In July 1942, the 15-year-old Ukrainian Stepan Baz was committed to the ‘Buchenwald work education camp’ for fleeing the forced labour camp in Halle. ‘A. E. H.’ stood for ‘Arbeitserziehungshäftling’ (work education inmate). A mere 1.52 metres tall, he gave his age as 14. A severe injury caused by a workplace accident cost him a hand. He survived with the help of political inmates.
From an interview with Stepan Baz, April 2009:
‘But I didn’t want to work for the fascists, and then I was sent to the concentration camp. In the concentration camp I again had to work. You know: all the procedures that take place beforehand, and then back to work, in the Gustloff factory. So I worked. There were two German comrades there—inmates maybe—and I was supposed to help them. But I helped ‘in reverse’. I don’t know the right names, but there were these mechanisms for cutting out various details, and I broke them one by one. Then the SS overseer saw me and took me upstairs to the gate. Then the interrogations started: ‘Why? Who told you? Who told you?’ I answered that I had no understanding of technology, that I was a country boy, that I didn’t know anything. ‘Who told you to do that?’ They kept asking me, and they beat me up real bad and locked me up in a cell. Then I was turned over to the SS doctor … But the food was better there … and they started cutting off my hand. First one part, then another part, and another, and over the course of half a year they cut off my hand. And after the third operation they threw me into the cellar, the morgue. Then Fritz Unger, Herbert Strobel, and Helmut Thiemann, who had come inside and understood that I was still alive, took me with them and hid me in the depot building … The Czech doctor Miroslav Matuschek operated on me. So I was there the whole time.’
