Livia Kransberg

Name of Interviewee: Livia Kransberg

Name of Interviewer: Shoshana Ben-Avraham

Cassette Number: VT-2363

Date: July 5, ‏ 1999

Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi

Names:

Petrova

Sighet

Neustadt Glewe

Salzburg

Ravensbruck

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Wetslar

Q: Today is the 5th of July, 1999. I am Ben-Avraham, Shoshana, interviewing Mrs. Kransberg, Livia. Your original family name?

A: Sabau.

Q: Date and place of birth.

A: I was born on October 13th, 1919 to Bezalel Sabau and Rachel Rosenbaum in Petrova, Rumania.

Q: Could you describe to us, tell us a little bit about your family?

A: Starting with my father – he dealt in rawhide, specializing in fur skins, like foxes, minks – all in raw condition. And then he transported to my uncle in Sighet and there they would work it out. This was very seasonal, during the winter, and so during the summer he would mediate deals – grain deals, all kinds of deals, timber deals. Or he would get together with some other merchants in Petrova and they would lease a three-mile stretch of orchard of apples and pears and they’d sell it in the fall for profit. But this was a three-mile orchard and so in the fall these fruits were very carefully picked and then loaded into freight carts and transported wherever. My father was very mild with his daughters. He called us “lemmele”, “little lamb”. He was strict with our brothers. They were big and strong and they didn’t shy away from getting physical with the peasants, youth of the peasants who would call them “Christ-killer” and “dirty Jew”, and my father resented this terribly. He would say, “You just make believe you didn’t hear what they called you. They are going to change. You see, their parents have done the same thing to me and now they are different.” And then one time when I was there I asked, “How could they be different now?” - “They changed,” he said. - “when they still hate and their children…?” He didn’t have an answer so he said, “’Lemmle’, maybe your mother needs you in the kitchen?”

Q: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

A: Well, we were eight siblings. Before we start with my siblings I would like to say something about my mother. I idolized my mother, I loved her with an unearthly love. I believed that if she died I would jump in the grave – I was very young. I remember I had an obsession - and I have to mention this because later on I’m going to have a connection in the camp – and so when I was like five and six years old, came Friday. Before the sunset I’d rush in from outside, I’d stop whatever I would do, playing and whatever else, and I’d ask my older sister, Rose, to clean me up and prepare me for sabbath and I’d go in a corner, place myself in a corner in the all-purpose room and watch my mother light the sabbath candles. And then as she made the blessing, so I’d close my eyes and in my imagination she’d turn into a beautiful queen, bejewelled as only a five-year-old child could imagine. Of course, when she was finished, I opened my eyes and the image disappeared. And then she’d signal to me to come and she’d pick me up in her arms and kiss me and say, “Good shabbos.” And then one Friday I saw that her eyes were tearing, it seemed to me as if she was crying. I didn’t ask her anything. I just rushed to my older sister, Rose, seven years my senior, and I asked her why was my mother crying. At first she didn’t answer me and then she told me that she has some health problem and maybe she has got to send her a (?), they used to say, a cure. And so she told me something at that time, that it was a condition that she could not be aggravated, so whenever I had a problem, instead of going to her, I should come to my sister. She should screen it and then see whether I could go. And that from moment on, I became bonded with my sister Rose forever, emotionally.

Now, going back to my siblings. My older sister, Molly – she emigrated to Mexico in the 20’s. She must have been eighteen years of age. Eventually she settled in the United States, got married, had two daughters, two grandchildren, and at the age of ninety-five, she is still alive and living in Brooklyn by her younger daughter, Anita. My older brother, Victor – after he was discharged from the cavalry, he married a beautiful, young, lovable girl and together they came to the then called Palestine. After years they divorced, he came back to the United States to join my father and he remarried. He is deceased and is survived by his second wife, a son and grandchildren. My brother, Joseph – and about him I would like to talk a little bit longer because he was the brother that I drew my courage from, my ambitions in life and so on. He was like the chosen in the family who was sent to the yeshiva. During the day he would attend yeshiva, not necessarily every day, and during the evenings he would go to the public libraries and university libraries and study all kinds of non-religious subjects, and so when he returned he was an accomplished Talmudist and a secular scholar rolled into one. Eventually he left Petrova, went to Yash, which is the capital of Moldova, met a very intelligent woman, Minna, and they married, had two children. And what happened when the war came – they were communists and the communist party was outlawed and so, of course, with the coming of the war, they fled to the Soviet Union, only to find out that safety meant there starvation and so people advised him to do maybe unethical things, work on the black market, which he did. He was caught, sent to Siberia for ten years. He survived, he came back and then during Chauchesko’s reign, Minna and him got high jobs in the government, but then in ’71 my brother realized that…he foresaw the demise of Chauchesko and sent his daughters to Israel. And so I knew the comfort in which they lived for the past few years as bigwigs and party members. They had everything for free - it was unbelievable – while the other people, the men in the street, were starving. And so I came here – that was in 1971 – and I did whatever I could, I helped them with whatever I could, and since that time I wasn’t here. But then my brother, in ’78, made aliyah to Israel. He settled in Ashdod and then somehow he got cancer of the prostate and due to his older daughter, Bianca, due to her unselfish and ceaseless care, day and night, twenty years later he is still alive. She works at Hadassah. He just moves his muscles and two doctors are already there. She works at Hadassah Hospital. She is assisting doctors in surgery.

Now I am here and visiting because he is ninety years old and as I mentioned before, I was very close, I drew everything, courage and ambition from him, and here I am. My younger brother gave us a present, gave us the two tickets here. And of course I have to mention that our younger daughter contributed two thousand dollars.

Q: Yes, but don’t go into details of money because it is irrelevant really. It doesn’t matter. Tell me some more about your sisters.

A: Okay. Then going down the line is my sister Rose who was my mother, my father, my G-d in the concentration camp. She fought for me, she starved for me, she stole for me – whatever the course, she was determined to keep me alive and she did keep me alive.

And then my brother Chaim – he was also different in that he was a wizard in math and he was the clown in the family until we had a terrible incident in school. He told one of his classmates that Jesus was a Jew. When there was recess they beat him almost to a pulp and when Father picked him up and took him to the doctor, he had a collapsed lung and he had broken ribs and never recovered since that time. He eventually married and he died in a labour camp. His wife survived.

Then my brother Yitzchak, Jack. He gave us the tickets to come here. He survived the labour camp and with his fifteen-year-old bride, came to the United States and opened successfully a corrugated box factory. They had three children and eventually he divorced. Now he is in Israel and bought an apartment in Netanya. He wants to make aliyah here.

And my younger sister – I’ll leave myself out – my younger sister, Toby – she was with us in Auschwitz for six weeks and she was sent to Germany to work in an ammunition factory.

Q: What is her name?

A: Her name is Toby. She returned and got married and successful business and by now she has thirteen grandchildren and one great-grandchild and she is seven years my junior.

Now, about myself. When I was very young I thought that my elementary teachers were the smartest people in the world and I wanted to be like them, but to be like them I found out that I had to attend high school and eventually a university. But unlike in the United States - I don’t know what kind of system of high school system you have here – in Europe high school was neither compulsory nor tuition-free, so your parents had to be very rich, especially if you didn’t live in the city, because high schools were only found in big cities. And so at the same time when I was still in my elementary, I found out that scholastic achievement is as good as money and so I worked hard and I graduated with an average grade of A+. This eased me into the most prestigious all-girl high school in Sighet with a four-year scholarship. What did I do for room and board? I ate the main meal, which in Europe to this day is consumed between one and two - the main meal I ate by my relatives – every day by a different relative.

Q: And the other meals?

A: As I was saying that I ate the main meal at my relatives, every day by a different relative. Now, what did I do for a room and breakfast and supper? The first year I tutored in a Jewish family two children and I received a room and one glass of milk, and my parents would send me a big loaf of bread and I cut it into slices and used one slice with a glass of milk and another slice I’d take to school to eat it during recess and I’d go in a corner because I didn’t have any liquid to wash it down with and I’d have the hiccups and I didn’t want the other girls to see me in this condition. But come Thursday, I didn’t have any more bread because maybe I cut the slices a little bit too thick, but I didn’t tell my parents that I was out of bread, so I went to sleep on an empty stomach. Maybe sometimes I'd have a fruit - my relatives would fill my pockets with fruit after I left their home. And so I’d go to sleep on an empty stomach. The second year I was fortunate to tutor three children – two in the same family, in a Jewish family - I still remember the name – Jacobovich – and I received room and a complete breakfast. And from the money from the third student I was to buy myself supper, but since I wasn’t paid on a daily basis - sometimes twice a week, once a week – I went to sleep again on an empty stomach. My classmate, Jacobovich, Eta Jacobovich, I slept with – we slept on the same “recomier”. It’s like a “castro-convertible”. She saw me tossing and turning and she told me to go the next morning to the nurse and report that I am not feeling well. So I said, “I am okay except that I am hungry.” For a minute or so she couldn’t figure our how I could be hungry and I explained I didn’t have supper at all, and so she took me downstairs to their quarters, to their servants’ quarters in the kitchen and told me to eat whatever my heart desired and I packed in whatever I saw there and then she left a little note for the cook – they had a cook and they had two or three maids and she didn’t want that the cook should blame the other maids for the missing food, so she left a note that she ate it.

The third year something unusual happened that changed my life. I received a B mark in physics. I had to keep up a high average to maintain my scholarship – not that I had to, but I wanted to keep up a high average – and I thought that I deserved an A and I told a professor. I say “professor” because our teachers, they had doctoral degrees because we in high school took subjects that they are offered here at the level of universities. So I complained and she said, “In my system G-d gets an A and the best student gets a B.” So I went down to the principal and I stated my case and I asked him kindly to have me reexamined from the entire material that we studied up to that point and if I didn’t answer one single question, she could fail me. And so the principal was really shocked and so the examination took place in front of a committee and I passed with flying colours, I got my A. The next day, my French professor was very curious about who this girl with so much “chutzpa” was, and so we talked and when she found out about my hardships, she offered me room and board in her home.

Q: She wasn’t Jewish.

A: She was Jewish.

