Rishon LeZion, 2017
And I was a child, of seventeen, I was not even seventeen years of age.
My name is Daniel Yohanan, son of Shlomo, my father, and Nina, my mother. I had six sisters and three brothers. My father died in 1938, we were a family of ten. “Where to go? The Germans are here.” We knew… we wanted to leave, we were in the villages, in a village called Kommeno that was eventually burned by the Germans, because they saw a machine gun, there were members of the resistance… The Germans turned back. At night they came with two Italian military units, because Italians had surrendered and the Germans came. But how did they know all the names? They had reshimot [lists in Hebrew].
[…]
Jacko’s brothers [refers to Itzhak Ganon], two brothers, they worked in the crematoria, they took them to the crematoria. Also, my middle brother, twenty two years of age, they put him to work in the crematoria, in the ovens. We saw these things, no, our brothers told us, because in the afternoon -we worked from five in the morning to five in the afternoon- for an hour there was roll call, this was for one hour. They counted us for one hour, and they were saying ‘’do this…’’, a piece of bread, a bit of margarine, a small bit ve ze ou [this was it in Hebrew]. I did not eat the whole bread, I kept a fourth in my pocket for the morning, because when you eat in the morning and leave a bit, you do not suffer. But do you know what it’s like to go hungry and be suffering, and the cold and things, to not have underclothes, socks and shoes?
[…]
So, for a month I worked in the airplanes. What airplanes? Thousands of airplanes broken, from England, from Poland, from the United States, from Czechoslovakia, from all the countries that they took. They put them inside Auschwitz, because there was room there, a huge space, six to seven thousand Russians worked there. I worked there for a month, what can I tell you? Lo ratsiti, [I did not want to in Hebrew], I did not want to live. The Germans, the Russians kodem kol [first of all in Hebrew] we held on to the rope, we tied up the kanaf, what do you call it, the wings [of the airplane], so they took take them out. And they ‘’raz dva zail ‘’ [one-two, the rope in Polish and German]. And I was a child, of seventeen, I was not even seventeen years of age.
[…]
They put me on the railroad track, because it was damaged from the snow, from the water. So now to unscrew the screws, to put in the screws with this rod … ze koah ve yesh leha naalayim [you need strength and you need to have shoes in Hebrew]. A transport came from Hungary. Rakevet kvar lo overet [the train could not pass in Hebrew], because the line was broken. They took them off the train. They brought us further up ‘’make another place”. What other place and what? What did I see? I saw it: children and men. They put them in line… with their machine guns they killed them and the tractor came and covered them with dirt. Lo ratsiti laagid, [I did not want to tell you in Hebrew], I did not want to tell you this. But I did.
[…]
At noon they told us that next to crematoria three and four there is a … [he gestures with his hands that they are one across the other], there is a hatser [space in Hebrew], between the two crematoria. They said “you will dig two pits”. There was about twenty of us, ten men for each pit, three meters deep. The pits should be separate, we made bricha [pits in Hebrew]. We dug two pits. But there were no stones on the ground there, so where we dug the dirt would fall back in. So, two men had to climb up, in order to throw the dug-up earth further along, next to the gander [fence in Hebrew] or to number three or number four [refers to crematoria three and four], in between. And a transport of women and children pulled up, two thousand and five hundred persons. The doors of the crematoria were open, each door one and a half meters, two panels in each door. And I see, I saw, I heard from my brothers and from others who worked in the crematoria, there were two big ventilators. The Germans said “be quick, take your clothes off, leave your things here, get in the ulam, in this room , there are sasfal [benches in Hebrew]. There are , what do you call them, hooks to hang your clothes over there, you will take a shower, you do not need to take anything with you, there is soap, there are towels, the quicker you finish you can go to the tsrifim [barracks in Hebrew] so you can rest and sleep.” I have this quirk, I need to see how it is inside. I see the two ventilators, one on each side. They are working, why are they working? The Germans, when everyone was inside, they closed the doors, but people could not get in because there was not enough room. So, they pushed, they pushed them in until the doors were shut.
Citation: “Daniel Yohanan”, excerpts from his interview to Artemis Alcalay as part of the “Greek Jews Holocaust Survivors” project, Rishon LeZion, 26 February 2017, https://greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art/en/profile/daniel_yohanan/