They drove the prisoners into a tunnel, a sort of subterranean passage leading into what looked like a giant silo with ventilation shafts. Two SS men in gas masks emptied cans into the shafts. The air filled with dreadful yelling and screaming, the children’s most prolonged, and subsiding into whimpering. After fifteen minutes all was silence. ‘We knew that 300 people had just been killed,’ said Luise Mauer. The killing she had witnessed was probably the first mass gassing at Auschwitz.