Q: Ah, she was Jewish. Do you remember her name?

A: Yes. It was Mrs. Fishman. In the end she emigrated here. I saw her one year ago when I visited. And imagine, in one place to sleep and eat three meals? Wow! This was something. But there was a little glitch there. She did not observe dietary laws and I did at that time - I must mention this – and so she had a tenant there, she had tenants, they shared property, and she paid for that tenant to cook for me kosher style. I would be there two years and then after that my professor of religion did get me into the Joint and there I….

Q: To the Joint to do what?

A: The Joint – I think it was financed by American Jews.

Q: Yes, but what was it?

A: It was an orphanage and I was supposed to tutor some of these orphanages. And then by the time the deal went through, these orphanages were not there anymore and I just lived there until my mother moved in in 1940 there. I would like to go back to my junior year because I used to come in every day half an hour earlier to help my three gentile classmates with their homework and I thought we were good friends, but at that end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938 an anti-semitic party came to power - their leaders were Goga Kusa– and so they had a chance to show their true colours. They waited for me at my classroom door, they took my books, especially the one who was the leader of them, Marissa, and threw the books across the street and said, “Pick them up, Jew.”

I made a mistake. I said they took the books and threw them across the street. They took my books and threw them across the classroom floor and said, “Pick them up, Jew dog.” And I thought they were joking and I told them this should be the last time they pull a joke like this on m. And then to show me that she was not joking – Marissa - she took my notebooks, tore out the pages and turned them into paper balls and threw them across the floor. I then realized that she was not joking and then I still wouldn’t pick up after all. She said, “Pick up your dirt. Look what you made here.” And I said, “You made this dirt, not me.” In the end she said, “Suppose I tell my brother that you called Goga Kusa ‘swine’?” I said, “But I didn’t call them.” So she said, “Wait until my brother, the policeman, is taking you to the authorities and you’ll see whom the authorities are going to believe, you or my brother.” I realized right away she was blackmailing me. I picked up my books, I did this for four weeks.

Q: Four weeks?! She did this everyday?

A: Yes. And I talked to the professors about it and they said they’ll do something, “Oh, I’ll take care of that,” but nothing was done.

Q: And you were the one that used to tutor?

A: I was the one that tutored. Yes. For no money. It wasn’t like I tutored them. I just came in in the morning and I just helped them for no money. I wasn’t paid. I just had a pleasure to teach youngsters. And at that the same time I thought I’d make friends. And so happened was that Eti Jacobovich, the girl that gave me food, if you recall, she was in that class too and at that time we had “numerus clausus” – only six Jews to a hundred. I came in with my high scholarship. She came into this system because her father was a veteran of World War I, and so she couldn’t take the humiliation I took. She just looked. They didn’t do anything to her and she dropped out from school. And her parents were very upset because it didn’t happen every time that a Jewish student was allowed to attend school at that time because we had this “numerus clausus”, so they married her off to a businessman. She had a boyfriend and she had a child and she perished in Auschwitz. Many a time I think if that would have not happened – sometimes, you know, I get guilt pangs, she helped me so much – if those girls wouldn’t have done what they did to me and she would not have dropped out, her parents would not have married her and she would not have had a child and…And so this was really unfortunate.

Q: We are talking about what year?

A: We are talking the end of 1937.

Q: Okay. I want to ask you something about this time period. By the time of 1937 or at the late ‘30’s, do you remember, in the family that you were staying with, on the street, in the schools, did you hear anything about what was going on in Germany? By that time? Not later on.

Q: No, we didn’t hear anything what was going on in Germany. Nothing. We just, at the time that this party was in power, they killed thirteen thousand Jews.

Q: Who killed thirteen thousand Jews?

A: This, the party, the members of the party. I was mentioning this anti-semitic party in Rumania.

Q: What was the name of the party?

A: It was some Christian national party.

Q: When you are saying they killed about thirteen thousand Jews, are you talking about the pogrom, or so to speak (?)?

A: No. That was in 1940, I think. This 1938, what I want to say is that during these four weeks when this party was in power, thirteen thousand innocent Jews, mainly merchants and professionals, were killed and their properties confiscated. And so the news of these atrocities reached England and France and they sent emissaries to King Carl – he was the king at that time – and told him, “Take a look at what is going on in your backyard.” So King Carl removed the party so they were only four weeks, and during those four weeks they killed so many people.

Q: Only Jews?

A: Only Jews. I mean, whom else? And so he removed the party from power. Now, Marissa and the other two came to me and hugged me and kissed me and said, “We must have been crazy. We didn’t know what we were doing and would you forgive us?” And I said, “You were not crazy and you knew what you were doing and I will not forgive you. But you know what? I will help you just as if nothing happened,” and I did, so help me. And in 1942, she was already married to the son of the chief of police and she collaborated with the Germans to have my parents, my family and me, to have us killed.

Q: Your family was with you in Sighet or were they still in Petrova?

A: Well, I’m talking about in 1942. My mother moved into Sighet in 1940 because my father, which chronologically I am going to mention that in 1938 he left for the United States, and so my mother moved in in 1940. But now I am talking about 1942 when it happened that she collaborated with the….

Q: Yes, but let’s get to it chronologically.

A: So we are still in 1938. My father left for the United States. He was sponsored by my older sister. He wanted to save his family from the oncoming war.

Q: So this is exactly what I am interested in. Was your family aware of what was going on, or at least thought that something was about to happen? You said that they were not aware, but then…

A: My father….I mean, maybe, you know, our parents knew something about it and there was a chance to come to the United States and eventually take the rest of the family to the United States. But we youngsters in high school, we knew nothing. We just studied very hard. In fact, we were considered, the high school students in Europe were considered the golden youth because they were an island in enlightenment in a sea of ignorance because very few people could attend high school. And so now in 1938 my father came to the United States. In 1939 the war broke out. And in 1940 my mother sold the property in Petrova and moved into Sighet, and this was at the same time when the northern part of Transylvania was given back to Hungary and so the situation for the Jews….this is when we started to feel the winds of war. Jews were afraid to travel in trains for fear of being thrown out from moving trains. Yes, they threw out Jews from the windows while the trains were moving. Now doctors could not visit their patients in the hospitals, the Jewish doctors. The Jewish lawyers had to take gentile partners who then became the senior partners who eventually pushed out the Jewish lawyer altogether.

Q: How did those events, or other events, affect you personally?

A: In 1940 I was finishing with my last year of high school, so I was just still studying.

Q: You were seventeen, eighteen years old?

A: No, I was older than that. I was maybe nineteen or so. See, in 1940 I started in (?) and that was that prestigious high school, and then being that I had a sister here, I wanted to learn English. So there was another high school there – they offered English. So I attended that high school for two years and this was when it happened with that incident with the B mark and I had this reexamination. And so in 1940 already, I had my fill of English and I came back to (?). Now, the Hungarians were already in and somehow in the senior class there were only eight students and the senior class of the (?), which was an all-boys high school, were also only eight, so they made a co-ed class and this is where that fellow who saved my life – he was there. I met this…he was my classmate.

Q: What was his name?

A: His name was Pope Vasily. And being that he saved my life I would like to have him inscribed here as a Righteous Gentile, because I am going to describe the circumstances in which he saved my life.

Q: Of course. There is only one something else that I would like to ask you beforehand. The fact that the war was already on in Poland and Europe – did this have any effect on your life at that time, in ’40?

A: No, except that we had problems. As a youngster I still continued school. I was privileged to be able to finish high school. And so in 1941 they started, the Hungarians started to recruit young Jewish boys and first they put them to work in the parks and gave them menial jobs and then they sent them to labour camps, and my younger brother, Yitzchak, was in one of these labour camps. Of course there were labour camps also known as labour detachment camps. Those were the worst camps and my sister Rose’s husband died there. These camps were established right behind the front and these young people, including my sister’s husband who was in the thirties, high thirties, and they worked. They dug foxholes and they worked with mines and they didn’t get any proper food or clothing and they died like flies. This was in 1941. Now in 1942, in my town called Sighet, it was during July 1942 - the Germans issued their decree that four hundred Jews from Sighet be killed. This operation was called “aktion”. It was supposed to take place during three days, but to make it a secret, they would round up the Jews during the night. Like, for instance, at eleven or twelve o’clock two policemen would enter a Jewish home. They’d pick a Jewish home at random, no particular, and they’d ask the head of the family to come with them to the police station for routine questioning. They shouldn’t worry. They learned from the Germans, the Hungarians. “Don’t worry. Just come up with us.” But once they were there the picture was changed. They gave them a “bubbemeise” that their ancestors were descended from Poland and that Poland wants them back and they shouldn’t worry about their properties, their home. Poland is going to take care of that. “Don’t worry.”

Q: Where do you know this fact?

A: I was there. I’ll come to that.

Q: Were you with your family?

A: I’ll come to that. Good thing you asked me, but I would come to that. And so they’d come two o’clock in the morning, the same policemen would come to the same people, take the rest of the members there. At dawn they would take them to Poland and just shoot them like dogs. They would tell them to run in the woods and shoot them, or make them cross a bridge and then open fire, that people would fall into the river. Some were not dead, they would swim ashore and the Jewish people there, the community would come in the morning to look for wounded, for bodies, and some of them they’d nurse back to health and clandestinely, secretly they would send them back to their homes.

