Lucille Eichengreen

Name of Interviewee: Lucille Eichengreen Name of Interviewer: Cassette Number: VD – 170

Interviewer: Please introduce yourself. Lucille Eichengreen: My name is Lucille Eichengreen. It used to be Cecilia Landau. I was born February 1st, 1925, in Germany of Polish parents. Interviewer: Where in Germany? Lucille Eichengreen: In Hamburg, Germany. I went to the private Jewish gymnasium in Hamburg, Germany. I graduated in 1941 and my father was killed in Dachau in 1941. My mother, my sister and I came to the ghetto. My mother and sister were killed during the ghetto years. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, I was on the first transport to Auschwitz and from Auschwitz to Neuengamenzazel. From Neuengamenzazel to Bergen-Belsen where I was liberated on April 15th, 1945. I worked for the English war crimes department and as a result they drove me to Paris where I lived until 1946. In March I received a visa for the United States and left for New York. I married in New York. We lived three years in New York and then moved to California. I have two sons, grown up. They're both economists. One is a professor of economics, the other one works as an economist and we've been living in Berkeley, California since 1949. I went back to school. Eventually, I got a bachelor's degree and I recently completed a book. Interviewer: What's the name of the book? Lucille Eichengreen: "Out of the Ashes Alive". Interviewer: Now let us start from the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your parents, about your education, about yourself. Lucille Eichengreen: My parents left Poland just after the First World War because they thought it would be an easier life, a better life to bring up children in Germany. We would have a better education. It would be easier to make a living, but we went back to Poland every year to see the family. Interviewer: Where in Poland? Lucille Eichengreen: Sambor. In Galicia. And life in Germany for a child was fairly easy at first. I went to a German-Jewish private school. I learned "humash" and "gemura" and Ivrit and everything else that you teach. Interviewer: In Hamburg? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. After 1933 everything changed. Interviewer: What did you father do for a living? Lucille Eichengreen: My father was a business. He imported and exported wine. My mother didn't work. Interviewer: And your economic situation? Lucille Eichengreen: Was very good. Very comfortable. In the summers we went to Denmark, we went to Sweden, we went to Poland, we went to Spain. It was a nice life. Interviewer: Did you feel something - that you are "Ausjuden"? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Remarks were made by Jewry, by the Jews with which I had contact - children in school, teachers. In derogatory way saying Polish Jews are either all uneducated or they are all dirty or they are all stupid - it was a generalization that I never could understand. I came home crying and my parents told me to ignore it. But a child realized it and there was resentment. I was never in school considered an equal, quite an equal. There were five hundred students, about ten of them were Polish Jews. And the faculty was entirely German-Jewish or Jewish-German, whichever way and it was painful for a child. Interviewer: Did you have German friends? Lucille Eichengreen: Non-Jewish German friends? No. Interviewer: Only Jewish? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. We had some neighbours and the neighbours stopped talking and playing with us after 1933. But real friends, no, I did not have any. Interviewer: And your parents? Lucille Eichengreen: Neither. Interviewer: Only Jews? Lucille Eichengreen: Only Jews and strangely all the friends of my father's with very few exceptions were Polish Jews. My father was friendly with Martin Buber, with Dr. Paul Holtzer, but those were exceptions. Interviewer: What happened after '33? Lucille Eichengreen: In '33 the climate changed. There were restrictions, there were ugly incidents - we walked to school, children would beat us up. Children would yell at us and make nasty remarks. We were told to be quiet on the streetcar. We were told not to draw attention to ourselves, and slowly and gradually people began to leave. Students, teachers - it was a very unsettled situation. It was constant turmoil and for a child it was not conducive to learning. it was difficult to study under those circumstances. Interviewer: And what happened? Lucille Eichengreen: My grades were not the best and my parents hired tutors for mathematics, for English, for grammar, and they improved somewhat, but I was not a carefree, happy child. I cried a great deal, I had a lot of nightmares and it was not a good childhood. My parents tried - I had no reason to believe that there was anything short in the house, but the atmosphere from the outside was so strong that it just did not leave, it just was always there. Interviewer: Your neighbours - how did they react? Lucille Eichengreen: They stopped talking to us and the children would run after us and call us ugly names, never talk to us. Sometimes they'd throw some stones and the boys, when they were in the mood, would beat us up. Interviewer: What happened to your father's business? Lucille Eichengreen: My father closed the business on his own in 1937. He did not need the business to make a living - there was enough money and he voluntarily closed the business and we wanted to go to Palestine, but the papers didn't come so we just waited. Interviewer: Till '41 you told me that you studied? Lucille Eichengreen: I went to school until 1941. Interviewer: What happened to the school during these years? Lucille Eichengreen: The school was at different locations - it was transferred back and forth. For a time it was combined with a boys' Talmud Torah school. The teachers came, the teachers left. The curriculum was state-regulated. Interviewer: This was a religious school? Lucille Eichengreen: Well, the direction of the school was religious, it was orthodox. The teachers as individuals were mainly orthodox, but it was not a religious school, it was a private school. And it had no non-Jewish children, just Jewish children. And towards to the end the classes were very, very small and in 1941 they issued a diploma although it was probably a little bit earlier than they should have issued it, just to be able to say "You finished school.". Interviewer: You had examinations? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Not state examinations, just school examinations because the State did not examine Jews anymore. Interviewer: How did it affect your life when the war break out? Lucille Eichengreen: Jews had to move into special building. Interviewer: You left your house? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Buildings designated by the Germans. Eventually a Jew could not have a whole apartment - you just could have a room for foru or five people. You had to shop for groceries in a special store for Jews only. Interviewer: Where was it? What was the name of the street? That you lived. Lucille Eichengreen: We lived in two rooms on Verde Street, we lived in one room on Brahmsalei. Interviewer: And all the Jews were concentrated there? Lucille Eichengreen: Not necessarily. The Germans designated special buildings. One building was for Jews, the next one maybe was not. And eventually in '41 they issued the order to wear a yellow star. Jews had to abide by a curfew, not to go out at night. Jews could no longer go to the theatre, to stores, to concerts, to anything public - to parks, to beaches. It was a very restrictive freedom and Jews tried to leave, to get away as much as possible, but it was difficult. Interviewer: You said that your father was arrested and went to Dachau. When did it happen? Lucille Eichengreen: The moment the war with Poland broke out, September 1st, 1939, he was arrested because he was a Polish national. A week later Poland had lost the war and he was sent first to Oranienburg and later on to Dachau and he died on the 31st, supposedly, on the 31st of January, 1941. The Gestapo brought a little cigar box with ashes which were buried under orthodox law by the chief rabbi. Interviewer: Did you have any connection with him during his arrest? Lucille Eichengreen: He wrote once every three months two lines: "I'm well. I love you." One time the Gestapo brought him to the Gestapo offices and we saw him - we were not allowed to touch, we just talked for five minutes and that was it. Otherwise there was no contact, no. Interviewer: And how did he look? Lucille Eichengreen: How did he look? Pale, grey. He wore a striped uniform. His head was shaven. He wore a cap and he smiled, he tried to smile. Interviewer: What did he tell you in these few moments? Lucille Eichengreen: He said: "Don't worry, I'm alright." That was all. Interviewer: And shortly after, you left Hamburg? Lucille Eichengreen: No, my father died in January, '41. We were deported in August, August-October, between that period. With the first transport from Hamburg to Lodz. Interviewer: Tell me about it. How was it arranged? What happened? Lucille Eichengreen: We received an official notification from the Gestapo telling us to be, within seventy-two hours, at a certain courtyard, a certain building with... Interviewer: Do you remember where? Lucille Eichengreen: Losion House, near the Hanoverriche Bannhof. And we could take a limited amount of luggage and we stayed there quite... Interviewer: Money? Were you allowed to take? Lucille Eichengreen: Well, first of all there was not much money because the accounts were blocked. We did not get much money out of our account. We took some money, but not very much, and after about ten hours they put us into compartments, not cattle cars, but regular compartments. They sealed them from the outside and the train took about two days, two and half days. When they opened up the train we were in Marichin. Interviewer: They told you where are you going? Lucille Eichengreen: No. They told us: "You're going east for resettlement." We did not know. We found out when we arrived in Poland where we were. Interviewer: Somebody tried to help when you waited to this deportation? Lucille Eichengreen: Some people of the Jewish community tried to bring some food or something to drink, but not otherwise, no. Interviewer: In your first transport, they were German Jews that lived in Hamburg, not only from Polish origin? Lucille Eichengreen: Right. There were about eleven hundred, short of eleven hundred. Interviewer: Now tell me the first time you saw the ghetto. How did it look to you? Lucille Eichengreen: We arrived in Marichin and the Germans turned us over to the ghetto police and we had to walk from Marichin into the ghetto. The first impression was the "balut" which we did not know. My mother talked to the policeman... Interviewer: How old was your mother? Lucille Eichengreen: My mother was forty-eight. And she talked to the policeman - my sister and I did not understand Polish. Interviewer: You sister is younger or older? Lucille Eichengreen:Five years younger. And we walked past unpaved street, dirty streets, broken-down houses, poverty, people in ragged clothing, people looking sad, tired, thin. We really could not establish a picture of what this was all about. It was very difficult to comprehend. On the way a drum, a large drum passed us, being pulled by four people in ragged dirty clothing. We didn't know what it was. Later on we found out that these people cleaned up the outhouses and got double bread rations for that work. We had never seen an outhouse. We were used to a regular toilet, regular bathroom. They didn't exist in the ghetto. We were housed for the first six weeks in a school on Linoska Street 25. Interviewer: Before that, how did the policeman that took you from the station - they helped you, they talked with you, they...? Lucille Eichengreen: If you could speak Polish, yes, they talked to you. Help, no, they didn't help us. The luggage came later on a wagon. We had no luggage, we walked for about two hours which was very hard on very young people and on the old. And they really didn't give us a picture of the place in general. Interviewer: Nobody talked to you and told you where are you, what is...? Lucille Eichengreen: They gave us a name, yes. Litsmanstadt Ghetto they told us. My mother said: "Well, what was it before the war?" And they told her that it was Lodz and she remembered, she'd been there for a visit. And in the beginning we got a soup a day and a piece of bread. And we still had clothing from the west and we sold some clothing. After about six weeks sleeping on the floor... Interviewer: No, you didn't describe me where did you sleep? Lucille Eichengreen: We came to the old school on Linoska Street. It had three floors, it had no bathrooms. It had an outhouse in the backyard. And we had to sleep at night on the floor with fifty people to a room for about six weeks. And after six weeks they slowly assigned rooms to the people, to most people. The rooms were throughout the ghetto, on both sides of the bridges. The only thing that we received for the room was a wooden cot and no other furnishings, nothing. Interviewer: And food? Lucille Eichengreen: Food was issued on cards, on ration cards in special stores. And the food rations were small, not adequate, and you never knew from one distribution to the next how much...what you would get. The loaf of bread, a round of bread at first was for six days, then for seven days and for eight days. The bread was more precious than life. And the old people really suffered a great deal from hunger or from lack of food. Interviewer: I want you to describe me a little bit. Lucille Eichengreen: Their faces got swollen, their eyes puffed up. Their feet were swollen - they couldn't walk. And it was all lack of food. We once called a doctor for my mother and he said: "It's hunger. There is nothing we can do." The other problem was, there really was no work for us. Nobody assigned any kind of work. Work would have meant one more soup a day and there was absolutely no work whatsoever. Also the Jews coming from Germany were very critical of the Jews in Poland and the ghetto, of how things were done, and at first the Jews from the west used to say: "We will change things." They thought they were still in