Roll Call
Daily concentration camp routines would begin with the daily roll call. During the roll call, prisoners had to stand in rows, completely still, for hours at a time, and in all weathers. Long lists of orders and instructions would be read out while the number of prisoners were counted.
"Every morning we had the counting of the prisoners. We were arranged in groups of five with just small distances between us. The SS trooper would come by and start counting one, two, three, four, five. If he miscounted, he went over it again. Sometimes we stood there two hours. I kept wondering why none of us tried to overpower this lone guard who had just a small pistol. But what could we have done? There were guardposts on either end and high tension wires in between. We would all have been killed." - Rudy, a survivor of Auschwitz.
"Every morning we had the counting of the prisoners. We were arranged in groups of five with just small distances between us. The SS trooper would come by and start counting one, two, three, four, five. If he miscounted, he went over it again. Sometimes we stood there two hours. I kept wondering why none of us tried to overpower this lone guard who had just a small pistol. But what could we have done? There were guardposts on either end and high tension wires in between. We would all have been killed." - Rudy, a survivor of Auschwitz.