"I could see flames coming out of the woods. I was silent, asking myself, 'Oh God, where are you?' The Germans were burning the bodies. All night, the sky was lit up by the fires . . . I was almost hypnotized by the distant fires, thinking of all the beautiful people going up in smoke. . . "

Edward Landau is a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in Krakov, Poland, Landau witnessed the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and soon his life began to be ravaged by the inhumanity of the Nazi regime and was forced into the Jewish ghetto of Rzesnow. In 1942, he survived the liquidation of Rzeszow and the ghetto was then transformed into Rzesnow work camp. In 1943, Rzeszow work camp was liquidated and the survivors were sent to Szebna concentration camp. In February of 1944, this camp too was liquidated and Landau was fortunate enough to escape the ensuing Szebna massacre, one among the 105 people selected by the SS to be spared. A week later the group was sent to Krakow Plaszow, the concentration camp depicted in the film Schindler's List. In March of 1945, with the Allies closing in, Landau and others were moved to Dachau in Munich, Germany. Desperate to escape his typhoid infested barrack, Landau volunteered to do outside work and was sent to a military airfield to fill in craters made by American bombardments. Left unprotected by the German soldiers in the middle of an American bombardment, Landau miraculously survived. Days later he was sent back to Dachau and soon was ravaged by typhoid. Less than a month later, Dachau was liberated by American forces. In 1948, Landau immigrated to the United States, faced with forging a new life for himself alone. In this segment, Landau recalls the liquidation of Rzesnow work camp and the Szebna massacre.

. . . From the time the Germans took over Poland in 1939, we Jews became their commodity, their possession and the SS and Gestapo could do with us whatever they wanted to do and that's exactly what they did. Depriving us of our liberty, taking away our material possessions, and stripping us of our pride and dignity . . .

The Germans would bring to Rzeszow camp some Jews from other towns and take out some people to the unknown. How traumatic those selections were when the wives were separated from husband, children from mothers, boyfriends from their sweethearts and all this to the brutal beating, kicking, and hollering by the SS men. And the people's cries, and the prayers, "Oh God, where are you!" when they were driven out to the cattle cars. It is not easy to describe my own feeling to be a witness to this tragic separation or the feeling of those who just lost their loved ones.

After the ghetto liquidation, we, the survivors, were broken, morally and mentally, but we were still living with the hope that we [would] hear in the future about the fate of our families. The abuses and the random killings in Rzeszow working camp was a daily routine, People going out to work for the Gestapo sometimes did not come back. One Jewish German girl was wandering during working hours, [and was] stopped by the SS men . . . She tried to explain that she was looking for her husband who had [a] permit to stay in the camp. The SS men kicked her to the ground, hollering, "You dirty Jew." She was really beautiful. He pulled out his pistol She was pleading with him and hoping for mercy, opened her coat showing that she is pregnant. That made him more mad. He was hollering again, "You dirty Jew. You know that Jews do not have any future. You should not have any children," and fired the gun. As she lay there, covered with her beautiful black hair, he put two more bullets in her body and calmly walked away. That was our life without hope for the future . . .

After the liquidation of Rzeszow camp I was sent to Szebna concentration camp. It was a dreadful place . . . with over 3,000 Jews in it from many small towns. In the first day, we were ordered to gather in a circle of fifty men. The SS men instructed us to put in the center all the valuables we had with a warning that noncompliance will be punishable by death. So the pile of watches, gold, diamonds was quite sizable. Then the SS men was checking the pocket of one of the men and found something. He started to beat the man, hollering, "You dirty dog Jews, you are all cheaters. You cannot be trusted. You were told to give up everything." He made the man lay down on the ground and shot him in the back of the head to the horror of us all. There were persistent rumors that Szebna camp [would] be liquidated and here again we were facing the unknown future. Early in February, 1944 the fateful day did come. Truckloads of heavy armed SS men took position around the camp. We, the 1,500 in the camp, were ordered to assemble in the square surrounded by the heavy armed guards and machine gun placement on each end of the square. The guards intentionally were pushing and cursing, making from us a tight human mass. Again, how could I describe the horrors, the cries, the prayers of the human multitude. Some SS men came and started to take out some people. I was one of them . . . They took out 105 of us and put under guard on the side of the square. We were not allowed to talk to each other and did not know which group would be safer, ours or the one in the center of the square. As I was leaning against the wall of the barrack I was witnessing again the unfolding of a monumental tragedy. The trucks come in and the SS men were loading them to capacity with the people from the square, driving them out from the camp. A short while later I could hear machine gun rattling coming from the nearby woods. Then the guns stopped and the empty trucks were coming back fir more human cargo. And again the same. The trucks left, the machine guns started again. We all were bewildered realizing that the German were machine gunning the people in the woods, and this sort of thing continued through the day until nobody was left in the square except some people who had committed suicide by taking cyanide pills. By the evening the machine guns were silent. I could see flames coming from the woods. i was silent, asking myself, "Oh God, where are you?" The Germans were burning the bodies. All night the sky was lit up by the fires. I was sitting on the ground leaning against the barrack wall speechless with my own dark thoughts flashing through my head. If that is the unknown destination, then hat happened to all our loved ones? . . . I was almost hypnotized by the distant fires, thinking of all the beautiful people going up in smoke.