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5-Liberation

Can you describe the day of your liberation?

It was around lunchtime and we heard a rumbling noise. We went out of the barracks - those of us who could - and we saw some tanks going up the camp main avenue between the barbed wires. The people that came out of the tanks had a strange uniform, it wasn't German. And eventually a couple of them came into the camp and they asked if anybody could speak English. And I talked to a couple of them and translated for them. They said they were British, advancing from the south towards the river Elbe to cut off the Russians. They didn't know about the camp, they had just stumbled upon it in their advance north.

They tried to bring in food, water, medical help, but all that took time. The first food we got was a two-pound can out of the German provisions. The cans must have either come from Poland or maybe from Holland or Belgium. Most of us opened the cans and fell over them. It had tiny little pieces of meat and a lot of lard. If you haven't eaten for several years, you just get convulsions and that is it. You can't digest it. I was lucky that at that particular time I wasn't in the barracks. I was translating for the British and a major asked me, "What can I get you?" And I said some biscuits and some cigarettes. I shared them with my friend and we did not eat the lard. Her mother did and she died.

It took many weeks to re-house us - to burn the barracks, to bring in bulldozers to bury the dead bodies. There were more than 10,000. Another 10,000 died after liberation. They didn't let us go out of camp, you had to have proper documents if you wanted to go out. You couldn't write a postcard or a letter abroad. And you wanted to get out. You wanted to go anyplace but out. It was very difficult. I finally got to Paris in December of '45 with the help of the British. But it took many people as much as five years to get out of a DP camp.

When you were liberated, how did you feel?

Numb. Too little, too late. Yes, one smiled, and yes, one was happy one got rid of the Germans. But then you start to think, "What price did I pay to be alive today?" I paid with my whole family - cousins, aunts, uncles, my sister, my parents. It was too high a price and there was a lot of guilt.

How did others in the camp react at liberation?

It is hard for me to speak for others. I would say probably, very similarly. Whether they voiced it or not, it didn't really matter. But there wasn't one person who survived who did not suffer tremendous losses.

Can you describe the guilt?

I was alive my family was not. I had promised my mother that I would look after my sister, and I couldn't. I ask myself, "Why am I alive and they not?" The guilt remained with me all my life, even though I know that I could not have changed it. They just opened an exhibit in Dachau, and the first picture at the entrance hall was taken 1929 in Poland. It has my father, my mother, and me in the middle. And they didn't ask for permission, which made me livid. My father, yes, I can see, but I don't belong there.

Working with the British Intelligence

How did you come to work for the British after the war?

Because I spoke English. I spoke it as well as I speak now, but it was a British English, not an American English. And I could read and write it.

When you were asked to help the British to capture the SS soldiers, how did you feel?

I was afraid in a sense to face them again, even though they promised me nothing would happen. They all stated, "We never did anything wrong unless you deserved it." How did I feel? I didn't feel. Because when I gave a deposition I spoke English, and I don't know the questions, I don't know my answers. I can't remember. They got very light sentences - a few years. A couple of them got twenty. They all held civil service jobs in the last sixty years. They all get a huge pension, and I'm still waiting. I haven't seen money yet. And I don't think I will. I'm too old.

Can you describe the trip from the displaced persons camp to Paris?

I was threatened by the families of those I helped arrest. I was hysterical. I said I couldn't stay here, I was afraid. The man I worked for - who was a colonel - he died in the meantime. He called a captain and he said, "Take an army car and drive her across the border to Holland, from Holland to Belgium, from Belgium to France." At the border going to Holland, they gave us trouble, and we just went through the woods, illegally. In Brussels, he knew a Jewish family who had survived the war, and the lady said, "I don't want girls from a camp. They can sleep in the hallway on the floor." Then we drove to Lille. I was the only one left, the others had stopped in Brussels. We went for dinner and we had the British army car stolen. So Captain Alexander had some money. He gave me the money, bought me a railroad ticket to Paris, and said, "That's the best I can do."

I arrived in Paris at four in the morning. My French was rusty - it never was very good. And I asked somebody where the Jewish YMCA was - the equivalent of the YMCA. Somebody told me the subway station, which was St. Paul, and I went there. The building is standing, it's a national monument. I got a cot in a room with twenty other people, one meal in the evening which was a soup. A French bread once every three days, food was rationed.

And living in just-liberated France in 1945 or '46 was not what I had looked for. And when I wanted to shower I had to pay two francs and go to a bathhouse. The toilets were in the backyard. It now houses an art school. I've taken my kids there and I've been there. And I hounded the American embassy at the Place de la Concorde day after day. They saw me coming, they knew my name, they knew my address. I had trouble getting a passport, because the Poles said I'm not Polish, and I wasn't anything else. My Polish had an accent. In the end I wore them down and I bribed them. And I came to New York in end of March 1946, and I went to work in a factory, and it really was no improvement to my past life, very little. But, eventually, I made it, but it took a lot of work.

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