Now, they third day two policemen came in my home and they were looking for my father and I told them that my father was in the United States, I told them. And so one of them said, “I am not in the mood to joke.” I said, “I am not joking. I can produce some papers. I’ll bring an envelope. I’ll show you.” And I went into the bedroom and went very slowly in the dark. I didn’t want to wake up my mother and my sister whose husband died - she had already a baby and she moved in with us – and my younger sister. So I stood there about five minutes to look for an envelope and as I opened the door I heard, “How long is that Jew-dog going to take?” And that “Jew-dog” resonated in my mind. Marissa came to my mind and I asked him whether his name was Horvath. He said, “So what?” And I asked him if Marissa was his sister and he said, “So what?” So there, it seemed that Marissa sent him to finish the job, so that our family is killed. So I said, “I’ll go to the police station instead of my father.” He said, “No. Your mother.” I said, “My mother doesn’t speak Hungarian. Besides, she was just through a heavy surgery and she is recovering.” “Then, you have an older sister.” I said, “Yes, but she has a baby and she doesn’t speak Hungarian.” He was very upset. And so at that time the baby, my sister’s baby started to cry and he got annoyed and he told me, “Come.” And so I went to the police station and there I was pushed into a room with people, elderly people. I was the only youngster there. Although I was already twenty-two years old I was very, very short and skinny. I remember first of all the air was stale. It was in July and the air, it was very hot. There was a mixture of smoke and perfume and sweat. To me, you know, it was something new. An elderly man said there, “Oy vey, they are already arresting children,” and I said, “No, they are not arresting children. I am here, I am replacing my father. I came here instead of my father. He is in the United States.” And I tried to find out what was going on there. They wouldn’t talk to me. I was a child there. They were whispering among themselves, but I couldn’t make out anything. I just heard a woman pleading for her life and soft music was playing. Next to me a lady fainted and while she was going down she cried out, “People, open the window! Air, Air!” and there was no window. Now, to drown out her cries of help they upped the volume, the turned the volume of the dancing music all the way up and now the room was blasting with dancing music. I couldn’t understand that and I felt that a voice is tearing out of my throat and says, “Stop! Turn off the radio!” The radio was turned off and then a few seconds later, “Would the wise guy come forward, whoever you are?” By now I got so scared I couldn’t move. I felt as if my feet were grounded to the floor, couldn’t move. And again I hear the commanding voice. I still couldn’t move and the people started to push me, saying “We have enough troubles. We don’t need your troubles. Go, go forward.” And I was pushed among people and I came in front of a desk with a detective there. It said, “Brno.” He looked at me and he was saying what am I doing here? At the same time the door opened and a young man came in and sat down next to him and told him something and then I looked at this young man and it was Pope Vasily.

Q: Did you know him already?

A: We went to school together in 1940. We went to school together and he was in love with me and I was in love with somebody else and that somebody else was in love with somebody else, as is always the case. Number two, he was gentile and I wouldn’t even let him call me by my name, Livia. He had to address me the formal way – Miss Sabau – so that he didn’t have a chance to be close and ask me on a date and so on. And here I saw him sitting there and then he picked up his eyes and saw me there and he said, “What are you doing, Miss Sabau.” Still Miss Sabau. And I said, “I don’t know what I am doing here.” So he went and whispered something in the detective’s ears, the detective picked up his eyes, looked at me, smiled and then nodded, you know, “yes” and he took me home. In other words, he asked him if he could take me home. He took me home and this is how he saved my family. I wrote a play in which I incorporated this incident, but there is so much more to it, about a hundred and twenty pages or so on. I think, of all the plays I wrote, four other plays, this should be produced because it is a matter of showing that a gentile had saved the life…

Q: You said that he actually released you, but you are also saying that he saved your family’s life. How is that?

A: I went home, so they didn’t come for the rest of my family. If I went home, I mean if he didn’t take me home, the policemen would have come two o’clock, taken the rest of the family and in the morning we would have been in Poland killed.

Q: Again, could you please mention his name?

A: His name was Pope Vasily. Now, when I walked out from the police station with him, I asked him what it was all about and he told that there was a decree issued by the Germans and that the Hungarians were just following orders. You know, the same story. This was when I found out what was going on. People just disappeared. Those four hundred people disappeared. Nobody knew where they were. People thought that they went to visit their relatives. They didn’t know that.

Q: So you went back and what was going on? What was happening then?

A: First I just want to say, when we left the police station and he told me what was going on and then at the same time he told me, “You remember Marissa? She is not your best friend.” I said, “I know.” I realized right away that it was her doing. At the same time I realized that he saved my life and maybe there was a price for it and maybe that price would be me and I got terribly upset. I had all kinds of visions, you know, being already with child from him, and I started to shiver. He happened to have a jacket, a light jacket and he gave it to me and he said, “Why are you shivering? It’s not even cold. It’s July. If you are afraid, don’t be afraid. It’s all over. You are safe.” But I still had in my mind that something was probably going to follow. And then we got to our gate to enter our apartment and there it was open. Normally it would be closed, but this time the police came and it was open. I gave him my hand and thanked him and then he kissed my hand as usually, that’s the European gentleman way, and he told me that he was going into the army in about two days and that his girlfriend was not happy about it. When I heard that he had a girlfriend, all that fear disappeared. But he asked me one thing. He wanted me to come the next day to this restaurant called “Brennan” and he wanted to address me “Livia”, by my informal name and he wanted to drink on that. And I said, “I don’t drink anything.” “I’ll drink beer, you’ll drink water.” And so I went inside and I told my sister, Rose – she was there with a child. My mother was still up, but I didn’t tell her anything, and we talked that we shouldn’t be telling to anybody because we were afraid that this Marissa might do something because we remained alive, so nothing, doesn’t even have to know that anybody was here. So the rest of my family except my sister didn’t know what happened at the police station and that I saved their lives. They didn’t know that.

Q: Did you go and meet him the next day?

A: Yes, sure I met him, but I had with him some other brush in with my younger brother, but I don’t think I should….

Q: Okay, so let’s continue. What happened later on?

A: It was ’42. Now we are in 1943.

Q: I want to ask you something else that we didn’t talk about it. What are you surviving on? I mean, who was working. You got an income? How were you surviving?

A: My father stopped sending money. I forget to mention something. In 1942, the same time, my father sent papers for my mother to emigrate to the United States and he did put all the names of the children on her papers and so I happened to go up to the Ministry of Interior and asked to see about visas to be processed, that we were going to the United States. They told me, “Your mother can go and your younger sister who is under twenty-one, but the others over twenty-one need separate papers.” And my mother wouldn’t separate from the family. She remained there and then we left her unfortunately in Auschwitz.

We are here in 1942. Now my father didn’t send money because there was no….everything was closed during the war. Dollars didn’t come in, so I kept on tutoring. My brother, Yitzchak, Jack, he worked as a chauffeur for an engineer – he knew how to drive a car. And my younger sister Toby worked in my cousin’s factory, and this was the way we managed.

Now in 1943, on March 19, the Germans occupied the northern part of Transylvania, including Mare Moresz (sp?).

Q: ’43 or ’44?

A: In ’44, excuse me. In ’44, March 19, ’44. We were given these yellow patches to wear, we were given curfews, but we couldn’t understand. You see, in Poland people knew what was going on, but we were very ignorant. We just knew that there were labour camps, there were labour detachment camps. We didn’t know about concentration camps, nothing (end of side).

This was March 1944. It happened one month later. It was the second part of April. We were celebrating the last day of Passover when the Germans gave orders that the Jews from Sighet pack two valises to an adult and line up in the streets. We did so. We were then taken to some restricted area on the outskirts of the town. The rooms were empty. It seemed that the people who were evacuated from there temporarily took their furniture, so we slept on the floors, twenty, thirty, forty people on a floor, depending on the size of the room. Fifteen, twenty families would use the same kitchen and they worked in shifts. We were allowed to go shopping once a day – I still remember the time, from ten to eleven. And of course we wore those yellow patches. We were guarded by the Germans. And still the mood was not one of despair. We were still ignorant. We believed that the German soldiers were going to take us to a labour camp. We knew only about labour camps. So what, we thought. We are going to work hard, we are going to return, we are going to reunite and eventually recover what we left behind. Little did we know that only a fraction of us would return. And so at dawn on May 15th the German soldiers ordered the people in the ghetto to pack one valise to an adult and line up in the street. We did so. We packed whatever food we had, our valuables and some clothes, and they took us through side streets to the railroad station. They included the Jewish sick from the hospitals and pushed into cattle cars. Now the condition inside these cars was indescribable. We were jam-packed like sardines – one hundred, one hundred and five, one hundred and ten. I think in our car there were more than a hundred and ten because there was only standing room available. We propped up our valises on their heels, we sat around them and breathed in each other’s faces. There was no air. The little windows from above were railed up and the doors were bolted. Now aside from the sick who were sitting or lying on their valises at the walls all around the cars, the children between four and seven were a big problem. They clung to their mothers for their dear lives. They ignored their fathers. You could see how they would fight over a piece of their mother’s skirt or they’d go down on the floor and just hug their mother’s legs as if stopping them from leaving or from abandoning them. They didn’t know, nobody knew what was going on. And so some of these people would prop up their valises one on top of the other, up to the chin to rest the head and maybe doze off during the night, but then these towers built in the air collapsed and then they were screaming and shouting and then apologizing.

Now the nursing mothers had their own problems. Their colicky children, infants kept crying continually. I remember our family found a place near the door somehow. I remember a nursing mother trying to protect her exposed breast from the stares around her, grabbed her husband’s hat and covered her breast including the kid’s face, and I thought that the infant is going to cry, but he was happy there about filling up his little stomach. But three days later it was entirely different, these mothers exhausted their food and their milk dried up, so the infants cried continually. There I was, part of a tragedy and I couldn’t help anything, but what I brought back – and I’ll carry it for the rest of my life - was I saw humanity in action. When the people found out that these nursing mothers had exhausted their food, they would give them their last crumb of bread or whatever. And then I remember an old lady saying, “Dissolve the sugar in your mouth and then transfer your saliva into the mouth of the infant.” My sister Rose, she had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, his name was Shuli, and she gave a jar with a little bit of marmalade on the bottom of it to a mother, to a nursing mother. And the kid held her by the arm – Shuli. He said, “Mommy, I don’t want a sister. Don’t buy me a sister. Give me back my marmalade.” He used to ask for a sister and she would tell him that, “Eventually I am going to buy you a sister.” Now, being among so many young children, he thought that the mother wanted to buy him a little sister.