Germany and they could still make the decision and decide which way they wanted things done. They did not realize that they had come to Poland and the Polish Jews were at home here and they were not going to do things the German way, but the Polish way, which is only the proper way of doing things, so as a result there were no jobs or very few jobs and they perished during the first winter in large numbers. Interviewer: I want you to tell me a little more details. Perhaps you can tell a story or two about people who lived with you there in the school. What happened to them? Who they were? A little bit to fill the things more with a face. Lucille Eichengreen: The people came of varying backgrounds. There were lawyers and bankers and a pharmacist, business. I would say by and large people who led a comfortable life. And the change was so drastic that people became harsh, they became angry. Food was stolen from person to the next. If you could believe that a human being can change completely, those conditions did change a lot of people. It is very hard, it's hard to explain even, but it was a matter of survival, it was a matter of "I" and where there was a husband or a wife or a child it hardly mattered. Human nature sunk to a level, almost an animal-like level. It was a not what you call a civilized human level. And while you can't condemn and you couldn't condemn then, it was horrible to see. If you had time to reflect and we had four roommates, two couples from Berlin and quite prominent in the Jewish community before the war, had a lot of money and they became like something out of a Kafka novel. We never were friendly with those people although we shared a room. My sister and I were treated like little slaves - you take the bucket down, you bring the water up, because we were the youngest. They were angry at us for not having work and there was no work. It was an ugly situation. At night when the lights were out the bedbugs used to fall down from the ceiling into the beds, made a terrible noise, clicking noise, and a terrible smell. It was very cold that first winter. The windows were constatnly frozen. The buckets with the cold water had an ice cover on top, the room was that cold. Downstairs was barbed wire and the German guardhouse and you could hear the German walk back and forth. You can't really describe it. Words will not put feelings into reality - you just can't. It's something that looking back fifty years you have a difficult time believing and yet it was there. Interviewer: What happened to your mother? Lucille Eichengreen: My mother died on July 13th, 1942 of hunger. Interviewer: I am talking about these six weeks. Lucille Eichengreen: At first, in Poland, she was quite at ease. She knew Yiddish, she knew Polish and she thought maybe it would be alright. And then after the first six weeks when we got the rooms, she began to realize that it really was a hopeless situation and she lost interest and she could not find work and she very slowly died of hunger. I mean, one could see it. My sister was more or less alright. She was quiet, she was withdrawn, she did not speak much. She was very intelligent, very bright, very beautiful and it was like living in a trance - you saw what was going on around you and yet you didn't want to see it. Interviewer: Have you met in this first day the Polish Jews? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, we met our neighbours in the building and... Interviewer: This was after you moved to your own apartment? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, not before. Interviewer: Before there weren't teachers that took care of you? Lucille Eichengreen: No, there were just a couple of people, but we really had no contact. We met neighbours and since my mother could communicate with them we had very good, very good, very friendly contact. Interviewer: You lived alone in this apartment? Lucille Eichengreen: No, we had two other couples from Berlin. Interviewer: This was the...this was already in the apartment? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, in the little room. It was a little room, not an apartment. Just a room. Interviewer: One room for how many people? Lucille Eichengreen: Seven. And the neighbours were very nice, very friendly. We got along very well with them, our roommates did not. Interviewer: They were young people you met? Lucille Eichengreen: No, they were quite a bit older and they just felt that the ghetto should be more like life used to be in Germany than life used to be in Poland. And they were absolutely unwilling to accept conditions which were dictated by the Germans and they were unwilling to accept Polish Jewry. And that of course made life impossible, made life a living hell. Interviewer: Did you find some job? Lucille Eichengreen: I went to the Department of Labour in December of 1941 and I waited a whole day and I came back the next day to see the director which was Bernard Fuchs at the time and I finally got to see him. I asked him for a job and he said there are no jobs, he couldn't help. I spoke German to him. And I returned four weeks later, again waited I think a day, a day and a half, to see him, and he said no, there are no jobs and I went back another two weeks later and he got very angry. He said: "You've been here before. I've told you there are no jobs and why do you bother me." And he opened the door and he yelled like a German: "Raus!" Of course I was in tears, I was upset and eventually I found a job. When the office was founded for the improvement of the ghetto the head of the office was Adolph Gertz from Germany and he employed a lot of Czech architects and engineers to draw up plans. We didn't do any work, but we just made pictures. And I worked as a clerk or secretary for him. He was very kind, very nice. To me he seemed very, very old - he probably was no more than sixty or sixty-five. A very small man, but very lively, and he thought that the ghetto ought to have schools and buildings and plans and parks, but he never thought about the reality of where the material would come from, who would build it, who would give permission to do this type of construction. He was convinced that the Germans would agree. Interviewer: But Rumkovsky gave him this job, no? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, Rumkovsky gave him the job and the permission, but not the material to build, just the material to plan. Interviewer: But the idea was his, or Rumkovsky's? Lucille Eichengreen: His. He sold it to Rumkovsky. Interviewer: And who was this...? Lucille Eichengreen: He was a civil engineer before the war. And the job lasted about six or eight months and then Rumkovsky sent an order and said the office will be dissolved in two months. No reason, no explanation and Adolph Gertz told us. Interviewer: How many people you were there? Lucille Eichengreen: About thirty. And most of them looked for a job someplace else. Interviewer: Most of them from West Europe? Lucille Eichengreen: Most of them from Prague. I sould way proably out of the thirty, twenty-five were from Prague, the rest probably from Germany. Interviewer: You told me before about Reich that worked there? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Dr. Reich was drawing up plans as well and he had a lot of ideas and before the war he used to be the general director of Skoda, in Czechoslovakia. He was a bachelor. He must have been around fifty, it was hard to say. He was a big, tall, burly man. He was not overly friendly. He was very short, he was always hungry, like everybody else. He was always angry, but he was brilliant. He was a very educated, very brilliant man. And he eventually found employment with Goodman of the "Holtzetylog". I never saw him again after that, but I remember him very vividly. Interviewer: How did you live before you started to work? How did you buy the rations of the food? Lucille Eichengreen: The money that you needed for the ration was very little money. It was ghetto money and if you sold one sinlge potato, you could pay for the whole ration. Interviewer: Did you sell your clothes? Lucille Eichengreen: We sold some coats and some, we had some extra shoes that we sold. We just kept the minimum and whatever we sold, we sold during the first six months. Afterwards there was really nothing left to sell. We had no valuables, no gold, no watches, nothing of any real value. Interviewer: You didn't get any social security in the ghetto? From the Jewish community in the first days? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Nothing. We still had a little German money which we exchanged for ghetto money and you got quite a bit for German money against ghetto money, but support at the beginning there was very little. Interviewer: Your little sister, she also found work? Lucille Eichengreen: I found work...after our mother died, I found work for her after many months of trying. I met a judge who had an argument with Rumkovsky. He was a Polish Jew who used to live in Berlin, who was a lawyer. His name was Neuman. His wife was not Jewish, but she came with him to the ghetto and he lived near us and we met them. And he knew a lot of people, he had a lot of influence and he got my sister a job in the "hat" - "hutuptylog" - where they sort of had some children, a little school. They really didn't work, but at least they got a soup. Interviewer: And your mother didn't work? Lucille Eichengreen: She tried to, but she got very sick. She really couldn't. Interviewer: So she was in the house and you went...? Lucille Eichengreen: She was in bed most of the time. Interviewer: What happened to you when there was this in May, '42, when they sent the German, the west Jews out of the ghetto? What happened? Lucille Eichengreen: We got a deportation order, my mother, my sister and I. And my mother said: "Here are the passports." We had Polish passports. "Go from one office to the next and try and get permission to stay. Tell them we are not German Jews, we are Polish Jews." I went to see Mintz who was one of the bosses. I went to see Kaplan. Interviewer: Bosses of what? Lucille Eichengreen: He was in the ghetto, one of the ghetto administration office for the new arrivals. And finally I went to see Heinrich Naphtali who was an attorney before the war, and in the last minute we got permission to stay, we were not deported. Interviewer: He gave you the permission? Lucille Eichengreen: He did not give us permission, but the names were taken off the list. So nobody came, nobody picked us up. We stayed. Interviewer: You knew him before or this was the first occasion that you...? Lucille Eichengreen: This was the first occasion. I went from one place to the next - I didn't know anybody. Interviewer: How did he receive you when you came to him? Lucille Eichengreen: I would say quite well. I was seventeen years old. I was a nice-looking little girl. I spoke by then a little Polish, a little Yiddish, a lot of German and people at least listened and all I pulled out were the Polish passports and I argued, I was not afraid. And eventually it worked. Interviewer: After you lost your job, your first job, what happened? Your mother was still alive when you lost the first job? Lucille Eichengreen: No, she died in July. I lost the job two months later. And my sister was deported at the "Shpere" in September, 1941. And then I lost my job. Interviewer: After the "Shpere" you lost your job? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: What happened in the "Shpere"? Lucille Eichengreen: We were not allowed to go outside. We were thinking for awhile maybe to hide or to run away, but we didn't know where. Interviewer: You stayed with these two couples? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, in the room. When the Germans came we had to line up in the courtyard. I put some lipstick on my sister, on her face. She was about eleven. And the Germans separated us right and left. They took the old people and the young people. They pushed them onto trucks and they were gone. It was minutes, it was very fast. And I would say the house was half empty. Most of the people were gone. Whoever was elderly, whoever was young was gone. One didn't know where they went, what happened to them, one could not find out. I tried. One couldn't. Interviewer: Can you describe some of this - what really happened that terrible days? You told me before about Rumkovsky talking to the mothers. Did you hear it? Lucille Eichengreen: That was earlier. That I didn't hear, no. I just knew about it, but I didn't hear it. The "Shpere" was announced. It had never happened before. We didn't know the meaning. We knew only that we could not go out, we couldn't go to work. We were frightened. It was summer, it was quite warm. Our neighbour Yulick was on the roof, checking whether anybody was coming and I think on the second or the third day he said: "I see the trucks, I see the Germans." There was one couple who had a little baby and they had....she said ahead of tim: "I would hide the baby." And she did hide it. They didn't find the baby. They found other people who were hidden and of course they immediately went on the trucks. When we went back upstairs again the baby was in an old chest-of-drawers, an old cabinet and the baby had suffocated. There was an emptiness after the Germans had left. Interviewer: You tried to hide your sister? Lucille Eichengreen: Not in the building, no. We tried to run away at first over the fields into another area, but then we were told it was of no use because the Germans were all around, so we decided to stay. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was not. It's hard to say. Interviewer: And you were standing in your yard? Lucille Eichengreen: We were standing in the yard, we were standing together. We were holding hands and they just pulled us apart. Interviewer: Who did it? Lucille Eichengreen: The Germans. Interviewer: You remember? