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5-Memories of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, & Bergen-Belsen
What memories are the strongest that you hold today from Auschwitz, particular memories of things that happened?
The gas chambers, which I did not personally see or experience. The smoking chimneys, and the people with their shaven heads, and their rags which they wore. And the music in the background played by the camp orchestra. Those are the memories of Auschwitz.
Can you tell me more about the chimneys, and how you felt seeing them?
Well at first, they didn't make sense because somebody said this is a crematorium. Whoever heard of a crematorium? And then the chimneys, and the smoke are of the burned bodies. If you hear it for the first time, you can't visualize it, and subsequently we heard of the gas chambers, and we couldn't visualize that either, but it was there, you had to accept it. But it was a concept which I had never read about, I had never heard about, I never knew it even existed.
When did it really start to process and make sense that it did exist?
After a few weeks it processed. When we were transported to the slave labor camps, and when the German SS threatened, "We will send you to a camp that has a gas chamber," then it began to register.
You said that you and about five hundred women were deported from Auschwitz around October 1944. What did you do in that next camp?
Slave labor.
In your last interview, when you were in the camps, you described that your arm was infected?
My hand was actually infected, not my arm.
And the infection traveled all the way up to your arm. What were you thinking after your friends had told you to go see the infirmary...
What were you thinking after your friends told you to go to the infirmary?
To report it because they told me it was blood poisoning, which I, at that point, didn't know. I reported it, but I knew it could go either way. Either they could let me see a doctor, or a medical corpsman, or they could send me to a place that had a crematorium and a gas chamber. So, either way, I took a chance. And a medical corpsman, opened the infection, and eventually it drained, and it healed. He did it without anesthetic, there was none, and I went back to work the next day.
You described that when you were at the infirmary, there were other Jewish prisoners.
I’m not sure they were Jewish. They were male, and they were prisoners. I don't know from where, or who they were.
And they came to hold you down while the doctor was in the process of helping your arm, you said that one slipped you a package of bread?
Well, he was scrubbing the floor, and at my feet he left a crumbled piece of paper, and I opened it, and it had a dry crust of bread. He motioned for me to pick it up. I watched, and I picked it up, put it – I don't know – inside my dress, or wherever, and I ate it later on, but I never could talk to him because we had no language in common. He had a prison uniform, and he knew I was a prisoner, and I never found out where he was from or who he was.
And you were very grateful for this act of generosity?
Yes.
And this camp that you came to after Auschwitz, can you tell a little bit about your first impressions of it?
It was a huge camp in Neuengamme, and it had about fifteen sub-camps for slave labor. And we came into the outer harbor, into the warehouses. It had no beds, no cots, nothing. And every morning we were taken to a shipyard, or to a building site, and we had to clean up the bombed damage. We got very little food, we were under constant guard. There were some women from Czechoslovakia, but we never were close enough to talk. There were some men, prisoners of war from Italy, but we couldn't talk either, and it was heavy, physical labor.
Was it the German SS soldiers who were watching you while you worked?
Yes.
Were there Kapos there, as well?
No, I don't believe so. Most of them were the SS in raincoats, in winter coats, in boots, in ear-warmers, and we stood there, barely clothed, most of us got pneumonia, tuberculosis. It rained. Later on, it snowed. It was very cold.
How was this camp different from Auschwitz?
It was strictly a work camp. It had no crematorium, it had no gas chamber, but it was hard physical labor. You handled metal, stone, concrete, anything. Basically labor that is much too hard for an average woman.
Without a crematorium, did you feel a little more safe?
No, you got shot. If you couldn't keep up, you were shot.
interviewees ask about pronunciation
By the time you were at Dessauer Ufer, did you feel that you had a great likelihood to survive?
I thought maybe because we were near the city of Hamburg. But I found out that the proximity really didn't matter. I didn't know anybody, I didn't have anybody, I couldn't get away. So it was just an illusion for a minute.
So after that illusion had subsided and you were back at reality, what did you think then of your likelihood?
I thought it depends [on] how long the war lasts. If it lasts once more as long as it already has lasted, I wouldn't have a chance. If it would be over in a reasonable length of time, maybe.
What would be reasonable?
A matter of a couple of months.
Did you ever hear from the camps or the people you were with of rumors of when the war would end or when or for how long it would continue?
No, we never heard again.
No information in or out?
No. Nothing.
You were in this camp for about a month, correct?
No, I was in that camp from October/November till Spring—till March, about. I mean, in one of the sub-camps.
Which sub-camp were you in?
I was in Dessauer Ufer and I was in Sasel.
How was this sub-camp distinct from the other ones?
It was identical. The housing [that] was in one camp was a warehouse—a brick building—-the other ones were wooden barracks. But otherwise, the work was the same, the S.S. was the same. There was no difference.
So the fact that you were in a particular camp was almost an arbitrary one? You could have been in another one, too.