To round out this horrific situation, there were four pails in the car – one in each corner of the car serving as toilet facilities. In just half an hour or less, these pails filled up and spilled over. By now, as the very, very young children nagged their mommies to take them to the toilet, to the bathroom, they were told to make in their pants, panties. Moreover, they were told to drop these panties to the floor. Of course, they resisted first and then they had no alternative and then they did that. Well, you can imagine the stench. We travelled under these inhuman conditions for four days and four nights, but the fourth day, at dawn, the car stopped and the doors opened about three feet wide. Now the foul odour seeping through the opening made the guard run away from his post and while he was running he said, “Stemahl, stemahl, stemahl!” as if we were going to escape there, meaning, “Stay put, stay put!” as if we were going to escape. And so being that we were right there by the door, my mother breathed in some fresh air and then after my sister and my younger sister had their fill, I stuck my head out and I saw a green blanket of grass and from behind a lifting cloud of dew I saw a peasant and so I signalled him to come to the car and first he refused and then he came and he stopped about two yards. The smell was unbearable. And I told him that if he gave me a pail with water – we didn’t have any water in four days or food – I’ll give him ten dollars. See, I had dollars. Besides the jewellery that we took we had some dollars from my father. And so in five minutes he was back with a pail of water and my mother, our family drank first and then on my mother’s wishes the pail was then taken by hands in the air to the sick, to the sick, to the children and whoever else. The same day at noon, our train came to a halt with a prolonged shriek of the locomotive. We held our breath and waited. Every second was a lifetime. Suddenly the doors opened, a flood of light blinded us – we were travelling in the dark. Instinctively we let our hands to our eyes. Then we heard a commanding voice, “Leave your valises inside the cars and come out with your handbags only.” Handbags only? These valises, these suitcases were everything we possessed, but a few rifle shots into the air made us realize we had to obey orders. Now the cars were very, very high from the ground, so the young jumped down first and helped the elderly and the children. And now we were on the ramp, on the ground of Auschwitz. There was utter confusion there. The SS guards with rifles on their shoulders and vicious dogs at their sides were pacing up and down, watching the crowd and the crowd really separated into families and was stirring in one place, waiting. And it happened, a few shouts of orders rang out and the men are separated from the women and there was embracing and crying and kissing, “Honey, take good care of the children. I’ll be back.” Little did they know that even if some of them would return, these children and their wives would not be there. And so the men were taken into the camp for men in Auschwitz, and the very old were left there on the ramp. Now a few more shouts of orders rang out and the women were separated into two groups. In one group there were the very old, the sick, the crippled and all mothers with children from infancy to fourteen years of age. Beautiful, young, strong children, beautiful, young, strong mothers. This group, together with the male leftover group was taken to the gas chambers immediately, but we did not know about this. We just found out about it about three months later, what happened. Now, my sister Rose, as you recall, had a baby and she was among the group with the mothers to be gassed. She looked around for the rest of the family. We were not there. My mother, my sister Toby and I were in the other group and this group was yet to be selected by Dr Mengele, who was waiting there behind a table in the near vicinity. But she wanted her family. We didn’t know what was going on. So she took advantage when the guard was trying to make some order between this group of screaming and crying and wailing people. She ran to the next group, to the other group and she found us there.

Q: With her child?

A: With her child in the arms. She was out of place. Now, we were asked to form a column five abreast and she placed herself in front of my mother on the outside and then the rest of us, my mother, my sister and so on, and we were heading towards Dr. Mengele’s table. A guard saw her, he realized that she was in the wrong column. He looked at her, he debated with himself and made up his mind he was going to save her. Save her if that woman next to her was her mother or a relative, because he knew that my mother was in her sixties. If she faced Dr. Mengele, he looked at her, she was in the sixties, he is going to point to the left, whether she is going to have her child or not. And so he lined up with my sister and whispers, “Is this your mother?” She said, “Yes.” “Give the child to your mother.” She gave him a look like, “How dare you? After what we went through now? I can take the child by myself.” And he tried two more times and she still refused. About two yards before Dr. Mengele’s table, he grabs the child out of her arms, put it in my mother’s arms and there she was in front in Dr. Mengele. She was beautiful, tall, strong. “You go to the right.” My mother, in her sixties, “You go to the left.” This was the last time…..I saw my mother. She had Shuli in her arms and the kid was trying to free himself from her embrace. He wanted to go with his mother and he kept crying. He said, “Mommy, I’ll eat hamburgers. Don’t worry. Just take me with you.” He refused to eat hamburgers, didn’t like hamburgers, and the poor child thought that the mother was punishing him, gave him to the grandmother because he wouldn’t eat hamburgers.

Now, the rest of us who were shown to the right – and that group was from fifteen to at most forty-five years of age. Anybody over forty-five, if he determined you were over forty-five, still go to the left. We were taken into a camp for women called Birkenau. First thing that struck us was a peculiar smell. It was a nauseating, sweetish smell and later we found out that it was the smell of burning flesh. In the distance we saw red smoke smokestacks. “Ah hah,” I told my sister, “See? These are the factories in which we are going to be working.” And then I started to spin a story and told her for what I think the Germans even have nurseries for all these children and their mothers are going to join us and the elderly, the healthy elderly will take care of the children and, you know, we were talking like this and she was very happy that our mother was going to take care of her son. At one point we stopped in front of an unending row of tables - women with scissors in their hands and a smirk on their faces cut our hair to the roots. When it came my sister Toby’s turn, she had titian red hair, wavy hair. It was cascading on her shoulders and that woman was impressed with her hair and somehow lifted part of her hair from her shoulders into the sun. It looked like a burning bush. And my sister got very upset, she pulled her hair out and ran to the end of the column. Now the whole operation stopped. Everybody looked at that woman. They were waiting she should say something or do something. A few seconds later she said, “She is not going to see tomorrow’s sunrise.” My blood ran cold. I went to her, I kissed her hand and in perfect German, because I had German in high school, I pleaded for my sister’s life. I told her she was young and didn’t know what she was doing and that my sister – I pointed to Rose – that she and I were going to see that she would never, ever disobey orders, and we left. Normally we would watch the grounds, observe where we were going and what things were around us, but this time we just kept on looking backward to see if we could see Toby, if we could see her somewhere. And so suddenly I tripped and I lost my balance and fell three steps down and took with me a bunch of screaming girls. By the time I got up I was in front of a door, unharmed, so I thought, “This is my first good luck sign.” Now we all entered in a brightly lit room, tremendous room. The room was painted white, snow white. In the middle of this room there were columns upon columns with benches – around these columns were wooden benches. To sit down on them, these wooden seating facilities. And on top there were hangers, numbered hangers. Also, all around the wall were these wooden benches, these wooden benches around these columns. And then a voice comes over the loudspeaker and orders us to undress until naked and hang our coats on the hangers, memorize the number of the hanger and fold our dresses, put them underneath out coats, our shoes next to our dresses, the jewellery inside the shoes or underneath the dresses. We had to follow these orders to the last detail if we wanted to get our clothes back as we were going to return from the showers. We were told so, but, you know, we never came back there. So the next orders were, “Line up in front of the door. Stretch your hands forward, separate your fingers, open your mouth.” They searched us for jewellery. After the search was over each of us received a bar of soap and we entered the shower room. The site was unbelievable. We thought that we were looking in some fiction book because there were perforated columns all over the shower room, with big holes in these columns made of sheet metal. They seemed to be growing out from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Soon, before we could figure out what these columns were all about, a group of men came in, shaved our pubic hair and left. As the last man closed the door behind him, lukewarm water began pouring down from the ceiling, but about two or three minutes later, without any warning, the water stopped coming. Most of us still had suds on our bodies, so “What now?” we thought. We didn’t have time to think because doors opened and we heard command words, “Come in! ‘Rein! Schnell!’” “Come in fast!” First thing our eyes caught two tables. On top of one table there was a heap of old clothes, on top of another table there were shoes and behind each table a woman stood there as if at attention, with a mean look on her face. Then on the side we saw towels on a bench, so we flocked to the towels and we started to towel, dry ourselves. Before we could completely towel-dry ourselves, the same group of men came in, sprayed DDT on our sudsy, naked bodies and left. Then from behind the table with clothes this woman threw at each of us a raggedy, stained, faded dress. From behind the other table the woman threw at each of us a pair of shoes, but not all these shoes were matching. Sometimes they tied together a high-heeled shoe with a low-heeled shoe, shoe size 9 with a shoe size five, a lace shoe with a non-lace shoe. After we put on these clothes we looked like hobos going to a Hallowe’en party, something analogous in this country to going to a Purim party. You know, we were all disguised. But somehow the spirit went along with this going to a party. We thought, “Why would the Germans,” collectively we thought, “Why would the Germans give us good clothes just to go around a corner back to the room where we undressed and get our own clothes,” but it never happened. So meanwhile, some of us were like modelling, were turning around in these “shmattes”, in these rags as if modelling and there were some with evening gowns and the hem was open and they were all stained and they made motions as if they were dancing. You know, we didn’t know. Of course, we were not taken back to those shower rooms. We were taken in “Lager A” and into a barrack. On both sides of the barrack there were three-tiered bunk beds made of boards with two blankets on each bunk bed. First thing, we tried to exchange clothes. The tall women who got dresses barely covering their backside looked for women, short women with dresses sweeping the floor, heavy women who got skimpy dresses were looking for these slim women, but those women who got the mismatched shoes were stuck with them. Soon we were ordered to occupy the bunk beds, eight of us to a bunk bed. These bunk beds were constructed to accommodate only four people and so before we could figure out which way we were going to be sleeping tonight, on our backs, lengthwise or sideways, we were ordered to come and get our supper. We lined up in front of at least twelve giant pails, cauldrons with black, ersatz coffee, substitute coffee. There is no such coffee in the United States. The “Stubbendienst”…the women in charge…

Q: I know what is “Stubbendienst”.

A: Gave us each of us…other people don’t know. She was in charge, in our barrack, she was in charge with distributing the food and the cleaning of the barrack. She gave each of us a bowl and warned us to hold onto it with our lives. No bowl, no food. Now, the first woman held out her bowl, she poured a cup of ersatz coffee into it and the woman was waiting for the rest of the meal to follow. She was told to come and get her supper. Realizing this she thundered, “(German).” “That’s all you’re going to have for supper.” “Cursed Jew, that is all you are going to have for supper.” The next day, of course, we found out that what we would have, what our daily diet would consist of. In the morning we received a cup of black ersatz coffee with a thin sliver of bread made of sawdust mixed with flour. For lunch we received a bowl of soup made of potato peels or potatoes, but since the “Stubbendienst” never mixed the soup, we wound up with just plain water. For supper we had another cup of black ersatz coffee like the evening before. But going back to the evening before, we had a terribly restless night. Our shoes served as pillows, our tatters as sleepwear. At dawn we were chased out into the open for roll call. Roll call was held twice a day, in the morning from about four o’clock until eight, nine, ten, depending when the last woman was accounted for. During these, the air in the morning at this ungodly hour, it was very cold and I shivered like an aspen leaf and my sister Rose was trying to help me in a way. She pulled me towards her, in front of her, and hugged me.

