Meet the man that survive the standing cells in the Nazi concentration camps. Here what he say about them

A Soviet prisoner, Yuri Piskunov, was confined to one of the standing cells for 10 days in October 1944, but there is no evidence of his crime. He had previously been confined in Mauthausen, but was moved to Dachau in November 1943.

Yuri’s number in Dachau

During the imprisonment in Dachau he used to repair railroad tracks. In the autumn of 1944, he carried out a clean-up work outside the camp, removing the ruins of bombarded buildings. There, he found several German newspapers, one of which he tried to smuggle into the concentration camp, so that the prisoners could find out something about the ongoing war. SS men discovered the newspaper and locked him in one of the standing cells of the camp prison for ten days, the so-called bunker. Having an area of about 70 by 70 centimeters the prisoner could neither sit down nor lie down. The imprisonment in these cells was intended for a period of up to 72 hours uninterrupted. This is how Yuri described his imprisonment in the standing cell in Dachau:

"It was dark. Wherever I turned, I immediately came against a wall. I could only sit a little by leaning my back against one of walls and with my knees against the opposite wall. I was very frightened and did not know if I would come to live the next morning. It was damp and cold in the cell. This is how a day would pass. Then they began to mock me. When the food was brought, the SS officer forced me to bark or grunt like a dog on all fours and scolded me "a filthy Russian pig." He always had the whip ready. If something did not please him, he would wip me immediately. So all I could do was to turn to the All Mighty, so that he would take my soul and save it from these torments.”

Standing cell in Alsace

He later mentions that the day after the imprisonment in the standing cell, he spat blood. After few months, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was in Dachau until its liberation by US Army on 27 April 1945. After the war he was a the vice-president of the Ukrainian Antifascist resistance organization. He died on 11 September 2007 and was buried in his homeland’s capital, Kyiv.

He also received the Order of Merit in 2005, from the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushenko:
"For his unbeatable will to live during the imprisonment in the concentration camps in the years of World War II, for his personal dedication to the achivement of the social programs for the former concentration camp detainees and his active public work.”

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