Odliczaliśmy, co dziesiąta szła do gazu... KL Auschwitz - Stefania Turbiarz. Świadkowie Epoki

Video recorded by the PILECKI INSTITUTE as part of the WITNESSES TO THE AGE project. Welcome to the Witnesses to the Age channel. If you appreciate the value of our content, please click the THUMBS UP and watch other videos on our channel. Please SUBSCRIBE to help grow our channel and share even more fascinating stories. Leave your opinion in the comment section below. If you know someone who would like to share their stoy with us, contact us via email: [email protected] Our today's interviewee: Stefania Turbiarz née Socha (born in 1923 in Skierbieszów, Zamość Region) and her family were deported from their village in 1942. Along with her sister, her sister's husband, and her two brothers, she was sent to a transit camp in Zamość. Three weeks later they were all sent to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the concentration camp she was forced to perform heavy and useless labor, such as digging ditches and burying them again. The work she did was supposed to humiliate and torment the prisoners. When the inmates returned from their worksite, with the camp orchestra playing in the background, the Germans would count the prisoners and send every tenth woman to the gas chamber. Stefania Turbiarz fell ill with typhus and had 42-degree fever – such individuals were taken to the crematorium. She was saved by a friend, Zofia from Kraków, who said in German that Stefania no longer had a fever and that she could go back to work. Stefania escaped a horrific death in crematorium once again when a decent German pushed her to a another spot, as she would've been the tenth one in the line. The same man, who had three children of his own back at home, showed mercy to Stefania by giving her some additional food. Stefania's sister also miraculously survived; severely ill, she was lying on a pile of corpses desting for burning, but someone read out a letter she had received from her little daughter to a German. The child was asking her mother to come home. The German ordered that Stefania's sister be brought back to the hospital. Her health improved and she managed to survive the war. For a period of time, Stefania Turbiarz worked in Birkenau, where she witnessed mass murders in the gass chambers; she heard a Jew – a member of the Sonderkommando – who had to burn the bodies of his relatives. Copyright by Instytut Solidarności i Męstwa im. Witolda Pileckiego.