Q: Was your sister Toby with you?

A: Yes. At that time yes. I’ll come to the time when she was…And of course the “Stubbendienst” warned her, “One more time and you are a dead duck,” so I tried myself to stir in one place and then I thought, “What about using my hands?” and my hands became like a machine. I took them from my mouth, covered my chattering teeth, to my dress, holding it around my legs so that the air should not come in, or I’d hug myself and then start all over again. In the afternoon, roll call started at the same time, four o’clock. Now, during the wintertime, when temperatures dropped below zero, ten below, twenty below, lots of our women never returned back from these roll calls and to their barracks because they just froze to death, but we, their neighbours, had to hold them up. They had to be counted. And so sometimes we’d hold these corpses for three, four, five hours until we went back into the barracks. Only then we let them fall into the deep snow. In the summertime we had other problems. The scorching sun kept beating down our bodies – we fainted, we got sunstroke, our faces, our hands, legs got blistered up. Now, when people have a blister they don’t think they’re going to die, but in Auschwitz a blister meant death because when Dr. Mengele made his selection he looked for a blister, and so every time we’d be chased out into the open by the “Stubbendienst” – that was when she cleaned the barrack, but her helpers really cleaned the barrack. She never did any physical work - first thing, we’d look for shade, but there was hardly any shade and so my sister Rose, full with innovative ideas, suggested that we make a huddle, like a football huddle. The women in the inside would be protected for awhile, then they’d switch with the women on the outside. Now, to protect our arms – we had short sleeves – she suggested that we remove them from our sleeves and put them back inside out dresses. But then one day a girl had no time to put back her arms into the sleeve of her dress before entering the barrack and so the “Stubbendienst”was always in the doorway, shouting, screaming and pushing, so the woman, she asked her what happened. She got tongue-tied, couldn’t say a word. The “Stubbendienst” pushed her with all her might. She fell to the floor face down, had no hands to break her fall. She broke her nose. The “Stubbendienst” took her to the infirmary and we never, never saw her again. Another tragedy relating to looking for shade happened in one of our neighbouring barracks. One afternoon a woman found an empty barrack, crawled into it and fell asleep. Now we were around eight o’clock in the evening on roll call in the afternoon. Eight, nine, ten – a woman was missing and we are standing roll call there. Around ten, eleven they found the woman. Of course they shot her and roll call was over. One scorching afternoon we were very thirsty. We had no drinking water there. If you could imagine living without drinking water for a whole year. And so we saw the “Stubbendienst” bringing a pail of water to clean the barrack. As I said, her helpers would clean the barrack. So my sister Rose suggested that we surround her and beg for a sip of water and then, you know, she could go back and fetch another pail of water, but she refused and so in our desperation, we tried to force the pail out of her hands, but she was strong. She pulled to her side, we pulled to our side. Most of the water fell on the ground and whatever was left in the pail she herself spilled on the ground. “Here,” she said, and here we saw a puddle of water. We all fell on our stomachs to reach that puddle of water, but…(not clear). We were in the hundreds, one piled on top of the other, scratching, pulling at hands, at hair, at whatever. Little did those women on the top of the pile know that the water got absorbed by the dry ground in five seconds after it was spilled.

Another feature designed to strip us of our human dignity was the communal latrines. These were low, rectangular boxes, wooden boxes, stretching from one end of the barrack to the other, with fifty holes on one side and fifty holes on the other side. From ten o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, whether or not we felt an urge, one hundred women were lined up, taken to the latrines, chased inside, and two or three minutes later pushed out again to make room for the next hundred women and the next hundred women. And we had no toilet paper.

Now, we remained in this “lager” for about six weeks. “Lager A”. During this time the SS men separated us into transports. Some transports were sent to Germany to work in a ammunition factory. My sister Toby was in one of these transports. Other transports were sent to the front for the pleasure of the German soldiers.

Q: I want to ask you about this. This is very interesting to me. You said that there was a group of women separated from the others to be sent to the front for the soldiers. Are you sure of that? Because there was “Rassenshande”, that means the Germans saw it as strict law not to mix with Jewish women.

A: Sure there was, because I’ll tell you something else. We gave blood every month, every month, only the Jewish inmates for the soldiers on the front. My question is, he believed that his race was superior to all other races in the world, so how come that he wanted our blood, wanted to mix our blood with the blood of his superior race? Sure there were. He knew better.

Q: I am asking you, you are sure of the fact that there were women chosen to become so to speak prostitutes of the German soldiers? They were Jewish women?

A: Jewish women. I mean, they wouldn’t send anybody. They were not afraid that they had venereal disease. After the war we talked among ourselves and we talked about it. They told about these women. They talked about the women who were taken for Dr. Mengele’s medical experiments and we found out that to test their endurance, they’d amputate their leg or remove a breast or sterilize them without anaesthesia. In fact, after the war I met somebody who was saved by a nurse – her leg was amputated and then she married him, but she always denied that he was the one who saved and so on. It really didn’t matter. And then we found out that some of these women were submersed in ice-cold water.

Q: Six weeks you were there.

A: I was there. Now, the ones who were not taken into either of these groups…we said they were separated in transports. So the rest of us were tattooed with a number.

Q: What is your number? Please show us.

A: It’s A16140. And marched off in two separate “Lagers”: “Lager B” and “Lager C”. “Lager B” was known as the “Lager” for the working women. They worked on the outside of the camp. “Lager C” - that stands for the “Tzeilager” – was also known as the “Lager” of the rejects waiting for room in the gas chamber.

So I would like now to mention that my sister Rose’s life and mine, how they changed for the better in “Lager C” and under which circumstances and who was responsible. Now, you have to imagine, my sister Rose and I were part of a column of inmates coming from “Lager A” into “Lager C”. On the other side of the street we saw an outgoing column. The “Tzeilager” was probably partially evacuated to make room for us. Now, the incoming column walked alongside the numbered barracks. Some of our women were told to get into these barracks, others were ordered to just continue marching. At Barrack No. 9 we heard our names called. We looked around and we saw it was our cousin Lily. Now Lily was my cousin, we were born in the same village, but we were not only cousins, we were also best friends. We went to the same school, although she was two years my senior, and we had the same ambitions to further our education and both of us went to high school on scholarships. Now she joined us in our march and told us that she was assigned to this “Lager” and to this barrack from the time that she came out from the showers two months before, and that now she was on the way to take a message to the barrack senior in No. 29. And she was walking with us – we have to get to Barrack 29. And she was also telling us that she had a job there, she worked in the “Broadkommer”. But before having a chance to tell us what the job entailed we were in front of No. 29 and we were ordered to get into No. 29 and this was the barrack senior my cousin was supposed to deliver the message to. This woman was in her forties, standing there at the open door, next to the open door. She was in her forties, beautiful black hair tied to the back, and she had a light complexion, very shapely. And so she said, “I’d better run and give her the message before she gets busy with us.” And she ran up the stairs and started talking to her and she gives her a few times her million-dollar smile and then she points at us, my cousin. We didn’t know what that meant. She ran down and went back into her barrack, went back to her Barrack No. 9. Now, when we were at the top stairs just before entering the barrack, the barrack senior said, “You stay on the side. Wait for me until I come back.” It took her about fifteen minutes to make order among the group. She came out, she took us into her room and said, “I know your cousin from Barrack 9. She recommended you” – she pointed at me – “to work in the ‘Broadkommer’,” and then she looked at my sister, she looked her up and down, beautiful, strong – really, she was a beautiful and strong woman. She said, “And you are going to be the new ‘Stubbendienst’.” No more, no less. And then she told me what my job would entail. I would have to cut a hundred and fifty loaves of bread each day into fifteen hundred – this is how many women we were in this barrack now we came in – and give out one slice to each inmate as she would come in from roll call. Then I figured in my head, a hundred and fifty. I cut every bread into ten slices and I have fifteen hundred. No problem, because she told me, “If you miss out one slice, you make a mistake, it’s going to be your slice. Two slices, your slice and your sister’s. Three slices, you have no job.” So I figured, no problem. But then she tells me, “You have to reserve a bread for a woman who knows her way around the kitchen, who knows how to organize things from the kitchen because you are going to be cooking for me.” And so the same woman was to stand guard in front of the entrance and watch out for an SS woman, an SS man or a kapo, and then she was supposed to alert me and I was to remove the hot plate - she told me I was going to be cooking on a hot plate and that the woman has to organize salami and potatoes and whatever else - And then hide these things if an SS man would appear and then spray the room with perfume so that in case they came in, they shouldn’t see, they shouldn’t feel that there was food there, that I was cooking, or whoever was cooking there. I was also to clean her room every morning. And so everything sounded beautiful. Now she told my sister what her job was and she said she has to wake up the women at dawn and take them out for roll call. She was responsible for them being quiet and not running around in the aisles. She had to bring the coffee and the soup from the kitchen and then take back the pails, and everything sounded beautiful. And now it was time – we entered in the morning the “Lager” and so now it was time for my sister to go to get the soup from the kitchen and then she recruited a few strong women and among these women I saw a grey-haired woman. If I weren’t a Jew I would have crossed myself. What was a grey-haired woman doing there? We were all young, with cropped hair. And so my sister introduced me to this woman. She said, “This is Galina. She is an old-timer. She is here since 1941 and she is going to help me bring the cauldrons from the kitchen. And you know what? I organized from her the sweaters that I gave you when you stood on roll call,” which I forgot to mention. You know, my sister couldn’t take my state of being cold every morning, so she found out that for a slice of bread she could organize a sweater. And so she organized a sweater, gave away her slice of bread for a sweater, but it had long sleeves, so she said never mind. We were not supposed to wear anything either on top of the dress or underneath the dress. She said, “Don’t worry.” She rolled down the sleeve of….and then here my arm looked like an inflated tire here. And so one hour passed like in the morning and the SS woman went by and counted and counted and then later somebody noticed that something was wrong with her arm there. She right away knew what it was all about. She told me to drop the sweater to the floor. I took off the dress, the sweater, I was naked for a few minutes and then put back. But two days later I had another sweater and a week later I had another sweater and so she was the woman from whom she organized the sweaters. But then I thought, “Oh, this is the woman that I need. She must know her way around the kitchen,” and I told her that I would be giving her bread and she should organize the food for me.

