Albert Cohen letter

PASS THIS LETTER AROUND, MOTHER; LET OTHER PEOPLE SEE IT.

April 26, 1945 Germany

Dear Mother,

I am sorry that I can't write more often but I've been working hard for a long time. we have been in Germany for almost a month and I'm glad to say that what parts of it I have seen are smashed to the earth.

A few days after Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, was liberated I got an opportunity to visit it. You can never realize what it was like. Approaching it, I saw

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people dressed in stripped pajama -like clothing walking around. They were thin as skeletons, weak and quiet, just walking around aimlessly. The place was surrounded by barbed wire fences and overlooked by towers where guards used to stand. The enclosure was very large and for the main part filled with red wooden barracks. Across the street were SS barracks and factories. As I entered, my attention was attracted to a pillory in which inmates were locked and beaten by SS men with clubbs and a tin whip. There were other things the

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Nazis had constructed to torture people in the courtyard too. The next place I visited was the oven room. Entering the basement, I saw the room where as many as 80 people at one time were hung by their hands from the pegs high on the wall and beaten to death with big wooden clubs. When they were dead or almost so, they were taken down and loaded on an elevator, then hoisted up to the ground floor where they were shoved into ovens and cremates - dead or alive. There

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were still partially burned bodied in the ovens. Walking outside, my attention was drawn to a huge wagon in an inner square, filled with corpses. They were skinny, shrunken bodies with big staring eyes and open mouths. It was so horrible that I was not bothered by it at all - it seemed unreal. Believe me though, I have seen with my own eyes what sights I describe. Some of the boys took pictures of this and I'll send home at my first chance.

Every once in while some of the inmates would bring

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in a pushcart full of bodies from the woods where the SS troops had taken them and shot them. These corpses were dumped on a pile with others which were later to be taken away to be buried. They were heaped together like a pile of leaves.

The hospital was a dirty, grimy building and it was the smellingest place in the whole camp. This was probably caused by the dirty bed clothes and the dead and dying people. It was hard to tell the difference; they both had purple skin. The main cause of death was

6 malnutrition. there were barracks after barracks filled with people who were slowly dying from that cause, whom it was impossible to save. The inmates were beaten down broken spirited people. Till the the time when the Nazis had to leave there were 51,000 killed in the camp and there was a high [huge?] monument with that number on it in the center of the courtyard, which had been placed there by the Nazis to commemorate their murderous achievement. I spoke to some Polish boys of a group of boys my age. They were placed in a

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concentration camp at the age of seventeen and were there for five years. They told me that the only thing that concerned the Nazis was how to kill the people fast enough. One of the methods they used at first was to inject benzine[?] or a strond acid either into the heart or veins with a large hypodermic. This killed them instantly but it was not efficient for large numbers of people so new methods were evolved. They were herded into a large barracks, 800 at a time, and all the doors and windows