M. DUBOST: We can proceed to the next picture.
BOIX: This was taken in April 1941. My Spanish comrades who had sought refuge in France are pulling a wagon loaded with earth. That was the work we had to do.
M. DUBOST: By whom was this picture taken?
BOIX: At that time by Paul Ricken, a professor from Essen.
M. DUBOST: We may proceed to the next one.
BOIX: This staged the scene of an Austrian who had escaped. He was a carpenter in the garage and he managed to make a box, a box in which he could hide and so get out of the camp. But after a while he was recaptured. They put him on the wheelbarrow in which corpses were carried to the crematorium. There were some placards saying in German, “Alle Vögel sind schon da,” meaning “All the birds are back again.” He was sentenced and then paraded in front of 10,000 deportees to the music of a gypsy band playing a song “J’attendrai.” When he was hanged, his body swung to and fro in the wind while they played the very well known song, “Bill Black Polka.”
M. DUBOST: The next one.
BOIX: This is the scene; in this picture we see on the right and left all the deportees in a row; on the left are the Spaniards, they are smaller. The man in the front with the beret is a criminal from Berlin by the name of Schultz, who was employed on these occasions. In the background you can see the man who is about to be hanged.
M. DUBOST: Next one. Who took these pictures?
BOIX: By the SS Oberscharführer Fritz Kornatz. He was killed by American troops in Holland in 1944. This man, a Russian prisoner of war, got a bullet in the head. They hanged him to make us think he was a suicide and had tried to hurl himself against the barbed wire.