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: You knew the Germans? Lucille Eichengreen: I didn't know any Germans. I mean, they were Germans in uniform. I didn't know them. Interviewer: What was the colour of their uniform? Lucille Eichengreen: Green, army green, you know, like....They carried guns. Some of them had dogs. Interviewer: And they put them on...? Lucille Eichengreen: Trucks. And hauled them away very fast. Interviewer: And the Jewish policemen? Lucille Eichengreen: They didn't do much. They just obeyed orders. They couldn't do much. There were several Jewish policemen living in our building and one of them had a very high rank, maybe a captain, and he lost his mother - he couldn't get her off the truck. He tried, he couldn't. His name was Fishlow. I just happened to remember. Interviewer: So after the "Shpere" you remained alone? Lucille Eichengreen: I remained alone, yes. Interviewer: You have no idea what is happening to them? Lucille Eichengreen: No, none at all. Interviewer: You didn't listen to the people talking? Lucille Eichengreen: People didn't know. The people I talked with didn't know. Some now say they did know, but at that time nobody knew. At least the people I asked did not know. So we could only hope that they were sent some place for labour, but we didn't know. Interviewer: What happened to you? Lucille Eichengreen: There were some girls inthe same building - they lost their parents and they asked me to come and put my bed or my wooden cot into their room and stay with them and I did. Interviewer: Polish Jews? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And I did and I went back to work when the "Shpere" was lifted. And two months later I lost the job and when I said goodbye to Adolph Gertz he said: "Go down to the second floor and try if they have work for you." And I waited a few days and I went down to the second floor... Interviewer: What was there in the second floor? Lucille Eichengreen: An office, an administration office, general administration. And I was standing near the stove which was still a little bit warm and opposite sat a man behind a desk with glasses, dark-framed glasses, and he kept looking at me and eventually he got up. He introduced himself: "I'm Shai Spiegel and I hear you are looking for a job." And I said: "Yes." And he said: "In two weeks I will be the boss of a new office that is going to fill out forms for the German government for the coal rations for the German population and I'll give you a job." I didn't believe it - it was too good to be true and I came back in two weeks and there was a job. And our boss was Heinrich Naphtali. My boss was Spiegel and I worked there for almost a year in that office. Interviewer: What was this job? Lucille Eichengreen: Clerical work, forms, German forms, filling out numbers. If a family had four people each person got ten kilos of coal and you had to multiply it and fill it out and since I could read German I did some translating and I got a soup every lunchtime, a watery soup, and that helped. We became very close friends. Interviewer: You and Spiegel? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. I stayed in the evening and he would read his stories which he had written during the day or during the evening. Interviewer: How old was he then? Lucille Eichengreen: Spiegel was thirty-eight. Interviewer: He was married? Lucille Eichengreen: He was separated. His first wife who died afterwards. She was separated from him. He had a child in the ghetto which had died and he lived with his parents. And after about a year..... Interviewer: I want you to tell me a little bit more about Yishaiyahu Spiegel and if you can say something about Naphtali also. Lucille Eichengreen: Naphtali was very charming, he was very brilliant. He was one of the few people who could talk to Rumkovsky without getting, without being thrown out or punished. Speigel wrote a song in the ghetto: "Machsede eigelach". It was a baby song to be sung to a child. It told the story of a father trying to get food for the child and there was no food. The song was performed in the ghetto. Rumkovsky got very angry because he felt that Spiegel was telling that there was not enough food. Rumkovsky did not like it. Interviewer: This was after you started to work or before? He told you? Lucille Eichengreen: Just before. He told me, right. But the song was performed again privately during the time that I worked for him. He also wrote another song. Interviewer: What happened to him? He told you what happened to him after this performance? Lucille Eichengreen: Rumkovsky said he wanted to deport him and he said in Yiddish....(Yiddish). Naphtali intervened and there was an agreement made that Spiegel would be careful and Rumkovsky would leave him alone. They knew each other, they never talked to each other and they hated each other. Interviewer: Rumkovsky and Speigel? Lucille Eichengreen: Right. Interviewer: And Naphtali took Spiegel into his office? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: And created this job for him? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: How many people worked there? Lucille Eichengreen: When we were very busy, three hundred. Interviewer: Only with these German forms? Where were you sitting? Lucille Eichengreen: Ribner 8. Interviewer: And Naphtali came to visit you? Lucille Eichengreen: He came every day and his office was partly on Ribner 8 and partly on Platzgechenye 4. He had two offices. Interviewer: Can you tell me something else about him? Did he try to help people? What was his attitude to the workers? Lucille Eichengreen: I think so. He was very human, he was very energetic, he was very concerned - he was a good person. He had a very charming girlfriend - Tatalka. Very bright - I think she also might have been a lawyer, I don't know. His mother was still alive, a little white-haired lady. It was difficult to get to know him. Very few people really made friends with him, but he would talk to people. He tried to be very fair. He was remarkable. I'm only sorry that I did not know him better, but the few conversations we had, he was really very, very compassionate. He tried to help, he tried to talk to Rumkovsky. And I think that he was one of the few people that were not corrupt in the ghetto. Interviewer: You told me before - I interrupted you - that you used to stay after work. Please tell me. Lucille Eichengreen: We stayed after work and the janitor used to sweep around us and he used to say: "Crazy people. They work ten hours and then they stay here." It was cold - no heat. We wore coats and scarves and hats and Spiegel would read us stories. And very often he would ask: "Shall I say this or shall I say that?" Or "How do you like it?" Interviewer: You understood then the stories? Lucille Eichengreen: I understood, yes. I understood Yiddish and when I didn't understand I would ask. I was very much in awe. I was barely eighteen. I was very impressed and the stories were just very sad and very profound and very real and I loved listening to them. Interviewer: Tell me please what you told me before, about the story that is called "Broit". Lucille Eichengreen: Well, the story of Brad he wrote in the ghetto. I am not sure where the story originated. The two children who kept watching the Polish bakery across the barbed wire and wished for bread and later on the father ate some of the children's bread. I remember that when he walked me home at night, we lived at the barbed wire and across the street on the other side, on the Polish side was a bakery and every morning we saw the Poles with the bread and we wished for just a slice of bread. Whether this actually had a connection or not, I am not sure, but it could have some sort of connection. I mean, we looked through the wires. The story, the children were in the attic and looked through a little slit in the wall, so there is a parallel, but he is a writer after all and he uses his imagination and it was a very touching story, a very sad story. Interviewer: You went with him to some lectures? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, we went to a concert in the ghetto in somebody's house. Interviewer: When was it? Lucille Eichengreen: After the "shpere". Between '42 and '43. It was early '43. We went to some readings... Interviewer: What concert? Who was playing? Lucille Eichengreen: The names I do not know, but somebody was singing a song - it was a private group, maybe twenty people. Somebody was singing a song. Interviewer: Do you remember the people that were there? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I did not know them. They knew him, but I did not know them. Then they played chamber music and it was very late. We sat on the floor, we did not get up till the morning when we went to work. We went to some poetry readings - I did not know the people, but I listened. There was once in the basement of the office of Ribner 8, there was some music, some records and some dancing, and I remember Spiegel was a very good dancer which I had never thought because he was a very serious man and we danced a tango. Interviewer: What was the occasion? Just so? Lucille Eichengreen: Some younger people in the office decided you have to do something. Naphtali came - he knew. And his girlfriend came. There were about maybe thirty, forty people. That was about all the social contact that I can recall. Interviewer: And you have friends? You lived with these girls? Lucille Eichengreen: The girls were killed, they didn't survive. Interviewer: Later, but in the ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: No, they probably were killed in Auschwitz, I do not know. Interviewer: No, I am still talking about the ghetto. All the time you lived with these Polish girls? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: How many? Lucille Eichengreen: Two sisters. Interviewer: You remember their name? Lucille Eichengreen: Etta and Gerda, the last name I don't remember. Was something like Rabinovich. Interviewer: What was your relationship...your friends were Polish Jews or still from Germany? Lucille Eichengreen: No, no, were all Polish Jews. Interviewer: And how did they accept you? Lucille Eichengreen: Very well. No problem, no problem. I spoke Polish, not correct Polish, but I spoke it and sometimes they laughed when I made a mistake and I did, but I was accepted. Those that survived, we're still in contact. Interviewer: From that time? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: And after work, the days that you didn't spend with Spiegel, what did you do? Lucille Eichengreen: During those days there were no such days. We worked every day and there were really no free days. I remember one in summer - we walked from Ribner to Marachine, to the country, because it was green, but that was only once. I would say during '42, '43 I spent all free time with Spiegel. Interviewer: There was some romantic...? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, yes there was. Interviewer: He was your boyfriend? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, you might say that. Interviewer: What happened after...you said you worked one year there. Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And then Naphtali transferred me to Dr. Oscar Zinger because of the German. I did not like it, I was unhappy, but I couldn't argue - he had made up his mind. Interviewer: Why did he do it? Lucille Eichengreen: Probably because of the languages - I don't know why. I did not ask. But at night, every night Spiegel would pick me up and I would still work two or three hours in the old office. And work for Dr. Zinger was very difficult. I was alone in the office, in his office. He was out. Interviewer: Where was it? Lucille Eichengreen: Platzgechernye 4. He was out most of the day, looking, talking and I was all alone. I was writing or typing up his reports and it was a very lonely job because he only was in maybe half an hour, an hour a day and to really sit down and talk to him I did very seldom because he was busy seeing and hearing and listening and asking. One day he had an appointment with Fuchshouvner, the next day with Wolkovner, the next day with Yacobovich - he was always going. Always meeting people, talking to people. And I would get the stories from the reports. Sometimes he would talk, but not very often. He was a very bright, brilliant man. Very articulate, very charming. I believe at one time he must have been very good-looking. Interviewer: How old was he then? Lucille Eichengreen: I would say in his fifties. And I knew that he had a Ph.D. in philosophy, I know he was a newspaper man before the war. I know that he had written a play in Prague. I knew he had a wife, two children my age. He had a sister in the ghetto. His daughter became a very good friend of mine and one day Rumkovsky came to the office and he took most of the women, some of the men to work in the straw factory that made straw shoes for the German army. And to me - I was terrified - he said: "You will hear from me," in Yiddish. And about a month later he called up and he said: "Send her to my office tomorrow." I went to the office the next day and he said: "I'm starting an evening kitchen with an evening meal which will be given to workers for two weeks, for fourteen days. And you'll work in the office of the kitchen and I will come every afternoon. You will get one extra meal...(end of side). Interviewer: You talked about your work with Oscar Zinger. Everybody of this chronic writers had his own secretary? Lucille Eichengreen: Not every one of them. I know Oscar Zinger became director of the department and I don't know whether I would qualify as a secretary or as a clerk, but I did work on some of the writing and rewriting. He would always sign it or initial it. Once a day I would go to the central police station and get the daily report - some many in the hospital, so many died, so many deported - whatever the daily report was and that was on the top of the page. And then Oscar Zinger would add on whatever he thought important for the day. I had the impression that he was somewhat careful, mainly because he did not want to say anything bad about Rumkovsky - that was dangerous. And then you never knew if the Germans would look at the records and then it was very dangerous. Our office was across the street from the "crippo" and there were a lot of Jewish informers, not a lot, some. And one could tell the truth yet one had to be a little diplomatic and Oscar Zinger was very good at it. Interviewer: Did you meet the other writers? Like Yosef Zelikovich? Lucille Eichengreen: I met Zelikovich. He worked on one floor above us, but he came down to talk to Oscar Zinger. I met Oscar Rosenfeld and I met... Interviewer: Ostrovsky? Lucille Eichengreen: I met Ostrovsky, but not very much, maybe two, three times, and I met a woman who worked in that department and her name was... Interviewer: Didi Bunun? Lucille Eichengreen: No, it was somebody else - I don't remember the name. Because they did have a certain amount of at least verbal contact, whether they actually exchanged any information I do not know, but there was communication especially between Oscar Zinger and Oscar Rosenfeld. I think they liked each other. They had something in common. Interviewer: And you typed the last copy? Lucille Eichengreen: I typed or I wrote. It depended - I didn't always type. Interviewer: You wrote by hand? