six days and six nights long. [...] You touch the walls on both sides with your elbows, your back touches the wall behind you, your knees the wall in front of you. [...] This is no punishment or pre-trial detention, it is torture, straight forward, Middle Ages torture. I had bloodshot eyes, numb from bad air, I was just waiting for the end. According to , an inmate in the standing cell received a single piece of bread in three days. On the fourth day, the prisoner was removed from the standing cell, given a normal camp meal ration and allowed to sleep on a wooden cot. On the next day, the three-day confinement in the standing cell began anew. The SS did not always adhere to the interruption after the third day. A Czech prisoner, Radovan Drazan, spent eight days without a break in a standing cell. Sometimes, prisoners were not even allowed a brief break from the cell, so that they had burns on their bodies from feces and urine. Auschwitz There were four standing cells at Auschwitz in the basement of Block 11, which measured about , and in which four persons were crammed, able only to stand. There was only a opening for air, so that prisoners would not suffocate. Punishment in these cells was usually imposed for a period of 10 days. Auschwitz survivor Josef Kral testified at the Auschwitz Trials about the standing cells where he had been held for six weeks with three meals during that time, and about how one prisoner was so hungry, he ate his shoes. Commander Rudolf Höss, the camp commander, stated that punishment in the standing cells was limited to three nights, but this was disputed by prisoners. Artur Liebehenschel, Höss' successor at Auschwitz in 1943, removed the standing cells. Stalin's Soviet Union According to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov, the standing cell, called a kishka (Russian for "intestine"), was used as part of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. After two days in a standing cell, a Secretary of the Tatar Provincial Committee was removed in an unconscious state. Pinochet's Chile There were standing cells at Villa Grimaldi, some of which held a single prisoner, others several. Sources Stanislav Zámečník, Das war Dachau. Comité International de Dachau, Luxemburg (2002) pp. 348-350 Notes References External links me life as a prisoner vent of a standing cell at Auschwitz Retrieved June