Shoah Page #3

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

ITZHAK DUGIN:

Survivor of Vilna

They'd been in the earth 4 months,

and it was winter.

They were very well preserved.

I recognized their faces,

their clothes too.

[ Lanzmann]

They'd been killed relatively recently?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

Oui.

[ Lanzmann ]

And it was the last grave?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

- [ Dugin Replies]

- Oui.

[ Lanzmann ]

The Nazi plan was for them to open the graves

starting with the oldest?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

Oui.

The last graves were the newest,

and we started with the oldest,

those of the first ghetto.

In the first grave,

there were 24,000 bodies.

[ Motke Speaking Hebrew]

[ Interpreter #3, In French]

The deeper you dug, the flatter the bodies were.

Each was almost a flat slab.

[ Motke Continues]

When you tried to grasp a body,

it crumbled,

it was impossible to pick them up.

We had to open the graves,

but without tools.

They said, Get used to working

with your hands.

[ Lanzmann, In French]

With just their hands?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

Oui.

When we first opened the graves,

we couldn't help it,

we all burst out sobbing.

But the Germans almost beat us to death.

We had to work

at a killing pace for two days,

beaten all the time, and with no tools.

[ Lanzmann ]

They all burst out sobbing?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

[ Motke Continues]

The Germans even forbade us

to use the words corpse or victim.

The dead were blocks of wood, sh*t,

with absolutely no importance...

[ Dugin Speaking Hebrew]

Anyone who said corpse

or victim was beaten.

[ Dugin Continues]

The Germans made us

refer to the bodies as Figuren,

that is, as puppets, as dolls...

- Schmattes.

- or as Schmattes, which means rags.

[ Lanzmann ]

Were they told at the start!

how many Figuren

there were in all the graves?

[ Interpreter #3 Speaking Hebrew]

[ Motke Replies ]

The head of the Vilna Gestapo told us,

There are 90,000 people lying there,

and absolutely no trace

must be left of them.

[ In German]

It was at the end of November 1942.

They chased us away from our work

and back to our barracks.

Suddenly,

from the part of the camp called

the death camp,

flames shot up very high.

In a flash, the whole countryside,

the whole camp seemed ablaze.

It was already dark.

We went into our barracks

and ate...

And from the window,

we kept on watching

the fantastic backdrop of flames

of every imaginable color,

red, yellow, green, purple.

And suddenly one of us stood up.

We knew he'd been

an opera singer in Warsaw.

His name was Salve, and...

- [ Lanzmann, In German] Salve?

- Salve.

Facing that curtain of fire,

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