Such was the way that the Venetian intellectual Egidio Meneghetti, deported to Bolzano, recalls in a renowned poem in dialect, the acts of sadism of Michael “Misha” Seifert and Otto Sein, the two terrible “Ukrainians” who terrorized the camp.

And ceaselessly, night and day,
the two Ukrainians,
Misha and Otto,
who are in the SS.
In the cell blocks, as if they themselves were God
the Ukrainians Misha and Otto reign supreme:
they ignite everyone’s torments
and when they summon everyone advances
and when they speak everyone listens
and when they are silent one and all wait
and the frightened women stare at him
they way a sparrow stares and an owl.

Misha’s hands
have a life of their own.
He’s only twenty
with a red forehead
bald as a man of fifty,
his round head, hair shorn off
is inclined forward
without a neck
and the hands…the hands…those hands…
covered with black marks and red hairs,
with knotty fingers, long, thick
and ending like the tongue of a bell,
even while he sleeps, or does nothing at all,
slowly, slowly, come evening, he clutches them into fists
he rubs them, they make convulsed spasms,
the nails turn purple, he cracks his knuckles
and the red hairs stand on end.
But, suddenly the fingers unfold,
falling as if dead, exhausted, broken,
the fingers shrink like dead snakes
and this goes on constantly, day and night
and everyone can feel their presence around their necks

(…)
A young blond Friulian
whose mouth was small, red and girl-like:
once tried to escape from the camp
and he ended up in the black cell.
For three days he implored
Misha and Otto,
three days spent shouting
“I don’t want to die”,
for three days he cried for his Mamma.
And in the night of the Easter vigil
such noise was heard coming from that cell,
it sounded like people
in furious altercation
and a suffocated cry that muted into a death rattle.
But just after that, one could hear
a sort of panting
heavy and coarse and greedy
as if it were caged beasts
pouncing upon the raw meat thrown their way.

It is Easter. In the morning. And he is on the ground
stretched out
hard as ice:
eyes opened wide
in a black face,
his stomach naked, with the flesh
torn apart and caked in blood.
In the peace of Easter everyone is silent
Immobile. Still as stone.
And in the black cell
The cry of Bortolo Pissuti was silenced as well.

(…)
Tonight the small Jewish girl died
just like a candle
made of tallow
burnt down to the wick.

Tonight Misha and Otto
threw her
in the coffin
two huge, dreamy eyes
and four poor little bones
hidden by pale skin.
And now in the coffin
they are pounding nails
and with every blow of the hammer
a curse is nailed down
(in the cells, every heart trembles
and the nails are pounded into their brains).
And before the coffin
now they are singing
funeral rites and litanies:
“heiliges Judenschwein
ora pro nopis,
zum teufel Schweinerei
ora pro nopis”

Tonight the small Jewish girl died
just like a candle
made of tallow
burnt down to the wick.

On the day that she first entered the cell
she was soft, lovely
and ripe
for love
but in her face,
full of fear,
two eyes that blink with the pain
and that sink in centuries of sorrow.
They threw her
upon the dirty table,
and they abandoned her there,
several days,
until it happened one evening
that Misha and Otto
shut themselves in the black cell
and they stayed there the entire night.

And emanating from the cell
for hours and hours
the tired lament of a baby who is dying.
From that night on, she never again spoke,
from that night on, she never again ate.
And there, huddled on the floor, mute, still,
in the obscurity of the cell
she is waiting
for death to take her.
She becomes ever more skinny and small,
ever more large become her eyes.
(…)

From the list of imputations in the trail against Michael Seifert:

7. during the night between the 31st of March (Holy Saturday) and the first of April (Easter) 1945, together with Sein, in the isolation cells of the camp, after having inflicted violent beatings to the young prisoner Pezzutti Bartolo, he killed him by tearing his stomach open with a sharp object;

For this and for other horrible crimes, Seifert has been condemned to a life sentence.