Q: I want to know. How did you manage to cut those loaves of bread, missing the one you used for the “Stubbendienst”?

A: Well, some I cut into ten slices, some into eleven slices, so some were thinner and thicker, but before I did cut it I always marked each bread and then counted. The marking alone took me two hours, so I’d start working in the “Broadkommer” around one o’clock at night because by four o’clock I was supposed to be ready to go out on roll call with everybody else, but when roll call ended everybody was supposed to wait until I came in first and my sister. I went into the “Broadkommer”, which was a room across from my barrack senior, and as a woman was coming in, I would give her out the slice of bread, and then my sister would go….What I loved most was that the barrack senior left me food on her plate and I stopped eating soup from the kitchen and I regained back my period, because we girls stopped having the period about three days after we got to Auschwitz. People are talking that we stopped because we were emaciated. Maybe that. When we got in there we were not emaciated. They must have given us something in the soup and I was the proof. As soon as I didn’t eat that soup I had back my period.

Q: Did you manage to help your sister as well with food because you were close to food?

A: No, she didn’t need. I’ll just talk about. She didn’t need. She was having that soup and she was happy with that, slice of bread and soup.

But next thing that I loved so much was to clean her room. She had things that reminded me of the outside world. There was a two-tiered bunk bed and the blankets had silk, silk-trimmed blankets. And sometimes I’d take this blanket to my face, you know, and then get scared, “Oh maybe I spotted it,” and looked at it. And then she had some chest of drawers and she had a table right underneath there.

Q: What was her name?

A: Her name was Helen.

Q: Helen what?

A: No, I didn’t. Just Miss Helen.

Q: Where was she from?

A: She was from Poland. She was one of the old-timers also. She came there maybe in 1941 and I’ll mention something about it.

Q: And she was the…?

A: Barrack senior.

Q: Barrack senior of which barrack?

A: Of Barrack 29. This is where our lives turned around completely here. We had jobs. And so there was a small table with a basin and a pitcher with water and then a towel on the wall, and sometimes I’d wash my face in her dirty water, which was really not dirty. And then I’d wipe my face with the other side of my dress. I thought that the other side of my dress was not as dirty as the outer side. And then one day I dared to take her towel. I thought she was not going to know about it. She walked in on me and I got terribly upset and scared and she said, “Don’t worry.” The next day there were two towels there. She was just great, wonderful. She also had a boyfriend. He was the kapo in charge of the commando that cleaned the latrines, so he would come in once a week and he would have somebody watch out there and he would come to her and would always bring something – half a chicken or a string of salami - so we had plenty to eat. Sometimes it happened that his adjutant saw a kapo or somebody coming, so he would rush here and I would knock at her door and then the boyfriend would run out the doorway. (end of side)

I would like to mention something about my sister as a “Stubbendienst”, compared to the “Stubbendienst” from “Lager A”. If there is something like sainthood in our religion I always thought that she should have been a candidate. Now, as you remember, in “Lager A” the “Stubbendienst” didn’t mix the soup. My sister mixed the soup and everybody had a bowl of consistency, potato peels or whatever it was - there were more potato peels than potatoes. And then she would look for the skinny ones and give them two portions and sometimes three portions because the “Stubbendienst” in “Lager A” would leave all that solid mess at the bottom and for that she would organize clothes and she would organize shoes and jewellery, but my sister gave it out to the women who needed it. And she didn’t want anybody to help her clean the barrack. She cleaned herself. She didn’t want to see these women having to clean, and still gave out these extra portions.

Q: You sister, she was the “Stubbendienst” of which barrack?

A: 29, where we were. We are talking about “Lager C”, Barrack 29. This is where we went in.

Q: I don’t understand. You said Helen was the “Stubbendienst” of 29.

A: No, excuse me. Helen was the barrack senior.

Q: Ah, sorry, okay, okay. So I made a mistake.

A: Barrack senior. She was in charge of the entire group. Unlike the “Stubbendienst” in “Lager A” who would chase us out when her helpers would clean the barrack and then we’d get blistered up, she did let these women stay there in their bunk beds. It wasn’t that easy because Helen didn’t agree. She was afraid that an SS man would come and then she could pay with her job. They were not supposed to be inside. They were supposed to be on the grounds. And so I stood guard at that time and if I saw somebody coming, I alerted my sister and she would tell the girls and they would go out through the back door for a short time. And she would check their rags and if she would see an open seam or a hole there, she would sew it together. How did she get, where did she get the thread? I asked Helen. I told her, because at one time she told me she was Jewish and I realized that she was a very good woman and I told her what my sister did and she brought me scissors and everything my sister needed to help these girls.

And now I would like to talk about a selection. The first time in our barrack selection by Dr. Mengele.

Q: I want to ask you before. You mentioned already a couple of times Dr. Mengele. Are you sure this was Dr. Mengele and not one of his assistant doctors because it was not only himself that did all this?

A: Selections? I didn’t know. Jobs - something else. Selection it was only him. No substitutes. But then a later one when I was sick in another camp – I had typhoid and they had a selection with another doctor. He was not here. Of course it was Dr. Mengele.

Q: Okay.

A: And so it was the first time in that barrack. It was like the second Friday in Barrack 29, “Lager C”. I went in to clean the room and Helen was there and she was agitated. Usually she was not there. She would stay out while I was cleaning. This time she was in and she was agitated and pacing up and down and told me, “There is going to be a change in schedule.” I was not going to clean her room, I wasn’t going to cook today, and I should send in my sister. And I thought my sister did something wrong, you know, because she was so agitate. I sent in my sister and she came out and I asked her what she did that the barrack senior was so upset and she didn’t do anything. And I pressed her a few times and then she whispered in my ear that there was going to a selection. So my first reaction was, “Is he going to separate us?” And she said, “Us? Never. We are always going to be together.”

Q: Who said it? Your sister?

A: My sister. I am talking now to my sister. She told me that there was going to be a selection. I put my head on her chest and started to softly cry and then she picked up my chin and she said, “Don’t worry. I’ll do everything in my power to keep you alive and that we be together.” Meanwhile, I was forlorn there. I wished I could hide under her skin, melt with her, or become a bug and crawl into the woodwork and then come back until it’s going to be all over. Then she said, “Listen, dear. I have to go to the kitchen. We are going to have an early lunch and you go in the bunk bed.” See, we had a bunk bed for ourselves. Big shots - only the two of us, with two blankets. It was the first bunk bed. “You go in your bunk bed.” I went to my bunk bed. I don’t recall how long I stayed there in a fetal position and then I heard my name called. It was Helen. I rushed in and she showed me half a sandwich on a plate on the table. “Eat it.” Now, I was so upset I said I could not eat it. She realized right away that my sister told me about the selection. She didn’t tell me anything about it. And so she said, “You eat the sandwich. You are going to be alright and your sister is going to be alright.” And I looked at her and I said, “From your mouth in G-d’s ear.” And then she still looked at me and I said, “This is a translation from Yiddish.” And then she said, “I am Jewish, but I don’t speak Yiddish.” And so this is when I found out that she was Jewish.

I ate that half a sandwich, I forced every bite down my throat. I couldn’t swallow it. And so around twelve o’clock she told me to lock the front door. I locked the front door. “Send in your sister.” My sister came in, she goes out. I see her going to the back of the barrack, she locks the back door. And on her way back to the front she went around the aisles – because in the middle of the barrack there was a low heating unit and then there was an aisle all around and she would sit there during the night on that heating unit and under this dim light she would sew the inmates’ dresses. She called them her children. And so she told them to take off their clothes and they started laughing. They thought that she was joking and so she said again, “Take off your clothes. It’s the barrack senior’s orders.” They still didn’t start taking off their clothes, so I thought I had to do something. I took off my clothes and started walking around the aisles and started talking to them. I told them I knew that my sister was lenient with them, the more reason that they should listen to her. They didn’t want the barrack senior to replace her with some SOB like the one in “Lager A”. And while I was going naked around and talking, the barrack senior, Helen, was right here listening to what I was saying. She got terribly angry, red in her face I remember, and she ordered the girls to drop their blankets. Normally we would undress naked and keep our blankets until we were and she ordered to drop the blankets and undress until naked. And to they realized already that…they started to apologize to my sister. It was too late. And so she told my sister to take the blankets somewhere, put them away in a corner and then take the first fifty women out on the grounds. Form a column five abreast and then come back for the next fifty until all fifteen hundred were out there.

Q: Out of the barrack?

