:12:02
...as we pulled into the station at Riga.
:12:33
We had been three days and three nights
in that cattle truck from Berlin...
:12:37
...without food or water.
:12:40
The dead, and there were many of them,
were crowded in among us.
:12:45
It was there I first saw him.
:12:48
Captain Eduard Roschmann,
the SS Commandant of the camp.
:12:53
The ´´butcher.´´
:12:58
Every day brought another trainload
of prisoners.
:13:02
Roschmann had many of the women,
children and elderly...
:13:05
...exterminated on arrival.
:13:07
They were more valuable dead.
:13:10
Their clothes, their hair,
their teeth were a cash asset.
:13:14
But Esther and I survived
through that year.
:13:19
I had been an architect before the war...
:13:21
...and knew enough of carpentry
to get skilled work.
:13:24
We laboured 12 hours a day
in the camp workshops...
:13:27
...or else at the lumber mills
in the damp frozen woods near the coast.
:13:33
Several times during the following winter,
I thought Esther would die.
:13:37
The hunger, the cold,
the constant brutalities...
:13:41
...seemed to have broken her spirit
and her will to live.
:13:45
Yet, compared to some, we were fortunate.
:13:47
Many of the prisoners
were given no food at all...
:13:50
...until they died of starvation.
:13:53
Roschmann had a hobby.
:13:55
He liked to destroy human beings.
:13:58
First their soul, then their body.