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Ansbacher, Mordechai
Witness to conditions in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czechoslovakia
1961 Quote: 5/12/61: ANSBACHER: Freddy Hirsch issued instructions on how to organize aid for the old people. Those were special activities by which children were sent to the houses of the elderly, and we had to serve the food to them, to read to them from books, fiction, books about Jewish tradition, or the Bible. And it used to happen that, when we were reading to them, these old men and women were so moved that they cried all the time. It would also happen that in the middle of the reading these old folk, who were mostly sick and feeble, died in the course of the reading of a chapter from a novel.
DEPUTY STATE ATTORNEY YA’ACOV BAROR: The youth sat there reading and the old people died?
ANSBACHER: Yes. The youth sat there reading and the old people died. After they died, they were taken below to the courtyard where all the bodies were collected.
1996 Quote: Theresienstadt was the so-called baby of Eichmann. Theresienstadt was used by the Nazis as a showcase for the whole world. And I gave details in my testimony about how children had to appear before international delegations from Denmark to show that everything is nice in the camps; there is a theater, there are schools, there are the concerts and so on. All this was a big lie, because all these actors and performers were sent a few weeks later to Auschwitz to their deaths in the gas chambers.
