Erich was one of five children born to observant Jewish parents. They lived in Vsetin, a town in Czechoslovakia's Moravia region that straddled the border with Slovakia. Some 70 Jewish families lived in the town of 12,500 persons. There, Erich's family owned a grocery store and operated a sawmill. Erich attended a trade school where he became an expert in lumber and forestry.

1933-39: The Germans kept our sawmill operating after they occupied our region in March 1939. Since I had a permit to work in the forests, I helped Czech soldiers flee Moravia through the woods into unoccupied Slovakia. Once, when a group of escapees was seized, the Gestapo arrested me. At their prison in Brno-Spielberg I was tortured: I was forced to hold up buckets of water while they burned my chest with cigarettes.

Europe 1933, Czechoslovakia indicated
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1940-44: Then I was sent to Nazi camps--Dachau in 1940, Hamburger-Neuengamme in 1941, and Auschwitz in 1942. In Auschwitz I was in a maintenance squad fixing wheel bearings, locks, pipes--anything metal. We were even made to repair leaky pipes in the crematorium. One day, while fixing a broken wagon, I watched as prisoners dug up thousands of corpses buried in mass graves--gassing victims. The decayed bodies were moved on small wagons to a pile some distance away and doused with gasoline. The pyre of bodies was torched.

Erich later escaped with his 11-year-old son from a transport to Mauthausen. He returned to Czechoslovakia and was a witness in the trial of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.

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Erich Schon