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Hoch, Nahum
Witness to conditions in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland
1961 Quote: 6/8/61: HOCH: We found ourselves in a large hall which resembled a bathhouse. There were nails in the walls – each nail had a serial number. They asked us to hang up our clothes.
ATTORNEY GENERAL GIDEON HAUSNER: They asked you?
HOCH: They ordered us to get undressed. We did not want to undress, and then they began shooting inside the hall; they then ordered us to get undressed and to hang our clothes on the nails and to remember the serial number, so that, when we came out, we would know where to find our clothes. Naturally, this was a deliberate fraud, and we already knew that. We got undressed and threw our clothes on the floor in the middle of the hall. After that, we were drawn up in rows of fives and then – I remember it as if it were happening now – one of the Sonderkommando who was working there came up to us and said: “Boys, at least don’t show them that you are worried – sing!”
1996 Quote: They wanted me to testify because I had actually witnessed the inside of a gas chamber. I was taken out because a transport of potatoes had arrived and they needed people to take them down from the wagons. They choose 50 people, the strong ones from inside the gas chamber. Attorney Gideon Hausner was crying at the time I was telling this story. He himself was crying. I have the feeling that I remain, I was chosen out from the gas chamber only to tell and to explain that something like that could not be ever again.