MME. VAILLANT-COUTURIER: That is to say to the gas chamber. That is why
very often the women preferred not to go to the Revier and they died at
their work or at roll call. Every day, after the evening roll call in
winter time, dead were picked up who had fallen into the ditches.
The only advantage of the Revier was that as one was in bed, one did not
have to go to roll call; but one lay in appalling conditions, four in a
bed of less than 1 meter in width, each suffering from a different
disease, so that anyone who came for leg sores would catch typhus or
dysentery from neighbors. The straw mattresses were dirty and they were
changed only when absolutely rotten. The bedding was so full of lice
that one could see them swarming like ants. One of my companions,
Marguerite Corringer, told me that when she had typhus, she could not
sleep all night because of the lice. She spent the night shaking her
blanket over a piece of paper and emptying the lice into a receptacle by
the bed, and this went on for hours.
There were practically no medicines. Consequently the patients were left
in their beds without any attention, without hygiene, and unwashed. The
dead lay in bed with the sick for several hours; and finally, when they
were noticed, they were simply tipped out of the bed and taken outside
the block. There the women porters would come and carry the dead away on
small stretchers, with heads and legs dangling over the sides. From
morning till night the carriers of the dead went from the Revier to the
mortuary.
During the big epidemics, in the winters of 1943 and 1944, the
stretchers were replaced by carts, as there were too many dead bodies.
During those periods of epidemics there were from 200 to 350 dead daily.