Holocaust in Romania - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

iages, while oth ers held as many as 150 crowded to gether. As a re sult,when death set in, the corpses re mained up right among the dy ing and theliving. The suffering of the peo ple packed into the sec ond train lasted for ashorter period, but was more appalling than that ex pe ri enced by thosetrans ported be fore them. There were carriages in which a person died ev erytwo or three min utes, and those still alive longed for death as their re demp -tion. By the time the jour ney had ended, in certain car riages there wereonly two or three sur vi vors wasting away among more than 100 dead bod -ies. Be fore the train departed 80 corpses were put into the last car riage,these had been collected earlier at the sta tion; some of them had been shotdead, oth ers bay o neted, but most had been blud geoned to death with thehammers the staff at the station used to test the wheels of trains. A periodof eight hours had elapsed be tween the loading of the prisoners in Iasi andthe time when the train stopped in Podul Iloaiei (20 kms away). This wassuf fi cient time for 1,194 of the 1,902 peo ple to die - the lat ter fig ure wasac tu ally 2,000. If they had walked, the jour ney would have been shorter,and nobody would have died.When the sur vi vors were ordered out of the freight cars at Podul Iloaiei sta -tion, they were met by Ser geant Ursache . By this time they had de gen er -ated into im be cilic wrecks in ca pa ble of walk ing, eat ing, drinking, cry ing,curs ing or hat ing. First they were taken to the syn a gogue, and later to thehomes of lo cal Jews; they lived there in mis ery for almost three months.June 30, 1941By Monday morn ing events were com ing to an end in the yard of the Cen -tral Po lice Station in Iasi. The wailing of the last of the dy ing was the onlysound to be heard from among the bod ies piled on top of one an other. Anenor mous pool of blood spread from the middle of the yard, on and on, asfar as the gate; it sat u rated the shoes of all those who had to cross it. Be sidethe fence bod ies were stacked in piles like logs.Every em ployee from the firm of un der tak ers was mobilized to clean thearea. Four tips, each capable of trans port ing 20-30 bod ies, and 24 rub -bish-carts, able to handle 10 bod ies each, were used all day long to take thecorpses to the Jewish cem e tery and other places, the ex act lo ca tions ofwhich still re main un known. One par tic u lar tip made eight re turn jour -107