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ITHE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, January 17, 1986 23
The horrors of Nazi Germany will return next
week for David Burdowski as he takes the
witness stand against a concentration camp
commander.
.
BY ALAN HITSKY
News Editor
It was a nightmare. Six years of
living a nightmare, 40 years of re-
pressing the memories. Only in re-
cent years have the dreams been,
allowed to surface, and next week
they will surface again for South-
field barber David Burdowski.
Horst Czerwinsiii, 63, will not
remember David Burdowski of
Klodawa, Poland — No. 141935 still
visible on his arm. And Burdowski
may not be able to recognize Czer-
winski after 41 years. But the
Burdowski holds photos of corpses taken
from a German soldier by an American
GA. from. Flint.
nightmares will come back. The
memories of the 22-year-old Czier-
winiiki who killed for pleasure at an
Auschwitz subcamp are permanently
etched.
Lagischa. Subcamp of Auschwitz
for male prisoners. Open from June
15, 1943 to Sept. 6, 1944. According
to the West German government,
Horst Czerwinski, now a resident of
Luneburg, West Germany, murdered
eight people at Lagischa in 1944.
But David Burdowski's nightmare
paints an even more horrible, pic-
ture.
"Eight people?! Just eight?"
Burdowski asks vehemently. lie
killed for pleasure, every day. On
Saturday he would kill two. On
Jewish holidays he would triple the
dead."
Burdowski was one 'of the first
to arrive at Lagischa from Au-
schwitz in 1943: The slave laborers
were to construct the camp, and
Burdowski was among the prisoners
sent out each day to bring back
stone, brick and. other building
materials.
"As we left each day," Bur-
dowski recalls, "Czerwinski would
pick one guy and torture him all day
long. At the end of the day he would
tell the guy to run ... and then
shoot him." The torture included
making prisoners walk barefoot in
the snow or on gravel, and _"other
things you couldn't print. It hap-
pened every day for a year. .
"At night, in the middle of eat-
ing — we would only have soup to
eat -- he would make us stand at at-
tention until the soup would get
cold. He would wake us in the mid-
dle of the night for inspections — in-
specting for lice, they said. We
would stand naked in the cold, some-
times a half-hour, sometimes an
hour.%
Burdowski will go to Luneburg
next week to testify. Accompanied
by his wife, the trip will cost the
Federal Reptiblic of Germany more
than $2,000 , and Burdowski is the
130th witness in the ten-year trial.
According to the West German Con-
sulate in Detroit, 176 witnesses from
all over the world were scheduled to
The concentration camp number on his arm is a permanent reminder for David
Burdowski.
be heard when the trial started in
1977.
The witnesses include 25 in
Germany, 61 in Israel and 37 in Po-
land. Josef Etschmann, legal counsel
for the Detroit Consulate,..was asked
to locate five in Michigan, Indiana,
Kentucky and Ohio. Neither his
office nor the West German Embassy
in Washington have accurate records
on the total cost of this single trial.
Etschmann attributes the trial's
length to the dispersal of witnesses,
a change of venue because of the de-
fendant's heart condition, and the
time needed to acquaint new jurors
with past testimony. Etschmann in-
sists that West Germany has given
Nazi cases "absolute top priority."
Similar cases in the United States
would take a minimum of eight
years if there were no delays, accord-
ing to a recent statement by Allan
Ryan Jr., former head of tithe U.S. '
Justice Department's Office of Spe-
cial Investigations. The U.S. depor-
tation case against Michigan's
Romanian Orthodox Archbishop
Valerian Trifa lasted seven years
from the time charges were first
filed. That case was just beginning
trial proceedings in 1982 when Trifa
.
,
agreed to 'voluntary deportation,
which took another two years.
If time is working for Horst
Czerwinski, who is allowed to live at
home during the lengthy trial, it is
also working for David Burdowski.
Time has allowed him to come to
grips with the memories.
Burdowski was just 16 when the
Holocaust began to engulf Polish
Jews. One of his brothers fled to
Russia and fought in the Red Army
against the Nazis. He was never
heard from again. A second brother
was a Polish soldier. Sent home after
the Blitzkreig of 1939, he was later
sent to a work camp in Germany
and died in the concentration camps.
In all, Burdowski lost four brothers
and two sisters in the Holocaust. His
parents were killed in Nazi gas
vans. He was the only survivor in
his immediate family.
For years he repressed the
memories of building an autobahn
for the Germans connecting Moscow
and Berlin; other forced labor tamps;
a paper factory in Germany; Au-
schwitz No. 141935; Lagischa; coal
mines at Jaworzno; death march to
Dachau; Buchenwald. He dealt with
,
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