Stephen Shooster afternoon. You could almost set your watch to their timeliness.
As soon as the bombers appeared, sirens started and the barrels would be lit to cre- ate smoke. The smoke burned my eyes terribly. During the air raids, all the prison- ers ran away from the factory as the guards retreated into the bomb shelters. Many of us ran to the mountain of used-up coal. The anti-aircraft fire created small clouds in the sky. Their sound punctuated the drone of the propellers and the whistle of the bombs falling. It was very frightening; the air was concussing everything nearby and the ground was shaking. The planes were also dropping small flecks of alumi - num to stifle the anti-aircraft fire. They bombed the entire region not just my camp. The British barracks were hit. Prisoners were dying, exposed to the shells. It was impossible to avoid. The Allied planes were not getting a free ride either. I saw planes fall from the sky. But the superiority of the Allies was overwhelming the Germans, the planes kept coming and the bombs kept falling. The first time my kommando, Walter, spoke to me as a person, I listened intently. It was July 1944, shortly after D-Day. He took out a map and said, “Junge, I want to show you something.” He showed me where he was from, Leipzig. Then he asked me, “Where do you come from?” I pointed to Nowy-Sacz, below Warsaw, and then over a little to the East, Grybow. Upon learning where I came from, he asked, “Is your family alive?” Forlornly, I said, “No. I believe they were all killed by gas in Belzec.” I pointed a little further to the East to where Belzec is located and thought, ‘the bones of my family.’ Then, I repeated the story of Belzec, told to me by the locomotive engineer. As I did this, anger filled his face. When I was through there was a long silence. He said, “Junge, the Russians will be here soon.” Excited and concerned at the same time, I asked him, “What will happen to us?” His response reaffirmed my concern, “The Gestapo cannot kill everyone.” Of course, I wanted to be liberated, but I was concerned the Nazis would try to erase their crimes. Auschwitz was one of the biggest. After a short pause he contin- ued, “Junge, I think we will pay for these atrocities for a thousand years.” We spoke a little longer. He asked if I had brothers or sisters. I told him, “Yes, I do. I had a brother and four sisters. I had two more sisters, but they died as toddlers before the war. I don’t believe any of them are alive.” “Do you have any other family?” I shook my head, “From what I know, I think all my relatives were killed. They were all held in a field with thousands of others and waited until it was their turn to be killed by gas.”
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