14.06.2021
′′This is probably the last letter I’m writing to you... The cemetery is located in Bełżec ′′ - the fate of Szlama Ber Winer
Today is the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of the German Nazi Concentration Camps and Death Camps. We would like to present the story of Szlama Ber Winer. He managed to escape from the extermination camp in Chełmno nad Nerem and gave detailed testimony of mass extermination of people in gas vans in Chełmno. He most probably perished in the death camp in Bełżec.
Szlama Ber Winer was born in 1911 in Izbica Kujawska. In January 1942, he was transported to Chełmno nad Nerem, where the Germans established the first extermination center for Jews. Upon arriving at the camp, Szlamek was assigned to the forest commando (Waldkommando), whose responsibility was to buried the bodies of the murdered Jews. After several days of digging graves, he became aware that he’d be killed as well, and that escape was the only chance for survival. On 19 January 1942, Szlama ran away – during transport, he managed to escape through a small window of a truck. After a long journey, he reached the Warsaw ghetto, where he passed on information about the mass extermination in gas vans in Chełmno to managers of the secret archive of the Warsaw ghetto - the Oneg Shabbat group. From Warsaw, he was sent to Zamość, where his relative Fela Bajlerowa was staying. In early April, he was writing to Hersz Wasser, the secretary of Oneg Szabbat, in indirect words that in Bełżec, the same things as he witnessed in Chełmno were taking place:
I have received greetings from a cousin from Lublin, and from my family in Izbica Lubelska as well. They wrote me that the whole family found themselves in the cemetery, in the same way as in Chełmno. Please try to imagine my despair, I don't have the strength to cry anymore. This is probably the last letter I’m writing to you. I will probably join my Parents, in the same way. (…) The cemetery is located in Bełżec. It is the same death as in Chełmno. (Collection of the Jewish Historical Institute)
On April 11, 1942, during the first Aktion in the Zamość ghetto, Winer was probably deported to the German death camp in Bełżec and murdered along with a group of about 3,000 Jews.