[7] 12. Emptied flats
All the acts of torture took place in the courtyard of the church, but Jews were
not allowed into the church itself, on the grounds that their presence would
defile it...
However, on 13 September, the fifth day that they had been in the courtyard,
an order came: “All the Jews must go into the church” – and there the
Jews suffered a new misfortune: Air! Air!
The torturers calculated that at night it was indeed cold in the courtyard,
but during the day, the Jews had enough air to breathe.
And so, they took approximately 2,000 people and locked them into
one room, so that it immediately became suffocating... People fainted from
the overcrowding and when Chaim Klajnbojm, a 65-year-old man, an important
person and a great scholar, fainted, Jews wanted to give him air and
keep him alive, so they asked the guard for water – and they received [8] the
cynical reply: “Your days are numbered, all of you,... so what if this Jew dies
a day earlier”...
They were not even allowed to take care of their physical needs... and
when the Jews demanded a place for it – the pious Protestants assigned them
a special one: by the altar!...
It is impossible to imagine how stinking and suffocating the air became...
and in addition, soldiers would constantly come in and artificially create congestion... and order the Jews to make a wide passageway so that the dirty
Jews wouldn’t touch them...
Jews suffocated, but the walls could not be stretched... and the bloodthirsty
guards beat them with rubber truncheons until they bled...
They battered them, wounded them, smashed their heads open, just for
the pleasure of seeing Jewish blood...
The Jews felt as though they had fallen among hungry wolves...
[9] And here the misery became even greater because, inside the church,
there was no possibility of obtaining food from the outside.
Jews prayed: “Lord of the Universe! May death come from your hand and
not from these evil-doers.”...
And so they remained in this hell for a day and a night – on the morning
of the sixth day an order came that they were all to leave the church...
They were lined up, they had become shadows of human beings, broken, tortured,
and starved...
