The crematorium at Auschwitz — a one storied building (some 50 meters long, 12 15 meters wide), in which there were five smaller rooms and one big hall, dark, 30 by 5 meters.

This big hall had no windows, only two vents in the ceiling, electric light and one door leading from the corridor, the other door leading to the ovens. This hall was called Leichenhalle (hall of corpses). It served as mortuary and at the same time for so called “shambles” ["demolition” or “slaughtering"], that is, for shooting prisoners. Directly adjoining was another hall where the cremating ovens for burning corpses were. There were three ovens and each had two openings, 12 corpses could be put into one opening, but no more than 5 were usually put, as they burnt more quickly in that quantity. The corpses were put into the ovens in so called special carts which, after dumping the corpses, were removed from the ovens, The corpses lay on grates under which coke was burning. The crematorium, moreover, possessed a coke store where coke was kept, then a special room for the ashes from the corpses and still another room which was a clothes store.

APPEARED Mr Alter Fajnzylberg, retired,
domiciled in Paris (nineteenth arrondissement),
Avenue Jean Jaurès, No 27.

Born in STOCKEK (Poland), 23rd October 1911.

Of French nationality by naturalisation (Identity
Card No 3 801 788, issued by the Préfecture
de Police de Paris on 15th April 1975

“Deported from the COMPIEGNE camp, I arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp on 27th March 1942. After having worked in the carpenters' shop there, I was transferred to the Sonderkommando (special kommando) of Krematorium I of the camp in November 1942. In July 1943, I was transferred to the Birkenau camp, three kilometers from Auschwitz and detailed to the Krematorium V Sonderkommando. On 18th January 1945, when the Germans evacuated the camp, taking with them a great number of deportees, I managed to escape from the convoy a few kilometers from the camp.

“During my detention in Auschwitz, I witnessed mass executions. The SS shot people in the hundreds using machine guns on the big room of the Krematorium, 30 meters long and 5 meters wide, called by the SS the “Leichenhalle/ corpse hall”. Before bringing their victims into the yard of Krematorium, the SS shut the nine Jews of the Sonderkommando in the adjoining coke store. There we could hear the shots and the cries of the victims. Then they brought us out and made us carry the bodies, covered in blood and still warm, to the furnaces. It is at Auschwitz that I saw for the first time a gassing in the Leichenhalle. This room had no windows, but there were ventilators in the ceiling. The two thick wooden doors of the room, one in the side wall, the other in the end wall, had been made gas tight. The room was lit by electricity. The victims of the gassing were about 400 Jews brought from Birkenau. The men of the Sonderkommando, including myself, saw them enter the yard then we were shut in the coke store. When the Sonderkommando men came out, they saw and I saw, only their clothes in the yard.”