On 8 September 1945 at 10.00 a.m., I heard:
Abus Blumenfeld, married to Chaja Weizblum, Polish fur coat seller, born 20 July 1907 in Klimontów (Poland), residing at rue Feronstrée 37 in Liège, who voluntarily testified in French:
On 18 February 1943 I was arrested by the Gestapo and sent as a Jew to Birkenau (Auschwitz) concentration camp, where I remained until February 1945.
In May or June 1944, I saw Adler’s wife arrive at the camp with her three children. The German SS men segregated the prisoners who had come in the transport in the usual manner. Around an hour later, Adler’s wife and the two younger children were taken to the gas chamber and murdered.
The procedure followed by the SS with regard to transports of political prisoners and Jews arriving in Birkenau (Auschwitz) was as follows: the unfortunates were loaded off the train they had arrived in and taken to a camp some 300–700 m away. There, the SS men segregated them according to their fancy, which means that each time 95% of the prisoners were slated for gassing and the rest, 5%, were slated for work or [medical] experiments.
During my stay at Auschwitz from February 1944 until January 1945 trains with deportees would arrive almost every day, in the following arrangement: one transfer of Belgian nationals every three months, between 1,000 to 1,500 people (men, women, and children); one transport of French nationals, over 1,500 people, at the same interval; one transport of Dutch nationals every three months, also larger than the Belgian one. In addition, there were three transports of political prisoners and Hungarian Jews of around 8,000 people each arriving almost every day.
The procedure was the same with regard to all of these wretches – 95% were gassed and 5% avoided death for the time being. All of those gassed were subsequently burned in crematorium ovens. I can say without any doubt that the number of people who were killed this way during my time in Auschwitz ran into the hundreds of thousands.
In February 1945, due to the Soviet approach, all the prisoners were moved to Oranienburg within some 15 days, then to Flossenbürg – also within 15 days. Finally, we were transferred to the vicinity of Landau, where the justice of the peace from Marche died, I don’t remember his last name. In the last of these concentration camps around 200 out of 500 prisoners died as a result of mistreatment within a single month.
At your request, I will report to the Civil Registry Office in Liège on Monday to make a statement about the death of Adler’s wife and two children. As regards the oldest daughter, Berta, I saw her three days after her mother’s death, doing forced labor in the camp.
Despite my fervent desire to see the punishment of all those responsible for the horrors in the camps, I don’t have any names of SS men to give, neither from this [camp], nor from the others.
The report was read to the witness and confirmed by him, whereupon he signed in my book.