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away. Wizengrunt, Roksn, and other camps in
the area were work camps. The prisoners were
used to build roads. The overseers, Sanitzki
said, “were very bad people. They used to beat
us with shovels, sticks, anything. You couldn’t
take a shower,” Sanitzki said. “The lice ate you.
There were a lot of lice because it was cold and
there was no place to bathe or wash yourself.”
Sanitzki spent about another six weeks at Roksn
before being moved to Bretz, another work
camp, and then to Witenberger in 1940.
At Witenberger the prisoners were used to
construct buildings and build railroads. “We
had to carry two sacks of cement at one time,”
Sanitzki said, “up on the third floor, the fourth
floor of what they were building. A 12-foot rail
we had to carry with two people.”
The routine and Sanitzki’s internment at
Witenberger lasted for one and a half years. This
was the time before the pace of the extermination
of the Jews quickened, though it was nevertheless
carried out. The forced labor pool for
the Nazis was at this point apparently too valuable
to utterly destroy, though there was not
much concern given the laborers who suffered
and died from exhaustion and maltreatment.
In 1943 there came an order. “It was around
June or July, something like that, very hot,”
Sanitzki said. He was now 18 years old. “I
remember I fell in one of the [railroad] cars what
we were working—unloading it—and I fainted
because of the heat and no food. But after a
while, they sent us away to Birkenau.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of the six
killing sites in Poland—along with Belzec,
Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and Majdanek—
chosen for that purpose because of their proximity
to rail lines and location in semi-rural
areas. The largest number of European Jews and
Gypsies were killed there during the war—1.25
million, ninety percent of which were Jews.
“But we were lucky when we came to
Birkenau,” Sanitzki said, “because one of the
S.S. sent a letter along with us that we were very
good workers, we were very hard workers, and
we could be used there. We were in Birkenau
maybe a week or so.
“Birkenau was [a camp] where you just
passed through,” Sanitzki continued. “And then
they took you to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz they
decided what to do with you. So when they
started putting numbers on you, then you knew
that you were going to be alive.
“I worked on building the street from
Birkenau to Auschwitz. When I was working on
that road, there were two different kinds of people.
There were Polish people—Christians—and
Jewish people. Two groups.
“And then after a while, Mengele came to
the camp.”
Josef Mengele was known as the Angel of
Death in the camps, one of the most infamous
Nazis associated with the Holocaust.
“All of us had to fall in,” Sanitzki said, “and
Mengele started looking over everybody. I was
standing with a friend. The friend was standing
in front of me; we used to go to school together.
When he came up to Mengele, Mengele looked
at him. He showed him his hands. And then he
put him to the left. Putting to the left we knew
we remained in camp. And when I came up to
him, he looked at my hands and my body,
because we were naked in front of him, and he
put me to the right. And I said to him, ‘Why are
you putting me to the right and him to the left?
We’re the same age. He’s my friend, I would like
to be with him.’ So he pushed me over to the left.
He wouldn’t answer, but he pushed me over to
the left. So I just went over. After that, when he
picked up so many people, I think it was about
500 or 600 people, he sent us to Goleszof.”
Goleszof was in Poland, located near a quarry
at Schteinbruch where the inmates would
dynamite and pick stone for a brick and cement
factory. Sanitzki remained there until the beginning
of 1944.
“Then, all of a sudden, they started liquidating
Goleszof,” Sanitzki said.
By this time the war had turned against
Germany. The Allied armies approached
German territory by late 1944, and the S.S.
began speeding up the extermination of prisoners
or evacuating the outlying concentration
camps. The Nazis began deporting prisoners to
camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation
and to hide the evidence of the genocide.
“It was in January, I remember, and my
uncle was in there, my mother’s younger brother
was there, and we started marching toward
Glaivz,” Sanitzki said. “It was a long, long
march. I fell down because we were wearing
wooden shoes, and the snow pasted itself into
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