SENTENCE FORMATION

Texts contains different forms of sentences. They may be simple or complex. When sentences are
complex, they contain more than one clause. So try to identify the complex sentences in the
following article.

It was when the guards began burning piles of bodies in the open
because the crematorium could not keep up with the task that Marek
Dunin-Wąsowicz realised he was being held in a camp whose purpose
was not just to “concentrate”, but systematically to murder thousands of
people.

In the autumn of 1944, the 17-year-old Pole saw trainloads of Jews,

most of them from Hungary, being taken straight to the gas chambers at
Stutthof. Others were gassed inside an adapted railway carriage, set on
tracks to trick prisoners into believing that they were being transported
to another destination.

But the point where certain knowledge of the Nazis’ plans for mass
murder could have shaken inmates into action had already passed. “The
one thing the Nazis succeeded in at in the camp was that they pushed us
inmates to a point where we became indifferent to the horror around
us,” Dunin-Wąsowicz told the Guardian.

“When your friends were being beaten up around you, your first thought
was, at least they didn’t get me. When they carried out public executions
at lunchtime, you were distraught not because people were dying, but
because you were missing out on food. We existed at a level where our
empathy had been beaten out of us.”

On Monday, 74 years after escaping near-certain death, Dunin-

Wąsowicz will for the first time face one of the men who stopped him
and the thousands of others from escaping from the concentration camp
east of what is now the city of Gdansk, in Poland.

He will be the first witness to give testimony in what is likely to be one

of the last trials against an individual charged over the Holocaust. A
former camp guard and member of the
SS Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion), Bruno Dey, has been
charged by a court in Hamburg with accessory to the murder of 5,230
people. Both the accused and the co-plaintiff are 93.

A gas chamber at the Stutthof concentration camp. Photograph: Getty Images

Dunin-Wąsowicz arrived in Stutthof in May 1944, following the arrest of

his entire family for involvement in the Polish resistance effort against
the German occupation. As a member of Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), a
paramilitary scouting organisation, and then the Polish Home Army, he
had carried out minor acts of sabotage, vandalising Nazi posters and
reporting on the movement of the Wehrmacht.

He faced squalid living conditions in the camp: around 5,000 of the

victims listed on Dey’s charge sheet died of a typhus epidemic after
being denied food, water and medication. Toothaches, Dunin-Wąsowicz
recalled, were generally treated by pulling out the infected teeth.
Anaesthetic was unavailable; patients were simply knocked unconscious
ahead of operations.

He survived the camp partly thanks to a Polish doctor who advised him
to drop a log on to his foot so he could get a break from gruelling forced
labour shifts in the sick bay. At regular intervals, the same doctor would
smash up his toe again so the young prisoner couldn’t be drafted back to
work in the field.

Later, he and his brother managed to get vaccinated because they had
been assigned administrative tasks that made them indispensable to the
organisers of the concentration camp.

In January 1945, with the Soviet army advancing, the two brothers were
made to join one of the death marches in the direction of the town of
Lębork. Snow was deep and temperatures were freezing. Those who
could walk no further were shot on the spot, creating a vicious cycle
where those at the back of the march exhausted themselves further by
racing not to be the last in line.

In what he described as a “miracle”, the Dunin-Wąsowicz brothers

managed to escape into the woods one night. Thousands of others on
the march were later executed or drowned in the freezing Baltic sea.

For the first few decades after the end of the war, Dunin-Wąsowicz tried
to suppress the memories of his time in the camp. Around ten years ago,
something changed: he felt he wanted younger people to know exactly
what had happened in the camps, he said.

Bruno Dey, 93, in court in Hamburg. He is accused of aiding and abetting the murder
of 5,230 people. About 25 camp survivors appear as joint plaintiffs. Photograph:
Daniel Bockwoldt/AP

When Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of National

Socialist Crimes identified Dey as one of the few surviving guards at the
Stutthof camp, Dunin-Wąsowicz did not hesitate to join the prosecution
as one of about 20 co-plaintiffs.

During the trial, Dey has admitted seeing people being led into the gas
chamber, and hearing screaming and banging sounds behind the locked
door. But he has denied being guilty of accessory to murder, and
complained that the trial had “destroyed” the last years of his life.

In Dunin-Wąsowicz’s memory, SS guards like Dey carried out three

types of tasks: overlooking the camp from watchtowers, armed with
machine guns, watching over prisoners while they worked outside the
compound, and escorting them to places where they were executed.

Even if brutal beatings were usually administered by the kapos – mostly

German prisoners tasked with supervising other inmates – he said the
SS guards played a crucial role: “The kapos beat prisoners to death
because they were being supervised. Their viciousness was an
expression of their will to survival – they had to excel at their task to
avoid being made ordinary prisoners again.”

His aim in joining the prosecution, he said, was not to “seek revenge”: “I
don’t necessarily want him to go to prison. But ultimately one has to pay
for one’s mistakes. It’s a question of justice.”

What matters to him now is that the European public remembers what
took place in the camps, and remembers that the prisoners included
nationals from more than 20 Europeans nations. He said: “It would give
me closure if this trial helps the next generation of Germans, of Poles, of
all Europeans, to learn a lesson when it comes to the revival of fascism,
racism and xenophobia.”

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