A: Out of the barrack on the ground. The grounds were a piece of land separating one barrack from the other. And she said, “If you have to make a U-shaped column, do that.” Now I was in the first row, the first woman in the first row of the column. My sister was standing here, naked, and next to her was Helen, the barrack senior, but she had her clothes on. And then the barrack senior said, “Each of you, one at a time, advance, stop about two yards in front of Dr. Mengele and turn. Watch for his signals. If he signals to the right, you go back in the barrack. If he signals to the left, you go into the truck.” And for that purpose I’m going to have to show you how the…you have to imagine the grounds. I’ll make like a square, let’s say it’s a square piece of canvas. On the top of this canvas there was a truck with black vinyl. The motor was towards the street. The opening, the rear opening of the truck was facing Dr. Mengele who was sitting in the middle. So it was not facing, it was in the back. He was with the back towards the truck. Now, all the way down there at this piece of canvas, there was the first row of the women and then going further. From both sides of the opening of the rear door of the truck there were semi-circles with guards, holding their bayonets inward. They were all the way about a foot away from the first row of women, so that they have place to go back to their barracks if they were lucky enough. And so after she explained what we had to do, she pointed at me, “And you, go!” Now, you know, again my feet were like grounded to the ground. For a second I didn’t move, but I recalled when my sister, when I told her I didn’t want to separate from her, she said, “We’ll never separate, but be brave.” And that resonated in my mind and all of a sudden I stood erect there and I started walking towards Dr. Mengele. I stopped, I turned, and then something spilled over from my guts into my stomach and I felt nauseous and I was watching his motion. He pointed to the right and you think that he spared my life, that this condition might alter. No way. I felt that the matter there was filling up my throat and I put my hands on my mouth and I walked by my sister and she saw and she realized what happened and she said, “Hold it until you get to the back entrance of the barrack. The wrong people should not see you,” but if my life depended on it I couldn’t hold it and so I started running and somewhere, midway towards the back entrance, you now, my hands filled up with that smelly mess and went through my fingers and all over my body and I was already at the back entrance. And there was a strip of green grass and I wanted to wipe my body and I didn’t think much and I went down and I started rolling in the grass, wiping my face and everything, and another woman who was reprieved, who was told to go to the right, caught up with me and she thought I had a seizure and she wanted to help me. And I explained what happened and she said, “Well, you didn’t have to roll in the grass. You could just wipe your body with your hands and face and then wipe it in the grass.” I didn’t know what to answer. I recall as if it were today. I said, “You’re right, but you know? I enjoyed rolling in the grass.” I came in, she came in and she said she was very cold. I said, “You are in charge of the blankets now. Put two blankets on each bunk bed.” I put on my dress and went to my bunk bed and I covered my head. I didn’t want to hear. And I still heard voices - I heard crying, I heard voices of joy. And then when my sister came in already, when it was all over, I asked her how many were shown to the left. She said, “Twenty.” So the first time he weeded out twenty of us the first day.

Now, the next day I had to go to clean Helen’s room and I was smelling of this vomit and she said, “What did you bring in from the barrack? What is happening there?” I said, “Nothing. It’s just me,” and I explained what happened. So she said, “Now take off that dress, wash yourself in the water, use my towel, drop everything to the floor. This is all going to go to the garbage and I’ll bring you a clean dress, different dress.” It was about twenty minutes. She brought me a dress and I was there naked. My sister came in – she told her on the way to come in and throw these things out and she came in and there I was, naked. She couldn’t understand what it was all about. Soon the barrack senior came back with a dress and I still remember it was of the colour…it was a semi-dressy, three-quarter dress of the colour of wine, with an applique flower here. Can you imagine? I put it on, nothing on my body, just put it on and it was as if it molded on my body and I ran my hands across my curvatures and then I thought, “Oh G-d”. I felt guilty.

And so these selections took place every Friday until the end of September. What I’ll never forget is seeing on one of these selections, I’ll never forget, a woman who had diarrhea and walked towards Dr. Mengele and she started to turn and then you saw human waste running down her body and of course he pointed to the left and instead of her going to the truck, she just tried to make a dash for freedom and ran into those bayonets, and not even aware that she was bleeding, she went to the other side. She looked like a stream of blood and she was still alive and she was trying to run towards Dr. Mengele. At this time the guards caught her and threw her to the ground and bayoneted her to death, kept piercing her body time and time and time again and blood was gushing like from a geiser and we closed our eyes and kept back a scream.

Now, during September, October and November things began to happen with the speed of lightning. “Lager B” was closed, the women from there were brought into “Lager C”. Some of them were taken back to Germany, others were evacuated from the camp and still others were gassed, not going through the process of selection. During the night the black truck would just come and they’d load it up with women and gas them.

Q: I want to ask you something. You mentioned the last time that you saw your mother while entering, as a matter of fact, Auschwitz. When did you find out what actually happened? Or at least when did you think that you were not going to see her again?

A: About three months after we were there some vicious kapo, a Jewish Polish kapo, expressed herself, “”You think you are going to see your mothers again? No! There!” She pointed to….They turned inhuman, these kapos, and I’m talking about the Jewish kapos, dressed like to kill. And with a stick she would walk alongside the street and you had to jump out of her way because if you were half a yard close to her she would hit you with that stick, that cane.

What I want to say is that in October we heard about the heroic uprising of the “Sonderkommando”. Now you know what the “Sonderkommando” was all about. It was around October the 8th. I came into the barrack senior’s room and her face was on the table and her hair is all over the table. I couldn’t understand. I thought she fainted or something and then she realized that I was in there. I lifted her eyes and said that Stefan – her boyfriend was Stefan - told her that Stefan was her husband.

Q: I don’t understand.

A: Her boyfriend was Stefan and she told me that Stefan was actually her husband, her non-Jewish husband. They separated them.

Q: He was Polish or German?

A: He was Polish. She was a Polish Jew. They took her to Auschwitz. She had a child - she placed it in a convent and I asked her why didn’t she give it to his parents. She said, “Well, they were not happy that he married a Jew.” Now, when he heard that she was….somehow he heard that she was in Auschwitz and he volunteered to come here and work and so they made him the kapo over the latrine commando. And now she told me that she was afraid that he died with these people, with the “Sonderkommando” together and I said, “Well, he didn’t work at the gas chamber. Why would he die?” And she said that she suspected that he furnished ammunition to the “Sonderkommando” from….there was a camp for prisoners, Polish prisoners and they had food, compared to what we had they had food and they could even have…somehow they smuggled in ammunition and he smuggled and because he was not anymore the commando that came in to clean the latrines - the kapo was another person. It was not Stefan anymore.

Q: Stefan. What was his family name? Do you know?

A: No, I didn’t know his last name. Stefan is a first name.

Q: Yes, I know.

A: In November the SS men were trying to destroy the traces of their hideous crimes and detonate the gas chambers and the crematoria and we inmates cleaned the debris and after we finished cleaning, I mean the premises looked as if nothing was ever erected there. Nothing.

On January the 19th the camp closed, but we didn’t know that. The night before, on the eve of the 18th, Helen called me inside and showed a heap of clothes in her bunk bed and she took out one coat and another coat, “One is for your sister, one is for you.” Took out a pair of boots, “One is for your sister, one is for you.” And two scarves and she said, “Sleep in all these things and don’t put on the scarves, only after roll call.” Right away I realized there was something wrong and she said I should sleep in these clothes and my sister, too, and I said, “Am I still going to be able to cut those loaves of bread?” And she said, “You’re not going to cut any bread tonight,” so right away I went to my sister.

Q: Up to that moment, had you any information, infiltrating or any other way, were you aware that the front was progressing and the Russians were coming nearer and nearer?

A: No, we had no idea, but we thought that we were going to evacuate for some reason because, you know, somebody must be in the back of Auschwitz. In fact, when we outside in “Lager A” on the grounds, we were talking about food and we were designing our clothes in our minds because we hoped that this war was going to end and we were going to go back and dream our dreams, I mean live our dreams. At one time we even thought that the people in the outside world didn’t know about us. But not one time did anybody go to the electrically charged barbed wire to take her life, but I understand that many men did that in Auschwitz. But we women, we were somehow stronger and we were more hopeful. At the same time they were working very hard. They worked them to the bones and so some of them did, but we never went there. We never tried to take out own lives.

And so my sister took her sewing kit and took her blanket, went on that heating unit and made two long-legged pants. In the morning she already knew what was happening. Helen also gave us two slices of salami and said, “Eat it before you go out on roll call.” And it was funny. When she woke up the inmates to go out for roll call, somebody felt the smell of salami because we ate it and the one above our bunk bed said, “Oh, we’re going to have salami for breakfast. I smell salami.” My sister went to the door and she opened the door and a strong….the wind was coming in with snowy powder. It blew in her face, this snowy powder blew in her face, and so she knew that there was a snowstorm going on there, so she went back and took a brush and she cleaned the steps and we went out and we held hands by our eyes and we lined up in the street and Helen was not there anymore. So the night before, when she gave us our clothes, was the last time I saw Helen.

Q: You never saw her again after that?

A: Never saw her again, never heard about her again. And so we went out and in no time we were all covered with snow and then they came to count us. We were only fifteen hundred leftover women. It went pretty fast. And so the SS man announced that the camp was closing and that we were going to evacuate. The women started to cry and beg for blankets, for some food, and they said, “Forward! Forward!” Now, at the last gate of Auschwitz, as the guards were busying themselves with opening the gate, a small group of women, with the desperation of the doomed, bare-handedly stormed a nearby warehouse, with clothing and food. Most of them met with their deaths, with the exception of a few. My sister Rose was one of the survivors. I didn’t even realize she was missing from my side. This is how fast it went. I saw her dragging a blanket – she tied it swiftly and threw it over her shoulders.

We were now on the other side of the last gate of Auschwitz. The grounds were so heavily covered with snow we couldn’t make out the road and the bitter cold pierced through our poorly-clad bodies. Snowdrifts were beating our faces and the guards were whipping us to an ever-faster pace, to the pace of running. Marching was not good. We had to run. They were in a hurry. We were the last ones to close Auschwitz. We made a human chain because the winds were about to lift our emaciated bodies into the air, but lots of our women gave up, but still we kept dragging them along until they were dead. Only then we let go.

