Piazza, Bruno

Bruno Piazza was an Italian Jew deported to Auschwitz at the end of July 1944. In a 1956 brochure, he claimed that he experienced a homicidal gassing at Auschwitz carried out inside a barracks that had 20 showers on the ceiling. Then some clerk wearing a mask entered the building, sprinkled potassium-cyanide powder onto the…

Pilecki, Witold

Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a lieutenant in the Polish Clandestine Army in German-occupied Poland. As such, he was arrested on 19 September 1940 and interned at Auschwitz under the name Tadeusz Serafiński. Pilecki organized a Polish resistance group in that camp. He claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz on…

Pilo, Aaron

Aaron Pilo was a Greek Jew who was interned at Auschwitz from January 1943 to January 1945, where he claimed to have worked inside the crematoria. In June 1945, he signed a statement, in which he claimed the following, among other things: Each of the crematoria could cremate 3,000 bodies a day. However, each muffle…

Pilunov, Ivanovich

Stefan Pilunov, a Soviet citizen from the village of Prisna near the Belorussia city Mogilev, was arrested in July 1943 for partisan activity, and held in a prison until 4 October of that year. On that day, he claims to have been deployed by his German captors in the exhumation of various regional mass graves…

Plucer, Regina

Regina Plucer was a Polish Jewess who was interned at the Auschwitz Camp from August 1943 until January 1945. On 11 May 1945, hence not even four months after leaving Auschwitz, she signed an affidavit in preparation for the Bergen-Belsen show trial. She asserted in it, among other things, that she had been deployed in…

Podchlebnik, Michał

Michał Podchlebnik was a Polish Jew who, during his interrogation by Judge Bednarz on 9 June 1945, claimed to have been deported to the Chełmno Camp in late December 1941 or early January 1942, depending on which of his statements we believe, and escaped from there after just a few days. He is one of…

Podchlebnik, Salomon

Salomon Podchlebnik was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a concise deposition of 6 December 1945, he claimed that inmates at Sobibór were killed with an unspecified gas in one gas chamber, resulting in half a million victims. The orthodoxy insists, however, that there were several gas chambers, and that only half as many…

Poswolski, Henryk

Henryk Poswolski was a Polish Jew deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in January 1943, where he was employed as a bricklayer and stoker. However, he was not working at the camp’s extermination sector, which was physically and optically cordoned off from the rest of the camp. (What he was stoking, then,…

Pronicheva, Dina

Dina Pronicheva was a Ukrainian Jew from Kiev who claimed, in at least 12 statements made between the 1940s and 1960, that she survived the mass shooting of Jews by Germans at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev on 29 September 1941. According to her various testimonies, the Jews were driven to Babi Yar,…

Puchała, Lucjan

Lucjan Puchała was a Polish railway worker at Małkinia Station near Treblinka until June 1942, and then at the construction of the track from Treblinka Station to the sand pit near the Treblinka I Labor Camp. Necessarily from pure hearsay, he reported, among other things: There were 8 brick-and-cement gas chambers for 700 victims per…

Putzker, Fritz

Fritz Putzker was a Jew from Vienna who passed through several camps, among them Ausch­witz and Birkenau, where he arrived on 23 February 1943. He was deployed in this camp for nine months as a foreman in the workshops of the Lenz Corporation. Probably in 1945, he wrote a report, in which we read, among…

Rabinowicz, Jakub

Jakub Rabinowicz was a Treblinka inmate who managed to escape from the camp probably in early September 1942. Later that month, his testimony was recorded by the Jewish underground movement of the Warsaw Ghetto. The extant fragment of it does not contain any reference to extermination facilities or killing methods, but it does mention a…

Rajchman, Chil

Chil Rajchman (aka Henryk or Ye(c)hiel Reichman(n), 14 June 1914 – 7 May 2004) was a Polish Jew who was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 10 October 1942, from which he escaped after an inmate uprising on 2 August 1943. Still during the war, he presumably wrote down his experiences in Yiddish, which were…

Rajgrodzki, Jerzy

Jerzy Rajgrodzki was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 12 September 1942, and escaped during the prisoner uprising on 2 August 1943. On an unspecified date, he wrote a lengthy report on his stay at the camp, which was published in 1958. He described the alleged Treblinka gas chambers, presumably operated with engine-exhaust gas, similar,…

Rajzman, Samuel

Samuel Rajzman (1904 – 1979) was a Polish accountant who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in late September 1942 – or maybe in August of that year, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT, Vol. 8, p. 325). He managed to escape from that camp on…

Rassinier, Paul

Paul Rassinier (18 March 1906 – 28 July 1967) was a French high-school teacher. Born in Bermont, France, Rassinier joined the French Communist Party in 1922, at the age of only 16. In the course of time, however, Rassinier turned to pacifism and opposed the nationalization of private property advocated by the Communists, which is…

Razgonayev, Mikhail

Mikhail Razgonayev was a Ukrainian auxiliary who served at the Sobibór Camp as a guard from beginning to end. After the war, he was arrested for this by the Soviets. During his interrogation on 20-21 September 1948, Razgonayev described the gas-chamber facility as a stone/concrete building with a corridor on one side and four gas…

Reder, Rudolf

Rudolf Reder (aka Roman Robak, 4 April 1881 – 6 Oct. 1977) was a Polish Jew from Lviv who was deported to the Belzec Camp in July or August 1942 at age 61 – which should have been his death sentence. But he miraculously was selected to live and work there as a stove mechanic…

Renard, Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul Renard was a French priest who was deported to the Buchenwald Camp in 1942. After the war, a collection of poems by him was published titled Chaines et lumières (Chains and Lights). In an appendix to his own work, he wrote about his experience at Buchenwald, where we read: “I saw going into the…

Rogerie, André

André Rogerie (25 Dec. 1921 – 1 May 2014) was a member of the French resistance who got arrested in July 1943 and sent to various camps. He arrived at Auschwitz on 14 April 1944 via the Majdanek Camp. He remained at the camp until its evacuation on 18 January 1945. Back home he wrote…

Rögner, Adolf

Adolf Rögner was an incorrigible, pathological liar with multiple convictions for swindling, forgery and perjury, both before and after the war. Because of his status as “incorrigible,” he spent time as a criminal at the Auschwitz Camp, where he was deployed as an inmate electrician. After the war, he was convicted again for similar offenses….

Rosenberg, Eliyahu

Eliyahu (also Ela, Elias) Rosenberg was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp on 20 August 1942. He made a deposition in front of the Historical Commission of Warsaw, probably in 1945, which was recorded in very bad French and is barely comprehensible. It only mentions in passing that he had to drag corpses…

Rosenblat, Herman

Herman Rosenblat (1929 – 5 Feb. 2015) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to a subcamp of the Buchenwald Camp, then shortly before the war’s end to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was liberated. Having gotten into serious financial difficulties in the 1990s, he decided to write down his wartime…

Rosenblum, Joshuah

Joshuah Rosenblum, born in 1923, was a Polish Jew who was arrested in May 1941 and sent to the Sosnowice Transit Camp, and then to Wiesau. After working with about 300 Jews on a highway construction project about 125 km from Berlin, he was transferred to Klettendorf, near Breslau, from where he fled. Arrested by…

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