The author lived in Lwów and was caught in a round up and sent to the Janowska camp. The camp was also a place where Jews were killed en masse. The boy was a witness of their mass extermination when he was 17 years old.

Lwów 1942. The Germans had ruled for one year. There were many round ups, forced payments and they set up a slave labour camp in ul. Janowska on a sandy hill. The camp had a double function. First it was for slave labour. The second was a place where Jews, Gypsies and others were murdered. It was called ‘Zwangsarbeitslager Lemberg‐Janowska’.

I was 16 when I arrived. The youngest prisoner. The day we arrived at the camp, they kept us late into the evening in the roll call square in front of the camp HQ. Prisoners were registered, all their hair was cut and paint was put down their spine so that the Gestapo could tell where the prisoner came from. Prisoners wore the same clothes that they had worn when captured and it was these clothes that were painted. Poles got a red stripe, Ukrainians blue and Jews white. There was typhus in the camp. Those that had caught the disease were mainly Jews who had been in the camp a long time. The sick were taken to a building where they were told that they would be taken to hospital but they were left without any shelter in a square surrounded by barbed wire next to the roll call square. A young SS man with red hair killed them. He walked around them and whistled. If a sick person did not raise his head then the SS man walked closer and shot him with a rifle. It was the same every day at the same time of day. New arrivals were put into work komandos. In the roll call square, Jews and Aryans were separated. Once numbers had been checked and the report given to the Gestapo then in the morning we were taken to work and in the evening to our barracks. The camp was based on existing concentration camps. In effect it was a death camp, especially for Jews, Gypsies and to a lesser extent Poles. It was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence. Prisoners could not approach the fence. If they did, they were shot from the guard towers which were manned by Ukrainians. The SS were young and taken from the front line for a rest. Some of them spoke Czech, we assumed that they were Germans from the Sudentenland. The kommendant was an SS officer called Willhaus. His second in command was called Rokita. The difference was that when Willhaus hit prisoners with a whip they survived whereas when Rokita hit people, they died. Prisoners had to take their caps off very quickly in the presence of the Gestapo, if they forgot or were unable to take the cap off for health reasons, they were were beaten. Rokita always wore leather gloves in the camp and carried a gun. He was around 50, average height, quite stout and completely bald. He lived alone in Lwów. His wife was in Kraków. When she came to Lwów, his sadism was less. Benefitting from gentler than usual behaviour, four Austrian Jews went to see his wife to ask her to put influence on him not to be behave so murderously in the camp. This ended in tragedy for them. The next day, during morning roll call, Rokita ordered those that had gone to see his wife to fall out. He fired at them with his pistol and they ran around the roll call square until they fell. That day, we did not go to work. The tractors left without us and were ordered to wait until the last wheeze of the dying men was heard, which occurred around noon. They were left to die in agony. Killings could take place individually or in groups as in the case of the Jews brought from the Lwów ghetto. I saw two mass murders of Jews. The second I saw whilst hiding in the HQ building. Rokita ordered us not to look out of the windows. The Jews were in a square around 100 metres from the HQ. It was in several parts and each part was surrounded by barbed wire. The first transport arrived during the day, then the next as it was getting dark, then at night. In the first transport there were young Jewish girls. They were brought in four lorries. Some of the young SS men took them to their quarters, others waited until night fall. No‐one knows what happened to them except for the SS men. The square was lit up by search lights once it got dark. That is how I was able to see what was happening there. People were brought to the first square. They left their outer clothing there, bags and other things that they had brought with them. Then the SS forced these poor people into another square through two gates, shouting at them and beating them with whips. They were ordered to strip, irrespective of age and sex. Then they were directed to the third square through one gate. There were baskets there into which they had to leave their jewelry and watches. From here, there was a narrow gate where they were subjected to an examination of their hands and mouths by the SS. Then they were taken to another square where the naked people were segregated and forced to form columns and walk in the direction of the sandy hill. There were children at the front, then women and men at the end. The murdering finished at four in the morning. Several hundred people died there. The SS appeared at dawn in the squares where the Jews had been. They threw what was left into the baskets. In the place where the jewelry had been surrendered, they examined the ground very carefully.

[...] That is how I saw the way Willhaus and Rokita organised things.