B. He elaborated more on this in his 1968 Portuguese book titled Inferno em Sobibór. He…

In 1947, the “eyewitness account” of Henike Szperling about his stay at the Treblinka Camp was published in a Jewish historical journal. Szperling claimed to have been deported there in September 1942. He was deployed in the part of the camp where no extermination activities occurred, working in a unit sorting clothes. On 2 August…