Testimony of Hirsh Hecht, born in Cieszyn, 1915, regarding his experiences in the Polish Army, as a POW in Germany, the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Braunschweig and Wattenstedt camps

Testimony of Hirsh Hecht, born in Cieszyn, 1915, regarding his experiences in the Polish Army, as a POW in Germany, the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Braunschweig and Wattenstedt camps Serves in the Polish Army at the outbreak of the Polish-German war; wounded during air-raids on the Warsaw front; hospitalization in Warsaw; falls captive to Germans and transfer to a POW camp in Pruszkow and then to a POW camp in Krotoszym; transfer of Polish POWs to Stalag 6-C POW camp; transfer to POW camp in Lublin; release from captivity and return to Lodz; labor on behalf of the Judenrat as a supervisor over several ghetto streets; labor as an electrician for the electric company in the ghetto; rescue inside the transports room during "Aktions" and deportations to concentration camps; deportation to Auschwitz, August 1944; life in block 12 in camp; murder of the block's inmates; murder of the children in block 25; transfer to Braunschweig camp during the advance of the Red Army front; labor in a Bussing-Nag factory producing trucks and mini-buses; transfer to Wattenstedt camp and labor in a Hermann Goering Werke factory; transfer of inmates to Woebellin; liberation by the US Army, May 1945. Work as a medic in a hospital in Neustadt; move to Lodz; emigration to Czechoslovakia and work as a textile engineer in Liberce; antisemitic atmosphere in Czechoslovakia during the trial of the Secretary of the Communist party, Rudolf Slansky; aliya to Israel, 1965.