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. In German. Interviewer: But he dictated you, what to write? Lucille Eichengreen: He dictated, he told me, yes. Interviewer: But he wasn't writing it alone. Somebody, the other also wrote. Oscar Rosenfeld wrote alone. Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, but that remained in their department. It did not go into Dr. Zinger's individual reports. Dr. Zinger's reports basically were his own writing, his own thoughts, his own observations. He did not incorporate somebody else's reports into his. They were there, but under somebody else's signature. Interviewer: Yes, but when we read today the Chronic of the Lodz ghetto, we get a variety of compositions of the different people who wrote for the Chronic. And if he was the director, somebody decided what would be the official Chronic. Then there were separate compositions of everybody of them. But there was the daily Chronic of the ghetto. Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, very dry, very factual. Interviewer: Who was the director? How was it written? Lucille Eichengreen: I think the daily Chronic of what actually happened - for a long time Dr. Zinger did and then later on somebody else took it over and Dr. Zinger took care more or less or the overall organization. People would come to him and ask him for advice or people would discuss with him their ideas of how to write it down. He was more or less a coordinator. He also had a great deal of contact with the ghetto administration and there were a lot of politics involved - I'm not sure of the details. Interviewer: How do you know? Lucille Eichengreen: It was talked about. I know that when Dr. Oscar Zinger arrived in the ghetto, Moshe Caro of the school department was at the trains and he met Dr. Zinger and he went to Rumkovsky and told him: "Somebody from Prague had arrived and can't we use him?" and he got him the job. Moshe Caro's daughter lives in the States - she's a close friend of mine. Interviewer: I know here. I met her here. Lucille Eichengreen: Last year? Interviewer: Yes. Lucille Eichengreen: Felicia. Interviewer: Yes. Did people come to you or you went to people? Lucille Eichengreen: For what? Interviewer: For information. Lucille Eichengreen: We went to people. Interviewer: You went to people. You received by mail, by the ghetto mail, you received statistical material? Lucille Eichengreen: Very little. There were some memos that came from other departments, but they didn't come to me. They were on small slips of paper because we used the big sheets and then each communication was torn off - there was little paper - and sent to the various offices. Our office had a telephone which was unusual. There were communications, yes, but I did not see them. I did not work with them. Interviewer: You were his personal secretary? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: Then there were...? Lucille Eichengreen:There were other clerks and other secretaries. I did not know them because I sat in his office and I never got out of that office. He was my only contact. Somebody would come down from upstairs to talk to him, like Oscar Rosenfeld or Zelikovich, but I never went out of that office. Interviewer: He was talking to you? He was a nice man? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: He told you about problems? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Sometimes he would talk about... his daughter had a birthday or his wife had a birthday or would make a "bupke" out of grated potatoes or...he was too distracted to really sit and talk. He was very intent and very preoccupied with going out and talking to people and seeing people and finding out how this whole ghetto machinery worked and why. He was convinced that he would survive the war. There was no doubt in his mind. He was an optimist. He had access to a radio occasionally. His son who was an electrician repaired the radio twice in a hiding place. Interviewer: Alone he was listening or with a group? Lucille Eichengreen: No, with two people, always two people. Interviewer: Do you know who they were? Lucille Eichengreen: No. I don't remember the names. I knew who it was, but the name now escapes me. Interviewer: This is not the group that was arrested in '44, in June '44? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Interviewer: You know about....when Widowsky committed suicide? He was not connected with this group? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Maybe he was, but there was another radio and it was very well hidden and only one or two people listened at a time. Interviewer: But not in the place of the work? Not in Kostcheyne 4? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Not to my knowledge. Interviewer: How do you know about this radio? Lucille Eichengreen: Because he would come to work and sometimes say: "I'll tell you a secret. I heard this on the radio" or "Somebody told me" or "There was a radio". "The war will be over in six months. It will be the end of the war in six months." He was an optimist, he was a dreamer, he was an idealist and it was always "In spring it will be over. In three months it will be over. The Russians are coming. The English are coming." He really believed it and he was very convinced that he would survive and he would go back to Prague and life would be the way it used to be. He was an optimist, I was a pessimist. Interviewer: He has personal connection with Rumkovsky? He went to him? Lucille Eichengreen: Not very often, but there was some connection, mainly through Dora Fuchs. But it was not a frequent type of connection because Rumkovsky...it was hard to just go and visit Rumkovsky. He did not let people come and just visit. Interviewer: You told me that Rumkovsky came to your office. This was the only time when you remember he came to the office, when he came and... Lucille Eichengreen: At the kitchen. Interviewer: Yes. This was the only time? Lucille Eichengreen: No, he came every evening. Every single evening. Interviewer: Not in the kitchen, no, no. I am still talking about....the Chronic? Lucille Eichengreen: When he came to the office to select. Yes, he came and he took some people...yes, only one time, but during that week he went to a lot of offices. And he took out the people and he put them into the straw factory. Interviewer: You remember when it was? Lucille Eichengreen: The exact date? Probably in late fall of '43. Exact I do not remember. Interviewer: He was looking at what you are typing, what you are doing? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Interviewer: He asked questions? Lucille Eichengreen: No. He asked me what my name was. He called me "the little German" in Yiddish. He asked me whether I had family. He asked if I would like to work in the "Baluta Ring", for the administration. And I went for an interview, but Dora Fuchs said no. She didn't want me. Interviewer: You said yes? You said that you would like to? Lucille Eichengreen: I said that I would go and try. I didn't dare say anything, but Dora Fuchs when she talked to me said no. Interviewer: Did you know her, Dora Fuchs? Lucille Eichengreen: I met her once when I went for an interview. Interviewer: This was the only time? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And then he called later on and he said: "I have a job for you in the evening kitchen." And there he came every evening for as long as the kitchen had food and was able to exist. He came everyday around four, five. Interviewer: I want, before you are talking about this, I want a few more details about your work with Oscar Zinger. Do you remember something from this period that you worked there? Something that you remember that you typed and that was outstanding? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Interviewer: You worked there at '43? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: Did you hear something about Warsaw? Lucille Eichengreen: Not directly. I lived later on, or walked, on Skerska Street. We noticed that the German soldiers that guarded us has disappeared and some new ones had come. We also saw the sky bright red for days and we could not figure out why. We also heard some distant noises, you know, like... Interviewer: No. You are talking about '44. I am talking about the Jewish in April '43. Lucille Eichengreen: I had a friend who had a boyfriend in Warsaw, but she never heard from him. No, we did not know what was going on. There was no contact to my knowledge. Maybe somebody did have contact, but I did not know. Interviewer: He didn't tell you about that he heard on the radio, about the revolt of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: No. He did not say anything. Interviewer: How long did you work there? Lucille Eichengreen: About six months. Interviewer: You liked you work? Lucille Eichengreen: No. It was very lonely. There were no people - I was all alone. Interviewer: Where did you eat there? Lucille Eichengreen: In the lunchtime, somebody would bring in a big can of soup and we would go down to the ground floor and fill up a little pot with the soup and I took it back to my desk and that's where I would eat it. Interviewer: Alone? Lucille Eichengreen: Alone. Most of the people in that office were much older. They were anywhere from thirty, forty to fifty, sixty. And here this little kid eighteen years old walked and it just didn't mix. I'm sorry it didn't, but it didn't. Interviewer: Can you tell me some details about Zelikovich? Lucille Eichengreen: No. I really can't because he would come in and he would ask whether Oscar Zinger was in or what. Interviewer: How old was he? Lucille Eichengreen: I would guess he was probably more or less the same age as Oscar Zinger at that time. He was very nice, very polite, but he never spent time, he never sat down, he never asked a question. He never asked: "What do you do? Where do you come from? Do you have a family? Nothing. It was all work-related. He had a reputation of being a very nice man. But beyond just very casual conversations we never talked. Interviewer: And Oscar Rosenfeld? Lucille Eichengreen: More or less the same except when he spoke, he spoke German. So he asked me whether I'd ever been to Prague and I had been twice to Prague before the war. He asked me about my father. He was a litle bit more outgoing or maybe he could relate better to a younger person. There was a little more warmth to him. Very nice. Interviewer: And the other members like Rostrovsky? Lucille Eichengreen: It was just a very casual "How are you?" and "What is the schedule? When is Zinger in? When is Zinger out?" But no real personal contact, there was none. Interviewer: How many people worked all....? Lucille Eichengreen: There were three or four floors in that building and I guess there must have been maybe fifty, sixty people at any given time, but I'm not sure. Interviewer: But only a small part of them worked with the Chronic? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. The other one had general ghetto administration other than Rumkovsky and Baluta Ring. Some of them worked under the direction of Naphtali with some sort of inner ghetto-related administrations. And as I say there was very little contact. Interviewer: But you don't have any idea how many people worked around this Chronic that was written? Lucille Eichengreen: No. I can't give you an exact number. Interviewer: Approximately? Lucille Eichengreen: Not very many, but exactly how many - maybe a dozen. Exactly how many I don't know. Interviewer: You talked about your job? Somebody knew what you are doing? Lucille Eichengreen: Several of my friends did, yes. Interviewer: You told them that you are writing, that Chronic was written everyday? Lucille Eichengreen: I think they knew without my telling them. I think it was not unknown. it was known that there was a statistical department. Now what the statistics meant - I don't think people even cared. It was more important to worry about food than about statistics. So to most people it was another office. It was really of very little interest. Because who was going to worry after the war? Who cared? Interviewer: About what were you thinking this time? Lucille Eichengreen: I was thinking that nothing of this would be saved, nothing would survive, neither would we. And I asked myself what for? And then I gave myself the answer - "Well, we're getting a soup. What's the difference what you do?" That was my conclusion - I was wrong, but that's what I thought then. Interviewer: You loved Spiegel? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: Why didn't you get married? Lucille Eichengreen: Because he would have had to go to Rumkovsky to ask for a divorce and that would have been a little awkward, but it could have been done and I decided I did not want to marry in the ghetto. So eventually we broke off just before the deportation, but that's another story, and during the time that I worked for him I was picked up one morning at five a.m. by the ghetto police and I was taken to the "Crippo". At the "Crippo" they said I had a radio. I told them no. I spent four hours there and they almost beat me to death - I don't hear on the left ear. I have damage from that time. I made it back to the room. Interviewer: Why did they arrest you? Lucille Eichengreen: I don't know. I made it back to the room eventually. I had some badly bleeding scars and I was in bad shape. The next day I went back to the office. Everybody saw the face - nobody asked. They were afraid and they knew if you were this beaten you had been at the "Crippo"- I wasn't the first one. Spiegel didn't ask, but after a couple of weeks he said: "Go see Dr. Cronenberg because when I talk to you you don't listen, you don't hear. Only when you look at me." And I went to Dr. Cronenberg and she said: "I cannot help. Maybe after the war." And I learned to read lips and I hear on the right ear, but not on the left. And then one evening I was going home from work and somebody followed me. And it was very eerie and I stopped and I turned around and in back of me stood a woman, very thin, sort of reddish hair, in a big, black coat that didn't fit and she said: "You are Cecilia Landau, or Tzila Landau." I said: "Yes. And who are you?" And she said: "I'm Spiegel's wife. And I don't want you to see him, otherwise I will report you again to the "Crippo"." Then I knew. I got very angry and I said: "How could you?" I never told Spiegel of the meeting until two years ago when I was here and his reply was: "I did not know. Forgive her." I told him I couldn't. Shortly after that, when I started working in the kitchen... Interviewer: He lived with her in the ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: No. No, he lived with his parents. Interviewer: With his parents, separately. Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Shortly after that, when I worked in the kitchen, he picked me up every night. I used to save a little food for him. He worked for two weeks in the bakery, but he did not save any bread for me and I was very hurt. Then when I was transferred from the kitchen to the saddlery after food ran out for the kitchen, he did not come anymore to pick me up. I did not know why, I did not ask, I did not see him. Interviewer: You were angry? Lucille Eichengreen: I was sad. Interviewer: You thought he's coming to pick you up only because of the food? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I thought there was more that...there was a relationship, but he didn't come. Then in '45 early my name appeared on a list and I didn't want to leave the ghetto. So Dr. Zinger's daughter... Interviewer: '44. Lucille Eichengreen: No, no. Yes, '44, excuse me. Interviewer: In winter '44. Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. My name appeared and Dr. Zinger's daughter who worked with me by then said: "You need protectzia, you need connections." She went to see Spiegel. She told Spiegel about it and he said: "I will try." And a few days later my name disappeared from the list. I stayed in the ghetto, the rest of the transport left. Whether somebody went in my place or not I do not know. Interviewer: They went to Chenstehov? Lucille Eichengreen: I do not know. Interviewer: In winter or in summer? Lucille Eichengreen: In winter. Then I did not know. I went to Spiegel's office, I thanked him, and like the first time we met we shook hands and we said goodbye. And I did not see him again. The next contact was in 1947 when I wrote to Poland asking for information about my sister and back came a letter in poor English, but in English saying that all these children were killed and it was signed "S. Speigel Kurovnik". Then I knew. And then I saw him the first time in 1963. Interviewer: In Israel? Lucille Eichengreen: In Givatayim, yes. And we corresponded every month. We spoke on the telephone every month and there was a friendship. There were a lot of things we didn't agree about and we had a totally different approach to people, to life, even to literature, but the friendship remained. Interviewer: He knew you were writing? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: You wrote also in the ghetto or you started only now? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I started afterwards. My children did not know until they were old enough to go to the university, then I told them. Not before. I never talked about it. Interviewer: Did you know Shayevits in the ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Interviewer: Did you hear about him? Lucille Eichengreen: The name I heard, yes. I did not know him. Interviewer: Let's go back now to the restaurant that you worked. Tell me about it. What was it? When was it? Lucille Eichengreen: There were several occasions. There were three kitchens. My kitchen was I think "Omlinaska", I'm not sure that the address is correct. There was a staff of young women that had finished school in the ghetto that acted as waitresses. I worked in the office. Interviewer: It was already in '44? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, end of '43, '44. And they served a meal. It had a little bit of potato, a little bit of vegetable like beets or carrots or turnips, and a little piece of ground meat, mainly horse meat and people in the factories would get a coupon for fourteen meals and they would come every evening and we would clip the coupon and it was very hard to get sent to the kitchen. It was very special. And we who worked there would get our soup and in addition we would also get this evening meal. And it was from a ghetto point of view a very good job. It did not last very long and it of course had the disadvantage that Rumkovsky would come every night. If he didn't like something he would take his cane and beat people. Interviewer: You saw it? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. He beat me once, too? Interviewer: Can you tell me about it? Lucille Eichengreen: He came to the office and that was pretty much towards the end of the job because the food ran out and he said above the kitchen was a little room and he wanted me to move in there so he could come and visit and I cried and I said: "Let me stay where I am." Interviewer: I don't understand. To visit? Why to visit? He wants to... Lucille Eichengreen: He was known for molesting young people. He was known for that. He was also known for being impotent. So what he had in mind I really can't tell you. I do not know. When he made this proposition I cried and I said I didn't want to move up there because I didn't want to and he said: "Well, I could come and how dare you refuse. You can't refuse me anything - I gave you a job." And he took the cane and he hit me on the shoulders. And I cried and it didn't help, but a week later they closed the kitchen. And that was the end. Interviewer: What was your job there? Lucille Eichengreen: I worked in the office figuring out if we had a hundred kilo of beans and we had a hundred or two hundred or three hundred people come in, how many ounces or decas or grams each portion would consist of. It was just busy work, it was really nothing. It was a matter of keeping records. There was a storeroom with the food and we had to account for the food and I had to do the figuring and the breakdown and I wasn't very good at it. And sometimes there was a young man in the kitchen department who would come and help me with the figures, but nobody told Rumkovsky because he wouldn't have liked it so we kept it a secret. Interviewer: Who was the manager there? Lucille Eichengreen: The manager was Minc, from the kitchen department. Very nice man probably in his fifties or sixties. Very cheerful, very charming and he came during the daytime and he would sit with us and talk with us and he was very human and very nice, very warm. But there really was nothing he could do. It was a job for him just as well as for everybody else. I worked with Genia Levin, with Dorca Piorco, with Ilsa Zinger, with Lucia Caro, with Bella Oppatoshu, with... Interviewer: These girls got their job through Rumkovsky, through protectzia? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Through protectzia and Rumkovsky, yes. Interviewer: And you think he liked you therefore he gave you this job? Lucille Eichengreen: I think so. He liked young women. He was known for that. It was nothing special. Interviewer: Do you remember that during these special meals he came occasionally and gave speeches or met some workers? I remember some of...Do you remember? Lucille Eichengreen: He came and he would....the speech mainly consisted of: "See what I am doing for you. If not for me you wouldn't have this." The speeches basically were meaningless. He said: "Work hard or work harder and if we work hard and produce a lot of goods for the Germans, it will be good for us." He was a great public relations man. Interviewer: How did these workers react when he was talking to them? Lucille Eichengreen: He didn't react. You know, you just listened, you had to be polite. Nobody argued. That was the price you paid for a meal - that was all. It was very matter-of-fact. And everybody basically was afraid of him because he had immense power. If you displeased him he could call up the Germans and say: "Take this one person, put him on a train and take him out of the ghetto." To where we didn't know. Interviewer: You knew somebody? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Chernovner. Diana Sheine. She was in charge of the food coupons and supposedly she stole some coupons - I don't know. So they said. And he called up the Germans and she was one person who was taken out of the ghetto. Interviewer: When was it? Lucille Eichengreen: I would say in '43. And later on we heard that she was taken to Auschwitz. Interviewer: There was no trial, no nothing? Lucille Eichengreen: Nothing. Well, there might have been a trial of a couple of hours, but no, nothing really of any consequence, no. I remember when she was taken. I know there were other people, but I don't remember names. Interviewer: During '43 - '43, '44? Lucille Eichengreen: '43, '44, yes. Interviewer: And it wasn't something like she was sent to work or with a group that was sent to work? Lucille Eichengreen: No. I was told, I did not see it, that she was taken individually as one person. Interviewer: Do you remember there were a strike of people who were ironing the clothes? Lucille Eichengreen: I heard about it. I do not know about it. When I worked in the saddlery the young communist youth group wanted to start a strike because the soups were so bad. And they worked very hard, they made many speeches and they wanted us to strike, but the majority of the people were just afraid. Interviewer: This is later. But I am asking you if you remember some of these demonstrations...of this strike...? Lucille Eichengreen: I never saw it. I heard about it. Interviewer: Because I think it was there. The meeting..Rumkovsky met the workers there in this special restaurant and...you don't remember? Lucille Eichengreen: No, not in this restaurant, but there were three restaurants and he went every day to all three of them. So in this one I do not remember, but it could have happened - I'm not sure. Interviewer: So when you finished here this job, what happened? Lucille Eichengreen: All the girls who worked there were sent to the "Saddlerie" to sew those leather frames for the shovels and we worked there until the liquidation of the ghetto and it was near Marachine. Interviewer: What did you do there? Lucille Eichengreen: Sewing. Sewing the leather by hand. Interviewer: By hand. It was a very hard job for you? Lucille Eichengreen: Well, the leather was very thick and you sat on a...well, it was called a "kosa", but it was actually like a wooden horse. you would put the leather into a vise and you had a little awl, like a little...like a very pointed needle, and you had two needles with thread in the middle and you would sew back and forth. it was hard work, but it could have been worse. We had to put out a certain amount a day of these frames. People talked of a strike because the soups were so thin, but there was no strike. Interviewer: Who were these people? Can you tell me a little bit more? Lucille Eichengreen: Well, the only people I worked with were the people who had worked in the kitchen. The other people I don't know, I did not know. Interviewer: Who came to tell you about the strike? Did you know the people? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I did not know them. It was a young communist youth group, people probably in their early twenties, middle twenties, very bright, very vocal, very idealistic. Interviewer:They came from the outside or from...? Lucille Eichengreen: No, from within the factory. And at lunchtime when they passed out the soup they made their speeches and they got angry and they tried to win support, but it did not materialise. Interviewer: Do you remember Noah Flug? Lucille Eichengreen: No. Interviewer: You know who he is? You know him? Lucille Eichengreen: I have heard about him, no. I do not remember and I don't think I met him. Interviewer: And the son of the lighter of this resort? Lucille Eichengreen: I met him once, but I met his father several times. I never met him, but I heard of him. I met him, as I said, one time. I knew of his convictions, of his activities. He was very young, he was in his early twenties, maybe even less. He was very good-looking and very different from his father. Interviewer: Tell me about his father. Lucille Eichengreen: His father was a friend of Speigel's. He was very respected, he was very idealistic, he was very well-known. He had a great deal of influence. I was told that he was the one who actually took off my name from the deportation list at Spiegel's intervention, but I was told. I do not know for a fact. He came occasionally and gave us a little talk. He told us why we worked and that it was essential and necessary. I met him only twice and it was a very brief conversation, but by reputation he supposedly was a very nice man, a very decent man. Interviewer: Many workers worked there? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, several hundred, on several floors. The leather came in strips and you had to account for the strip and if a strip was short you had to get an extra strip and it was very strict and when we left at night we were searched, that we would not take any leather out, but I did steal several pieces of leather to have soles made for my shoes. And I stuck them into the top of my boots and I was very afraid, but I did steal it. Interviewer: Do you remember the hangman who stole leather? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, I remember that. I also remember the people who had smuggled, who were hung on Pazarnarova... Interviewer: Pazarna. Lucille Eichengreen: Pazarna, that's it. I remember that. I can still see the gallows and the bodies swaying in the wind. Interviewer: You were present there? Lucille Eichengreen: Almost. I was not right in the front line, but yes. Interviewer: They made you? Lucille Eichengreen: They made us. They made us watch. Anybody they could find they mad watch. It was right opposite Ribner 8 where we worked so they grabbed people. Interviewer: Have you anything more to tell me about this, your stay in ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: It was really not describable to have a combination of a work, of a factory situation with small food ration, with hunger, with typhus, with dysentery, with....There was a lack of humanity. We had been reduced to animals, not human beings. You looked at the streets, you looked at the buildings - you could only shudder. It was a situation which you cannot picture, you cannot paint, you cannot put into words. It was a situation as grotesque, as vile, as inhuman as Auschwitz was in a different way, because this lasted for three years and you could see people sinking lower and lower and lower, physically, mentally, morally. There's nothing I can compare it to, nothing. It left an impression which probably will never go away. I sent back two years ago to the former ghetto - it all stands. The buildings stand, the streets stand - everything is there. It's occupied by Poles and you look at it and you ask yourself: "Was it real?" It seemed like a dream and yet it was real. Interviewer: You went to the cemetery? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. I looked for my mother's grave, but there are over sixty thousand dead, hardly any markers. I went to the Jewish community to look for the records - there were no records for 1941 because there were so many dead, but I went. Interviewer: Tell me about the liquidation of the ghetto. What happened? Lucille Eichengreen: The liquidation of the ghetto was announced in early fall of 1944 and the means by which they accomplished it, they would block off certain streets, the Germans, and say all Jews on such and such a street had to go to the trains in Marachine. And my street was one of the early ones and I saw no point in leaving. I did not know why they were liquidating. There were rumours that the Russians were approaching, but we didn't know. And I decided to go on the first transport. I walked across a wooden bridge. I knocked on the door of a friend, Dorca Piorko, because I could not live anymore in my house and I asked her to let me in. She lived with her mother and she also shared the apartment with a family of a very high "zonder" police and he came to the door and he said: "Go away or else." Didn't let me in. Then I went to the door of another friend. She didn't let me in either. And then I figured it's no use, I went to the train. Interviewer: You went alone or with...? Lucille Eichengreen: With a little suitcase and I went alone, all by myself. I had all the documents that I still have left - a birth certificate, a passport and little suitcase and at the train station I saw cattle cars with ramps and at one of the trains stood Dr. Zinger with his entire family. So I joined them. We were put on the trains. We were given a bread. We sat together in one corner, Dr. Zinger, his wife, his son and his daughter, and two elderly ladies from Prague who shared the room with the Zinger family - I think they were from Bratislava originally, widows. And we took the slow, hot ride to Auschwitz. We did not know where to. The train stopped many times and we looked out on the top and we saw military transports pass us. Once when the train stood we saw another train and men with striped uniforms and shaven heads and we tried to communicate with them, but it was not possible. It was too great a distance. They were prisoners. Whether they were even Jews we did not know. And after about two days more or less, and it was a very short distance which we know now, we arrived around four in the morning. It was dark and the trains were opened up. There were German commands... Interviewer: You are how many people? Lucille Eichengreen: In that transport? Interviewer: In your car only? Lucille Eichengreen: In the compartment probably seventy, eighty people. Very close and it was very hot. And we arrived on a brightly lit platform with a lot of Germans. They had dogs. They were armed. They lined us up immediately. They separated men from women within minutes and they marched off the men to one side and then they separated the older ones from the younger ones and then the command was given to drop all luggage. And I held on to my father's briefcase for the documents - it was very important - and Dr. Zinger's daughter stood next to me and said: "Drop it." And I didn't drop it and a German came towards us and she tore it out of my hand and dropped it and he said in German: "You saved yourself a beating." And then after that we were marched into the barracks-type building. We were told to undress, to leave all jewellery, all rings, watches, whatever you had, and make a neat pile of the clothing and the watches and to walk away from it. Some did, some did not. Dr. Zinger's daughter had a tiny little red cloth bag and in it she had tiny little pictures of the whole family and naked as she was she hid it. And it came through the war, through the entire war. I think she still has it. And then we were told to walk towards the end of the barracks and there the kapos started shaving our heads. And one kapo stood next to us and we were horrified and I think she or I asked: "Do we have to shave heads?" And she said: "Don't you know where you are? That this is Auschwitz?" We'd never heard of Auschwitz. Interviewer: In what language did you talk? Lucille Eichengreen: Probably Polish, and she showed us a number, an Auschwitz number and we said: "Can't we have a number rather than shave the hair?" And she laughed and she said: "In this place you don't ask. You take what they give you." And they shaved the hair and I saw in the tiles in the door, I saw a reflection of my head without hair - just big ears and eyes and it was horrible. I think it was one of the worst things. I didn't know hair was that important. And then of course the... Interviewer: What did you do? How did you reflect? You cried, you laughed? Lucille Eichengreen: I cried, I cried. I mean, the tears ran down my face. Nobody laughed - people were horrified. Interviewer: Hysterical laughter. Lucille Eichengreen: The SS women were very cruel and one of them said: "The gas chambers are busy today, but we'll get you tomorrow." Then we were pushed... Interviewer: Did you understand what she means? Lucille Eichengreen: Not really, but something told us that it was bad. At that point we did not know. Interviewer: And the wife of Dr. Zinger went with the older women? Lucille Eichengreen: No, she went with us. And then we went to the showers - a litle bit of...well, before the water came somebody said: "Water or gas?" And we still couldn't figure it out, but we were afraid. Not knowing, we were afraid. A little bit of water came out. No towels, no nothing. Then we were walked to another barracks and we were handed one garment - an old dress, an old nightgown, something. One garment - no underwear, nothing. One woman in our group - Alice, she was from Vienna, she was also in the ghetto - she received a pair of wooden shopes. Nobody else did, just she. And eventually we were all put into a large barracks in Birkenau. We didn't know it then. We passed the orchestra. We saw the smoking chimneys and then slowly, by word of mouth, people told us what this was, what was happening, but to say that at that point, that we fully comprehended - I don't think so. It really did not sink in until much later because we didn't see the people die. We just were told. Some people committed suicide by running to the electric wire. Interviewer: People that were with you or you saw them from a distance? Lucille Eichengreen: Both, but very few. Somehow life was not worth living and still you didn't commit suicide. The barracks were crowded. There was not enough room to lie down. You sat in a funny fashion and when you were lying down at night you put your head on the stomach of the person in back of you and the person in front of you would lie on your stomach and there was Dr. Zinger's daughter, his wife, his sister, I and Alice from Vienna. And we had this one little strip of space. In the morning we had to stand for "appell", for counting for hours. Interviewer: Did they give you numbers? Lucille Eichengreen: No, there were too many coming in every day so they just shaved the heads, no numbers. No numbers between fall of '44 and beginning of '45. No more numbers. They didn't have time. Interviewer: Do you remember the number of the barrack? Lucille Eichengreen: No, but my friend in Minneapolis remembers. She went back last year, into the barrack - I couldn't. She did. No, I don't remember the number. I don't want to, I guess. Eventually we were told one morning that there would be an inspection. Interviewer: Did they take you to work? Lucille Eichengreen: No, no work. Just standing in line, day after day, being counted for hours and then back into the barracks and then out again. And then we would walk out to the latrines once, twice a day. No water in the faucets. It was unbelievable. The ground was hot during noon. At five in the morning it was freezing. It was - how do you describe it? You can't. There are no words for it. Interviewer: And food? Lucille Eichengreen: Very little food. There were some pots for the soup, but we didn't have a pot so we used Alice's wooden shoes and we had the soup put into the wooden shoe and we ate out of the wooden shoe. Interviewer: The whole group? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And then Alice would put them back on again. We felt like pigs eating out of a trough. I mean, we looked at each other and, you know, it was disgusting. But this was the only way to do it so what can you do? So we did it. Interviewer: Selections? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, there was one selection. We were warned the night before by the kapo. And we stood in line. We were told to put the dress over the left arm and to run past the three SS that stood in the centre and go fast and not to look and not to turn the head, just go. I went first, Dr. Zinger's daughter followed me, his wife after her and the sister, I think, was the last one, and Alice was the fifth one. We all stood in the "S" row because we didn't want to be separated so we decided if somebody should ask - we thought somebody would ask for a name - we would say that my name is Zinger, that I had married the brother in the ghetto - in case. But it never came to that. So we stood with all the "S" people and we walked through that group of three SS, past them, and they pointed with sort of a whip that you use for a horse or something - a braided leather whip. And you went wherever he indicated, not knowing where. And it went very fast. Somebody said it was Mengele. Whether it actually was Dr. Mengele or not. Some people say he only stayed in the hospital, he did not do selections. Somebody said yes, he did. Since I did not know him I do not know. And I was sent to the left, I think it was to the left. And when I turned around Dr. Zinger's family stood in back of me and we put the dresses back on and we looked for Alice and Alice had disappeared on the other side. We never saw her again. Then we were pushed into a new barracks. We were given a pair of shoes which either didn't fit at all or they were much too large. No underwear, but we were given a coat out of which a piece was cut out in front and a yellow stripe was painted on top. And then we were loaded into cattle cars. Interviewer: How long did you stay there in Auschwitz? Lucille Eichengreen: The exact date I don't have. Luckily it was not very long. Interviewer: Days, weeks? A month? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I don't think it was a month. It was less than a month, but I can't give you the exact number - it could have been two, three weeks. I don't know. You know, there was no separation of days. It was just continuing. And the train went for several days - it was very hot, very crowded. It stopped, it let troop transports pass. Interviewer: The whole barrack? Lucille Eichengreen: Well, whatever had remained after the selection. Interviewer: Right after the selection they took you? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And onvce I climbed on Dr. Zinger's daughter and I looked out on the top of the cattle car and somehow I said to her: "I think we're not far from Hamburg. It looks familiar." And she looked at me and she said: "Sit down. You're just dreaming. And in the end what difference would it make? You know, you don't know anybody there. What good would it do?" I was right and she was right. It didn't do any good, but it was the outer harbour of Hamburg. And we worked in heavy construction, cleaning... Interviewer: What was the name? Lucille Eichengreen: Dessauruffer. In heavy construction, cleaning up bomb damage, glass damage. I cut my right hand very badly and I was taken to Neuengammer to see...to the infirmary because I had a red stripe going up my arm, it was almost poisoned. And there were no doctors, but there were like medical assistants or, as they called them, "sanitator". (end of side) Lucille Eichengreen: I was taken to the infirmary at Neuengammer. Interviewer: It was close to the factory you worked? Lucille Eichengreen: Within an hour, two hours. On a truck I was tied down to the outside of the truck and the Germans took me there and I was very afraid and this medical corps man looked at my hand and he asked me how it happened and when I spoke German he said: "How come you know German?" And I told him that I was born in Hamburg and he did not believe me and he said: "What do you answer if I say 'hummel, hummel'?" And I gave him the correct answer which would be translated in English the equivalent of "kiss my ass", which was in dialect. It's the story of the old watercarrier who carried two buckets and he was teased by the children and called "hummel hummel" and that was his answer and you would only know it if you had lived in that region. So after that he got a little bit more human. He was middle-aged. Interviewer: He was a prisoner? Lucille Eichengreen: No, no, no. He was a German. Interviewer: Yes, but not a prisoner? Lucille Eichengreen: No, not at all. He told me to sit down on a table. I was held by three prisoners - men. We could not talk. He told me he would cut the hand and drain it and he told me not to scream, but I fainted instead and he afterwards said: "I'm glad you fainted and didn't scream." And while he took care of the hand one of the prisoners put a little piece of bread in my pocket, another one a bandage. The hand was bandaged and the blood came through the bandage. Interviewer: He didn't cut your hand? Lucille Eichengreen: Oh yes, he cut it from here to there. And eventually it healed. Interviewer: Without any medications? Lucille Eichengreen: No medications, no anaesthetic, nothing. I went back to work. I worked with the left hand, not the right hand because I was afraid to say anything. Interviewer: What was your work there in this...? Lucille Eichengreen: Cleaning up stones and glass and rubble. Interviewer: In the streets? Lucille Eichengreen: In the streets and the factory, wherever there was damage. Interviewer: How many women? Lucille Eichengreen: Five hundred. Interviewer: And all the women were from Lodz? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Except a couple from Prague and I. Interviewer: What was the meaning of being together with this Zinger family for you? Lucille Eichengreen: Dr. Zinger's daughter was a very close friend for many years - she still is. There were some things that she did not like. She did not like Spiegel. She did not like my friendship. There were some things I criticised her for, but we still remained friends, I mean, this is human nature. The friendship remained until liberation when she got very sick - she lost a lung. She was sent to Switzerland, but we remained friends till today. Interviewer: Not this was my question. I asked you... Lucille Eichengreen: Whether it had any significance? Any importance? Interviewer: The fact that you had there a close friend and the mother and the daughter and that you had some group. What was the importance for you when you came after... Lucille Eichengreen: It was important to belong with somebody, to have sort of a substitute family. It was important and yet...I mean, you survived because of friends. Without friends you couldn't survive. I had another friend - Sabina Shmuelevich-Zaretsky, who died in Sweden after the war. You needed friends, you needed support, for many reasons. If nothing else but to feel that another human being was close to you because nobody had anybody. it was important. Interviewer: They helped you? You helped each other? Lucille Eichengreen: Help was limited, I mean, help was more of a physical nature. If you couldn't walk, somebody would support you if they could. To share anything - there was nothing to share. There was help, but the help was of a moral, of an emotional nature rather than a material nature. Interviewer: When you came with your wounded hand, somebody helped you in work? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, yes. Somebody tried to sort of cover it up so it wouldn't be very obvious to the Germans. It became known fairly soon that there was one person who spoke German so the Germans used me to translate from them to the girls and back again. There was one German SS who one day asked me to translate for him and to come to the opposite side of the work area and I was very worried because during that morning when we were shovelling the dirt and the glass I had found a little rag, torn, dirty and I had taken the rag and hidden it between my legs because I wanted a scarf to cover my head, or something. And when he told me to come over there, there was just a chimney left of a building. To translate I sort of stumbled after him. I had shoes, but four sizes too large - I couldn't walk very well. And when we came to the chimney, behind the chimney he took his hand around my neck, covered my mouth, and his hand went down my body and it came to stop on the scarf. And he was very shocked, very angry. Interviewer: Why did he do it? Lucille Eichengreen: He wanted to rape me. He was very shocked and very speechless and then he started to curse in German. Called me terrible names - pig and I don't know what else. And the end of it was I was a pig because he thought I was menstruating. In the ghetto nobody menstruated for years. It had just stopped. And he let me go and he pushed me away and said: "Go back to work." Because he thought the rag had a different purpose. That night in the camp I washed the rag in cold water and in the morning I put it wet around my head and I wrote about it. Then they transferred us from this camp to another camp in Zasel - all these camps belonged to Neuengammer. Interviewer: When you stayed near Hamburg there, did you have any connection with the civic population there? Have you seen the Germans there? Lucille Eichengreen: We saw the Germans and in this one place there was a man who sort of threw an old jacket at me and gave me some cooked potatoes because he asked when he passed by where did my father have his business and I told him the address and he said: "I must have known him." Whether he did or didn't I don't know. Interviewer: How did you talk with him? Lucille Eichengreen: He stood here and....you were careful. You tried. If you got caught it was bad, but you tried. And then they transferred us to another camp in the same area which was called Zasel, but it was under the direction of Neuengamme and there the commandant found out that I spoke German and he and a young woman from Lodz - Sophie Kaloshinska - were working in the office. It had the advantage that you did not go out in winter to work outside. It had the disadvantage that whenever the Germans walked through the office they would hit us. I was black and blue. Some of the girls envied us and I guess it was just a fight. We had no more food than anybody else. We were indoors rather than outside, but on the other hand we were black and blue. The eyes were closed were sometimes closed when they would hit us. My legs were covered with cuts and bruises, but I worked in this office for four months with Sophie. Sophie died a few years ago - she remained in Germany with her family. She married, she had a son. And during that time I kept records of both the Polish girls - not by name. More or less by number. If somebody died, if somebody was killed, if somebody was beaten. We had a camp doctor, a young woman, from Romania. I think she lives in Herzliya if she's still alive. I have her name, but I don't remember it right now. But there was not much you could do. There was a German doctor or a German assistant doctor coming in. He amputated some fingers without anaesthetic. There was a rumour that one of the kapos had an abortion, but I didn't see it, but it was a rumour. Interviewer: The kapos - they were Jewish girls? Lucille Eichengreen: The kapos were Czech, Jewish-Czech. Four of them. Interviewer: And the women in the camp - you came five hundred. You found other women there? Lucille Eichengreen: No, they just brought in the four kapos. We were the only ones. It was a small camp. Interviewer: A new camp, or it was before you came? Lucille Eichengreen: No, we were the first occupants. There were others after us, but we were the first ones in this camp. Interviewer: So only your group? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, five hundred. Interviewer: And the kapos were...? Lucille Eichengreen: Czech. They were brought from another camp. They were much older as a rule. And I worked in the office and I kept records of the German SS and after four months writing it over and over and over I memorised the names and the addresses. It just...I didn't make an effort. It just happened. Interviewer: Do you remember them now? Lucille Eichengreen: Some of them. Interviewer: Please tell us. Lucille Eichengreen: The commandant was Stark who was before the war a gardener, who was vicious. There was Parsh and Pirtz and Himmel - they later on stood trial. I think one or two had a death sentence, the rest were eventually released. When we were liberated we were shipped to Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before the end of the war and when I worked for the English I asked them whether they were interested and of course they were absolutely amazed that I didn't tell them sooner. We picked up all the Germans. I went to the prison to look at them behind bars. I got a citation from the British government, military government, and then I received some threats from the families of those Germans. They said: "We will find you." And I got hysterical and the English drove me in a car over the border to Holland. The Dutch didn't want to let us enter. We entered not quite legally. From there to Brussels. From Brussels to Lille. In Lille the young captain - Alexander was his name - took me and his driver for dinner. When we came out the car had been stolen. It was an army car. He bought me a ticket to Paris, put me on the train. It's difficult. As the train was leaving I asked him why he had taken the chances and he said he was a Jew. He had emigrated from Berlin in 1935. He lived in London. He was engaged to be married. His father used to be a doctor. He had a twin brother who tracked down Hess, the commandant of the camp, and arrested him all by himself. And we see each other every other year, either in England or in the States - we're very good friends. And I was just very surprised that he took the chances he did. In Paris I lived in ayouth hostel. It was not much of an improvement - it was a big room with fifty beds. Food was rationed - there was very little food - but at least there was an American embassy and I got an affidavit from an old, old classmate when I was a child. And every day I went to the American embassy until I showed them the commendation from the British military government and I had a visa in February. I left in March. Interviewer: '46? Lucille Eichengreen: '46. I got money from my uncle in Haifa to pay for a ticket by boat. It was an empty merchant marine and it took twenty-two days to New York. And I came to New York and I was very lonely. My friends were very nice, but I missed my friends from Bergen-Belsen. And it was a hard life. I did some factory work. I wanted to go to school, but there was no money. My friends said I didn't need school. I met my husband at a party and he found out that I knew his parents and a year later we got married. We moved from New York to California and the children were born in California. And I went back to school. I worked for forty years, but I went to school. I studied art, and the last four years I went back to school again and I took up comparative literature and creative writing and that's very rewarding. Interviewer: Let's go back. Lucille Eichengreen: Alright. Interviewer: You stopped in this camp, Zasel. I would like you to describe this camp. You told me what you were doing in the office. Please tell me more details. Lucille Eichengreen: The camp had about a dozen barracks. We were divided into those barracks. It had a washroom with water, which Auschwitz did not have much water. Interviewer: New barracks? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. They were new at that point. They had cots and straw mattresses. I would say it was a little bit better that Auschwitz, but not much. We were beaten. Interviewer: Describe me please a day there. Lucille Eichengreen: We were woken very early, about five in the morning. We were counted and recounted, divided into groups for different work projects and taken out of the camp to the work sites, either built temporary housing or cleaned rubble or whatever was needed. We were under constant guard. Interviewer: Who were the guards? Lucille Eichengreen: The guards were SS uniforms, but I would say the youngest of the guards was probably thirty-five, forty. Before the war most of them belonged to the civil service like customs or similar jobs, but they were ordered to be guards and they complied and they played SS rather well. Some were very cruel, especially the women guards. Food was in short supply. There was a soup in the evening and a piece of bread in the morning. There was a kitchen and our girls cooked, did the cooking. We were under guard - German women guarded us. The food for the SS was cooked in the same kitchen, but separately. It was very good, but we couldn't steal - we tried. And it was really the same story. It was beatings, harrassment, mistreatment and not enough clothing on rainy days, on cold days. It was a very cold winter. We did not know whether the war would end soon or not very soon - we had no idea. We knew that the city had been bombed badly. Interviewer: Still the end of '45? Lucille Eichengreen: End of '44. In '45 it really did not change materially. It was pretty much the same. We could hear sirens sometimes for air-raid alarms, but it was so far out of the city that we really did not know. Interviewer: There was there illness? People died there? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. People got sick. They had a lot of dysentery, they had a lot of infection from the handling of the dirty material. We had a lot of coughing, of colds, of pneumonia, and not treatment. People survived with a lot of damage. Tuberculosis and lung damage. The place did not have a gas chamber, let me put it that way. It did not have a crematorium. Interviewer: People died? Lucille Eichengreen: People died, yes. Interviewer: A lot of them? Lucille Eichengreen: Maybe a dozen. It's hard to say how many over a period of time - a lot of them died the first two days of liberation, so people died and people survived with a lot of damage. Interviewer: What was the relation of the Czech kapos, of these four girls that you said? Lucille Eichengreen: They were considerably older. They were rather brisk, abrupt. They did not make friends with us, we did not make friends with them. The chief kapo was Gerde and the two minor kapos were Josh and Vera. The camp doctor was very quiet, very timid and we on our own had a kapo fromLodz, Mircka Kupervassa. I'm told that she committed suicide - I do not know. She was a student before the war, maybe a medical student. And I believe she was a communist politically and she really had a way of talking to us: "Try and go to work and don't give up." She was very supportive. Interviewer: You chose her? Who gave her the nomination? Lucille Eichengreen: She really chose herself, she talked to us and the Germans saw it and then she said: "We'll also make you a kapo." It was sort of an involuntary-type situation. And some people didn't like her, which was unavoidable, but she was decent, you know. She would plead with us, talk to us. When she would get upset she would tear her hair and she had no hair and she was very convincing and very...I mean, she would have been a good political worker, or good party member if it had been a different time. I personally liked her and I slept in the same barrack with her. She was remarkable in her drive, in her determination. What made her commit suicide afterwards, I do not know. Maybe it was hard to live with this label - "kapo". Interviewer: Right after the war she committed suicide? Lucille Eichengreen: A year after or so. I wasn't there anymore. And she also had tuberculosis - she was very sick. I did not know her well - our relationship was superficial, within the framework of that camp. We did no talk about before the war or after the war - it never entered the conversation, only what happened today and what could happen tomorrow. That is how limited our way of thinking was. Interviewer: Did you have conversation with your friends, with your other friends in the camp? Did you do anything after work? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, yes. No. There was no energy. The lights in the barracks were put out very early. When you are hungry your brain stops, with most people - I wouldn't say with all, but with most. You are atrophied, you are paralyzed. Hunger does terrible things to people. You really lose interest in thinking, in dreaming. You just think about tomorrow and the next piece of bread. Interviewer: No girls that sang in the tent? Lucille Eichengreen: Very seldom, very seldom. Interviewer: No religious girls? Lucille Eichengreen: No. There were some that were a little bit religious. I remember Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah that somebody would say: "We should have a holiday today or yesterday." But most of us said: "What for? Where is a G-d? Who needs a G-d? There is no G-d." And I still don't believe. So there were some that believed, that were religious, but few. Interviewer: And you stayed all these four months in the office? Lucille Eichengreen: In Zasel camp, yes. The previous camps, no. Interviewer: Yes, but here you stayed the longest period you stayed here? Lucille Eichengreen: Four months. Interviewer: And then what happened? Lucille Eichengreen: Then they told us one morning to get into trucks. They counted us, they put us on trucks and they took us to a place that we didn't know where it was. We had to march a long stretch of road and there was gate - it reminded us of Auschwitz. And to the right and to the left of the gate were huge mountains and the mountains consisted of shoes - big shoes, small shoes, old shoes, shoes, boots, shoes. And what crossed our minds was shoes - where are the legs? We walked on. They pushed us into a barracks. The barracks was very, very small. No room, no cots, nothing. The first night a woman screamed terribly and we tried to put something under her head. We assumed she was sick and in the morning she give birth to a baby maybe a pound, maybe two pounds - dead. Somebody took the baby away and she eventually fell asleep and the first morning I went out, looking for the latrine and I met some women, two of them, who told me that they had been there almost six months in Bergen-Belsen. Interviewer: This was Bergen-Belsen? Lucille Eichengreen: It was Bergen-Belsen. They told me the camp was guarded like every other camp and as we walked to the latrines there was a terrible stench, smell. and there was hardly any water in the faucets. There was hardly any food in the camp - the Germans brought in very little food. There was a lot of typhus. They showed me a pit full of dead bodies, some clothed, some not clothed, green, yellow, totally decomposed. And we existed there from day to day. We did not think that this was a situation you could survive. I mean, there was no food, there was too much typhus, there was just no way of escaping. Interviewer: This was already towards the end? Lucille Eichengreen: This was already March, April. And one morning towards lunchtime we went outside... Interviewer: And many of your group died there? Lucille Eichengreen: Some had died there, yes. They were already very sick.they couldn't move anymore, you know. Interviewer: When they took you from Zasel, what was the reason, you know? Lucille Eichengreen: They didn't say. Later on the reason was that the English were advancing, but we didn't know. Interviewer: But here you don't know if this was the reason? That they liquidated this camp? Lucille Eichengreen: Now I know. Interviewer: You were the last? Lucille Eichengreen: No, there was another camp after us of non-Jewish women that they brought in. Why they pushed the Jews to Bergen-Belsen nobody...I tried to look at the archives in Germany - they're not sure. And in Bergen-Belsen you lived from day to day. And nobody thought that we would see the end of the war because there was too much typhus and no food. And one day towards lunchtime we were outside the barracks near the wires and we heard a noise and we saw tanks coming into the main avenue of the camp and the tanks stopped and out of the tanks came soldiers that did not wear an SS uniform, but a brown uniform. A few officers came into the camps - they did not let us out. They were not prepared for a camp or for the conditions. They asked if somebody spoke English and there were about four or five or us and they asked that we translate. And by nighttime they brought in a little drinking water. They called for the Red Cross and medical personnel, but it took a day or two. And they went to the German storeroom and they found cans of meat and fat, probably from one of the occupied countries, possibly Belgium, Holland, France. And everybody got a kilo can of this meat with the fat, with everything. And of course the first thing you did, you tried to open the can and eat the thing and by morning half of the people were dead. Interviewer: You ate it? Lucille Eichengreen: No, I didn't get the can till very late and while I was working for the English the officer who was fairly high-rank asked me: "Is there anything you want?" and he had a tiny piece of chocolate in his pocket, some biscuits and cigarettes. And he had it in his hand and he said: "Do you want it?" and I said: "Yes." And somehow common sense told me that night not to eat the meat. I ate the biscuits. I shared the chocolate with somebody - I'm not sure who it was. And we smoked the cigarettes together and by morning Dr. Zinger's wife was dead - she had eaten the whole can, maybe even more. And I went back to work the next morning for the English. Eventually they gave me a watch from all the accumulated jewellery and I worked for them until they transferred into the old German barracks or what you want to call it and I worked for them until December, '45. Interviewer: In Bergen-Belsen? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. And whenever they needed translation between a German, or even Jewish people, and English I would do the translating. And then I told them about the Germans of Zasel camp. They arrested all of them. Interviewer: They left the camp? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. Interviewer: When the English came the Germans...? Lucille Eichengreen: Tried to run. Interviewer: But they still were in the camp? Lucille Eichengreen: Some yes, some no, but eventually all of them were found. And they stood trial. I was taken in fall of '45 to Tsele, to a military trial. I remember being asked whether I could speak, whether I wanted to speak German or English. I said English. I don't remember the questions, I don't remember my answers. I know it took several hours and then they drove me back to Bergen-Belsen. I don't remember a thing of that morning because it was a terrible experience, talking about the past, talking about the Germans and repeating what had happened and I just don't remember. I just see a vague room with some English officers. I see some Germans, German prisoners, but no details, it's just blanked out. Interviewer: Did you went back to Hamburg? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes, I went back with a military escort. I found my father's property. It had been appropriated by the Germans. The Germans who now had control over it didn't want to talk to me. They were very nasty. Eventually I went to trial through a lawyer five years later. The Germans said they had paid for the property to the German Reich. I did not get any money and I said we did not sell the property - I wanted it back. Eventually I got a verdict - I did get it back. Several of the properties were destroyed by the English bombs, but the ground was mine. I eventually sold it, but I got very little money compared to value. The Germans took advantage of the situation and I really didn't care. I just wanted to be done with it, to get out of it. Interviewer: And your house? Did you go back to the house you used to live? Lucille Eichengreen: I did not go inside. It still stands today. It was like a condominium - we owned the apartment. I went back, I looked at it from the outside, I did not want to go in. Interviewer: And you didn't go back to Lodz till two years ago. Lucille Eichengreen: Took fifty years, yes. Interviewer: What made you go back now? Lucille Eichengreen: I did not like the Poles any better than I liked the German because my mother used to talk about pogroms as a child which she had experienced. What made me go back? I grew...I mean, my growing up, my teenage years were in Poland, in Lodz. Interviewer: In the ghetto? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. My good friends were from the ghetto years. There was a part of me that belonged there. I just wanted to go back and see it. I don't think I'll ever return, but this one time. Interviewer: You are glad you went? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes and no. It's a mixed situation. I'm unhappy in terms of memories. I'm unhappy to see five thousand Jews left in Poland where there used to be three and a half million. I'm angry about what the Germans and the Poles did, but I just had to convince myself that the Germans could be as inhuman as they were, that the Germans kept records to this day which are not always accurate, but fairly complete. That they had so much respect, so much reverence for bookkeeping, for record-keeping and no reverence, irreverence for human life. Their dislike for the Jews is still there, whether you talk to a man on the street, whether you talk to a taxi-driver - it's all the fault of the Jews. It's the same in Germany. There are hardly any Jews - still in all, they will bring up a Jew as something odd, as something undesirable. You ask them: Have you met any Jews?" "Oh no, never met a Jew, never seen a Jew." "How do you know?" Oh, that's what they say. That's probably what the parents said. It's very unbelievable. The Poles said to us, to me: "You Jews come here." They didn't say "You Americans". They said: "You Jews come here because you look at us like the cemetery of Europe." And I looked at them and I said that's what you are. It's the same with the Germans. The few Jews that live in Germany that I met... Interviewer: You went back to Germany? Lucille Eichengreen: Yes. I had an official invitation from the city government. They do it as a matter of...because it's proper to do so, but they really have no feeling, no courtesy, no curiosity. They make a speech, there is no apology, there are no regrets. There are no guilt feelings. There is nothing. And I find this incomprehensible. The community consists of maybe a thousand, twelve hundred Jews, most of them from Iraq, some from Poland. They live a dual life. They think they're Jews living in Germany, they think they're equal. They're full of complexes. They're not equal. And the synagogue is surrounded by a high fence, by an alarm system - you can't get in, you can't get out. When you ask them why - "We're afraid of incidents." When you ask them: "Why is the synagogue here? Why not on the former ground of the old, grand synagogue?" "We were afraid to build there because it's right next door to the university." And I said: "So?" "We're afraid of vandalism." I said: "From whom? Students?" They didn't say yes, they didn't say no, but it was obvious. And I said: "You mean to say that this is 1991 and you are afraid of any kind of a German? Haven't you learnt? Can't you fight? Haven't you learnt from Israel?" The answer was: "You don't understand. You don't live here." I said: "I understand very well. I don't want to live here. You should go to Israel. Who tells you to stay here? Who wants you? Who needs you?" The conversation with the Jews, the manager of the community, the people that consider themselves important, they said: "You don't understand. You're an American. You don't know what you're talking about." I might agree because I talk from an emotional point of view and they talk from a convenient economic point of view. And those two don't mix. Interviewer: Why didn't you went to Israel, to your relatives right after the war? You said that your uncle from Haifa paid you the ticket. Why didn't he pay you a ticket here? Lucille Eichengreen: I had a cousin in the Jewish Brigade. He was six years older than I. He came to visit and the family had decided that I was to marry him. He was very good-looking, but not very bright. And I said I will marry him, but I get a divorce when I land in Palestine. The family said: "No" and I said: "Then I don't marry him." He already had gotten the papers. I already had a certificate to come, but I was not going to Palestine if my mother's and my father's family were going to dictate whom I was going to marry, what I was going to do, where I was going to live. I had been on my own since I was sixteen, five years. And I was not going to marry a man that I had nothing in common with. He had no interest that I shared, that I shared with him, and I didn't want to marry a cousin. Who wants to marry a cousin? So I had a choice between American and Palestine and the only reason I went to America is because I was afraid of the family because they had made all the plans for me and I couldn't live with that. Interviewer: Thank you very much. Lucille Eichengreen: You are welcome.