Tag #106651 - Interview #78163 (danuta mniewska)

The last day was such a horror one can never forget it. There were some 80 patients in the hospital - adults and kids, infants too, because there was a maternity ward there, it was the only hospital in the ghetto. I remember the terrible yelling, 'Raus! Raus!' [German for 'Get out!'] - The way they did it. Three trucks came. The doctors from outside the hospital got aboard with their families and they left. Shortly afterwards they returned - the Jewish cemetery was nearby, they were killing them there. Then another dispatch - the patients able to walk, the personnel helped them come down. Those were taken to the cemetery too. Then the bed-ridden ones, who had to be taken down to the courtyard. There the Germans told the doctors to give them a shot of morphine. Several young doctors refused. They were immediately executed, and when the rest saw they had no choice, they started giving them those injections.

Not all patients fell asleep quickly - they lay there, breathing, still alive. And the Germans told the staff to strangle them with towels - wrap a towel or blanket around their neck and pull at both ends. Then, whether they were still alive or not, you had to throw them onto the truck. There were three or four newborns - warm, just taken away from their mothers. And up they landed on that pile of corpses, like a bag of potatoes... The last transport also went to the cemetery. And that left us, the staff - 20, 30 people - doctors, nurses, orderlies. We were taken to the 'Umschlagplatz' [German: transit point, originally the place in Warsaw from which Jews were transported by train from the ghetto to the death camps, here used as a category] where the selection took place. My husband, I and my sister were young and healthy, and we went to the right side, to life...