Sonia Lewkowicz

Treblinka Survivor – Testimony – Selected Extracts

 Federenko Trial Fort Lauderdale, USA 1978   

[photos added to enhance the text]

Q: Where were you born?

Sonia Lewkowicz:  I was born in the city of Dombrowa , near Grodno, Poland.

Q: And when were you born?

On the 11^th of March 1922

Q: And when did you finish school?

It was already during the war in June 1924, correction 1941

Q: In December 1942 were you taken in a transport to Treblinka Camp?

Yes

Q: You were twenty years old when this happened?

That is right

Q: Tell the Court what happened, when the train you were riding in pulled into the Treblinka camp?

When the train stopped, we were chased from the cars to a big square where we were separated, women and children on one side, the men on the other side.

We went to the barrack where we had to undress.

Q: And did you undress?

Yes

Q: Who else was in the barrack where you were forced to undress?

There were other women and children, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jewish prisoners, men, with some kind of a blue band on their sleeves.

Q: Tell us what happened to you?

I wouldn’t undress completely. One of those Jewish prisoners, Jewish men, who suggested that I should say that I am a laundress. Then he ran to the SS –man, told him probably I am a laundress, and pushed me into him, and he said to this officer that I am a qualified laundress, he pulled me aside.

Q: One of the Jewish prisoners with an arm band that said you were to say you were a laundress?

Yes

Q: Was that in order to save your life?

Yes

Q: Were you really a qualified laundress?

No

Q: So when you made the statement to the SS man that you were a laundress, were you pulled out of line?

Yes

Q: Was anybody else – were any other women pulled out of the line at the same time you were?

Read the full testimony here:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/sonialewkowicz.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org 


Hitler; Himmler Shoah; Third Reich; Final Solution; Nazi; National Socialism; Jews; Judaism; The Holocaust; Auschwitz; Deathcamps; Sobibor; Belze; Treblinka; Krakow; Lublin; Action Reinhard; Wirth; Globocnik; Goering; Goebbels; Anne Frank; Propaganda; Genocide; Murder; Racism; Aryan; anti-Semitism; Israel; Torah; Talmud; Sephardic; Mengele; Euthanasia; Wannsee; World War II; Axis History; Gas Vans; Chelmno; gas chamber; Zyklon B; Buchenwald; concentration camp; Dachau; Bergen Belsen; Stuthoff; Gross Rosen; Mauthausen; Natzweiler; Survivors;