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Phoebe Barton 🚀 🇺🇳
@phoebebarton.bsky.social
Giant queer trans sf/game writer, typewriter guardian, Nebula finalist, Aurora winner! AE at Escape Pod, CW '19. Hamilton, Ontario. Header by Sidney Hargrave. She/her. www.phoebebartonsf.com
1.4k followers324 following7.2k posts
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From "Life's Reports: Sunday in Poland" by Richard Lauterbach, September 18, 1944.

The hours we spent inspecting Majdanek were pretty grim. It wasn't the gas chambers where victims were snuffed out standing up, or the crematorium where they were chopped up and then burned in specially constructed ovens. This part of the "death factory" didn't get us, somehow. Too machinelike. It wasn't even the open graves or the skeletons or skulls or stacks of fertilizer made from human ashes, bones and manure. The full emotional shock came at a giant wooden warehouse chock-full of people's shoes--more than 800,000 pairs--all sizes, shapes, colors and styles. In one place the shoes had burst out of the building like corn from a crammed crib. It was monstrous. There is something about an old shoe as personal as a snapshot or a letter. I looked at them and saw personalities: skinny kids in soft, white, worn slippers; thin-lipped old ladies in black, high-laced shoes; sturdy soldiers in brown military boots.
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Osubska-Morawski took us in a jeep to the hearing room. On the dais were members of the joint Soviet-Polish commission, including Father Krusinski, a Roman Catholic priest. The first of the German witnesses on the stand was followed by a tall, grisly character named Staub who had been a trusty at Majdanek. One day, he testified, he saw a truckful of prisoners arrive. They were etold to undress. One Polish girl, 28 or 29 years old, refused. Mussfeld, one of the camp's Oberführer, began to beat her. She scratched him, yelling, "Why am I to die?" Enraged, Mussfeld roared, "I shall burn you alive!" He called two assistants. They grabbed the girl and bound her hands and legs. She was carried to the crematorium, where they put her on one of the iron stretchers and slid her into an oven. Staub recalled calmly, "There was one loud scream. Her hair flared up in the flames momentarily. Then I could see no more."
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PB
Phoebe Barton 🚀 🇺🇳
@phoebebarton.bsky.social
Giant queer trans sf/game writer, typewriter guardian, Nebula finalist, Aurora winner! AE at Escape Pod, CW '19. Hamilton, Ontario. Header by Sidney Hargrave. She/her. www.phoebebartonsf.com
1.4k followers324 following7.2k posts
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