Right, and they were all fairly similar.
Did you have any contact with the other sub-camps?
No. None whatsoever.
And how many people were in this sub-camp?
In the one I was at, [there] were 500 women.
Do you know the total camp population?
I didn't know then, we know now that—it was, in fact, the main camp at Neuengamme was mainly French and mainly male, and I would assume more than 50,000.
By this point, you didn't give much thought to whether the situation was getting worse or better or the possibilities of what could happen?
No, no. That, you know, it's been four years and I saw no end in sight. I saw the bombed-out houses, the bombed-out streets, but yet the S.S. stood on guard. So as far as I was concerned, nothing had changed.
By this point along in the war, how much were you really trying to pursue and maintain friendships and how much of your time was just devoted to your every-day survival?
You couldn't survive without a friend. Survival and a friend were one and the same. So the friends that you had over a period of years—and if they were with you—they were important.
Did you have any friends betray you?
No, I don't think so.
Did you expect any of them to?
No. I am very slow [at] making friends, but then they stay a lifetime.
So there was a high level of trust involved.
Yes, yes.
When did you leave and what was the process involved in moving out of this camp?
The Germans put us on trucks and the trucks drove for maybe an hour. There was very little room on the trucks, and it took several trucks for 500 people. And then we had to get off the trucks and walk. We walked finally through a gate and the name above the gate was Bergen-Belsen. Once we walked through the gate, there were mountains of shoes, on the right and on the left—just shoes, nothing else. And for a second I wondered where are the legs and where are the feet? And that was my first impression of Bergen-Belsen.
This occurred during the move from...
From Neuengamme camp to Bergen-Belsen.
In the spring of 1945?
Yes, yes.
Upon reaching Bergen-Belsen and seeing the shoes, what emotional sort of reaction was triggered by having that as the first thing you noticed?
That people here die and all that remains of them are their shoes. And as we walked into the camp, we saw dead bodies on the walk-ways, we saw dead bodies inside barracks, we saw dead bodies in huge pits. And we knew that, for whatever reason—we didn't know what reason at that point— people here could not live.
And did that translate then into "I cannot live here"?
No, it translated into that typhus is highly contagious and that we caught it, some sooner, some later. There was no help for it, there was no more water, there was no food, the Germans didn't enter the camp, and we knew that it was a matter of days, or at most, weeks, because you couldn't survive longer.
So did you lose all faith in continuation of your life, in a sense?
I don't think there was much faith to lose but if there was any hope for anything, at that point, it was gone.
Despite the terrible questions, did you ever feel, in these years in particular when you were in the camps, some moment where you did acquire some feeling of hope or power or validation, that at least temporarily helped you?
No, no—it didn't exist, not for me.
Also, talking about contemplations of suicide, if I'm not mistaken, I remember you talking about how it was definitely something you thought about but never actually attempted. What made you choose life?
Well, the only chances I had was to go near the barbed wires. Either they were electrified and you died or the guard on the other side of the wire would shoot. What made me decide against it? I don't know. Maybe lack of courage; I don't know. It is not a pretty death. I'd seen other people do it. I don't think there was even a specific reason or rationale behind it. It was just something you contemplate and you don't do.
Did you, at times, feel that there was no rationale for your actions?
Yeah. You became more of a machine than a thinking human being. It was something you did, in spite of yourself, without ulterior motive, without reward, without being rational because we were no longer rational.
When did you feel most like a machine?
Now?
Then. When did you feel most like a machine?
Well, after four years in various Concentration Camps. It was a repeat of the last one. It wasn't better—it was sometimes worse. It was the same scenario, over and over.
Did the German soldiers continue to have you stick to routine such as getting you up in the mornings, recounting...
Yes, yes. The soldiers changed, there was a rotation. The commander of a camp changed. But the routine was, I guess, prescribed in a book and they followed it.
Was there any laboring to be done at Bergen-Belsen?
No. When I came to Bergen-Belsen, there was no more labor detail, other than that there were people used to crawl into the pits where the dead were lying and extract gold teeth. But other than that, I didn't see any labor.
When you think of why you survived, do you ever think it was luck or fate or destiny? Or do you feel like there was a sense of luck or hope behind who you were and where you were?
I think the main reasons are good friends. And everything else is just a little bit of luck, a little bit of being at the right place or the wrong place at a given time. Maybe something is destiny--I don't know. But I personally think that I would not have survived without friends.
Do you think the connections you had with friends, in particular, might have been a little more helpful and a little stronger than a lot of other people and maybe that was also something that really aided you?
I don't know. You can never really judge the relationship of another person. I can only speak for myself. And the friends I had remained friends until they died or we are still friends till this day. So, I don't know how other people reacted, very differently, from person to person.
And do you talk about these times in your life often with them now?
No, no. Not at all.