The first day my sister Rose and I were fortunate to withstand all these rigours of the first day, but the next day my right foot swelled up and I couldn’t run, so I told her to continue without me. “Yes,” she said. Before I could figure out what that “yes” meant, I was on her shoulder. She took out a knife, cut out my boot and took a sweater, wrapped it around my foot, put me down. I ran again, but about three, four hundred yards – not yards, feet – down the road the sweater got so snow-laden and ice-laden that I couldn’t walk any longer. And you know, I told my sister that was it. This time she put her life on the line. She walked out from the column, took off a pair of shoes from a corpse, gave them to me. I put them on, I walked again. She did it on the run. She pulled the corpse, took off one shoe, took off the other shoe – it was all on the run. Now, what were corpses doing like this on the sides? It seemed that all evacuees before us took the same route and when they couldn’t run any longer they were shot and casually pushed to the side. And you know, this march is remembered as the “Death March”. And so we ran, we marched like this for four days and four nights and we rested only twice, once in a shack with corpses, which we just found out in the morning that there were corpses. We thought these were our own women. They were probably tired, they slept. In the morning we realized that there were mounds of people there, because the third day, in the afternoon, we were shown off the main road and there was a blanket of virgin snow in front of us and it was up to the knees. We had to trot in this snow. Now, some of our women were trying to help extricate their feet from this snow and bend down and help themselves with their hands. And so they bent down and the SS men thought that they were giving up and they shot them, so my sister Rose learned from their misfortune and she told me to “barehacker” from the back, lean on her body so that I could take my feet out. And as we were walking we saw a black dot on the horizon and with time this black dot became bigger and bigger until at dusk it became a shack and we were pushed inside there. And when we were pushed inside we stumbled on top of each other. In the morning only we realized that these were corpses. Now, the second time of course, we found a place there, my sister found a place on one side of a body and I was on the other side of the body, but at that time we thought it was just another inmate. She came in and she fell asleep. But in the morning we realized that they were….

We marched on the whole day and in the evening or late in the evening we were pushed into a barn with cattle, into a cattle barn, barn with cows. They were sleeping. And so, of course, picture the following: women are pushed into this barn and they fall on top of these animals and the animals don’t know what happened. They stand up, they move in all directions. They want to get rid of these screaming humans, because we started to scream and some of us, you know, used our intuitive sense and held on to the horns of these animals. Others fell to the ground and were trampled to death and still others were saved by my sister Rose as she found the opening to the hayloft. The next day, the next morning we woke up and SS men were standing there - it was in the hayloft – SS men stood there, guards, and they said, “Aufsten! Raus!” And some of us were hoping that they could hide under the hay and didn’t get up and we saw a tragedy. We saw blood spurting because they went with their bayonets to test the hay. Around twelve o’clock, noontime, we were loaded into trucks, not trucks. It was a train, a coal train, no top and it had at least six or eight inches of snow inside. And there we met again our cousin Lily. Again we met her. Of course I don’t have time to describe what happened in that hayloft and the way my sister pulled up these girls and what happened in the end. Somebody stole the blanket with food and then we just saw somebody in that coal car, we saw an inmate wrapped in a blanket. Where did she have a blanket from? That was our blanket. Rose told her she should let four of us hold the blanket because it was snowing and then we were going to go, ten of us were going under the blanket and then they’d switch, another ten of us. Well, she agreed a few times and then she got her blanket back.

A few days later we arrived at the periphery of Ravensbruck, another infamous concentration camp. The periphery looked like a garbage dump. The barrack into which we were herded in was full of holes.

Q: Of what?

A: Holes. The weather corroded the barrack. It was weather-corroded, it was full of holes. We went inside and there was snow on the floor and in the bunk beds there were two to at most three boards instead of twelve and we grabbed a board from here – I imitated my sister – and we accumulated four boards. We separated them and we slept crosswise, with our feet dangling downwards, but we had no blankets to cover ourselves with. Why no blankets? Because at the far of this barrack there were about six, seven or eight intact bunk beds, with blankets and boards. This part was occupied by a group of gentile women. It seemed that they held positions in Auschwitz…

Q: In Auschwitz or in Ravensbruck?

A: No, I’m talking about as we arrived in Ravensbruck, they had clothes on, regular clothes on. We didn’t have clothes, so we assumed that these were people that held jobs there. They were dressed like human beings. And they were evacuated before us and then took the boards and blankets and didn’t care what would happen to us. The same women were supposed to bring food to our barrack on a daily basis, but they did so whenever they pleased, once every other day, once in two days, and so my sister Rose would smuggle herself into the camp proper – we were not supposed to go into the camp proper – and beg for a crumb of bread of whatever, and I would remain there, watching the boards. If I had left, upon my return I would have had no boards there. And so one day she was very late, my sister. I was very upset. I took two boards – saving two boards, I thought, was better than nothing. I put them underneath my armpits, from my armpits downwards, held them close to my body, walked like a wooden soldier, and went to look for my sister. Suddenly an SS woman appeared in front of me. I was busy watching those boards and there was that SS woman. I had no time to get out of her way. She got angry, took her truncheon and kept poking in my ribs because she found the board. So she took the board and started pounding over my head. I protected my head with my hands until I passed out. When I opened my eyes I was in my sister Rose’s lap, who was crying and kissing my swollen hands. Suddenly we saw these women coming out of the kitchen with cauldrons of soup and we were watching to see whether they were heading towards our barrack. They did not, so we followed them, and they stopped somewhere in a remote corner. They took off the lids and started to eat. My sister sent with her bowl and begged for a bowl of soup, but they wouldn’t give her, so in her desperation she forced her hand into this hot soup. The woman got angry, put the lid back on the pail and sat down on top of the pail and my sister’s hand was caught there. She was screaming like a wounded animal. The woman told her to drop the bowl in punishment. She knew if she dropped the bowl she was never going to eat anymore. She wouldn’t have a bowl what to eat from. And my sister wouldn’t drop the bowl and so two women held me about two yards from the scene – they didn’t want me to help my sister free her hand and I cried and I told them that I could convince my sister to drop the bowl. They let go of me and I went to the scene and I bent down to talk to my sister. Then something entered my mind because I saw two dangling feet. The woman was sitting on top of the pail. I picked them up with all my might in the air. She fell backwards. The lid came off, my sister removed her arm, there was nothing in that bowl and she grabbed my wrist and we ran for our lives because they ran after us. It wasn’t enough. They ran after us.

And so as I said before, my sister Rose was my mother, my father, my G-d. I always suspected that way deep in her heart I was her two-and-a-half-year-old child.

Three weeks later we arrived at a small camp called Neustadt Glewe.

Q: Three weeks later?

A: Yes, we stayed there about three weeks only.

Q: But you didn’t actually work or anything.

A: We were there only in that corroded barrack. We were not inside the camp. We were not allowed to get inside there.

Q: Okay. So after three weeks where did you go?

A: After about three weeks we were loaded and we arrived at Neustadt Glewe. That was a small camp. The barracks, there were no bunk beds. We slept on the floor on a very thin layer of straw. We had no facilities to clean ourselves. We didn’t go to delousing - in Auschwitz we would go very six weeks. Here there was nothing. Our hair grew back. All of a sudden there were lice appearing everywhere. And about three or four hundred of us came down with typhoid fever. My sister Rose and I were among them. And so we were herded into a shack which I called the “death shack” and left there to die. It was somewhere on the outskirts of the camp. We were given no food, no medication. My cousin Lily would smuggle herself out of the camp and walk for miles and put her only slice of bread on the windowsill and hope that we were going to eat it, but she didn’t know that the windows were nailed shut from inside. The windows were not opened. It was terrible. There were chamber pots all around. We had dysentery, blood. We moved with blood. I remember I was on the third bunk bed. I felt I had to go. I would somehow crawl down and when I was at the bottom I would faint and then I would get up. It was terrible. Every few days a group of men would come in and would take out the corpses. We were dying there like flies. And one day I had a nightmare and I dreamt that some skeletons were weaving a basket and they wanted me to go inside there and then I called for my mother and she came as that regal queen that was in my imagination when I was young. This time she had a scepter and she lifted her scepter and these corpses disappeared. I opened my eyes and I saw everything crystal clear. I was over the crisis after that. I saw what was going on and I went to look for my sister because before I didn’t know where she was. I found her on the other aisle. She was alive and she had, besides typhoid she had an inflammation in her knees. And then one Friday a doctor and nurse came in and ordered us to sit up straight in our bunk beds. Anybody who couldn’t sit straight, the doctor would point, the nurse would write down the number and in the afternoon they would come for these people and just gas them. And so somehow I thought….

Q: There were gas chambers there at Neustadt Glewe?

A: Yes. Whatever they were, these people were not left there.

Q: But are you sure that they were gassed?

A: Yes. They were gassed because they never recovered, we never saw them.

Q: This I understand. But you don’t know. Maybe they were taken to freeze out in the cold or shot or whatever.

A: Yes. That I couldn’t tell you then, but I know they died.

Q: So you don’t know if they were gassed or whatever the case may be.

A: No. And I thought that the doctor pointed at me. Can you imagine? I felt already fine and I went to my sister because in the afternoon men were supposed to come for these women. I said goodbye. I cannot describe those two hours that I lived through. When the men in the afternoon came with bundles…you see, they were trying to deceive us to the last minute. They came with bundles of clean clothes. They said that those women who were selected, they should dress in these clothes, in these new, clean clothes, like hospital gowns – they brought hospital gowns – and they said they were going to take them to a hospital in the city. Now, they wouldn’t infect those hospitals with them. I already realized what was going on and when these men came and handed me a bundle with clothes I said, “You’re not taking me.” I grabbed the arm of the bed, the pole and I said, “You’re taking me, you take the bunk bed.” I was completely well. And then one opened the bundle and those were my clothes. I was supposed to go back into the barrack. The other ones were killed in whichever way. Because the doctor did point at me. He saw that I was well and he saw that I would tell my neighbours, “Stand straight,” because I watched the other aisle, what happened to the other aisle, and so I came home. And then one evening the German soldiers were boarding up our windows and were nailing down our doors. Now, we feared that now they were going to detonate the barracks or set them on fire and so we started in hysterics and then ended in prayer. And then one day passed, another day passed, a third day passed and nothing, so we took our last strength and put it to work in the face of the ultimate challenge and broke out of the barrack. Our barrack was facing the main gate and the kitchen and we saw the main gate was open, the kitchen doors were open. We realized right away that the Germans fled. I couldn’t walk. I was very weak. I stood in the barrack and the other girls were going all over, helping the other inmates to break out. My cousin Lily organized a truck and went to the “death shack” and collected….

Q: What do you mean “she organized a truck”? A truck where from?

A: There were men there working. We were already liberated. There were no Germans there.

Q: Were there other forces there? There was a German truck left in the place?

A: Not left. Sure. There must have been trucks left. They didn’t take everything with themselves. And so she told some of these men to go to the “death shack” and they collected the survivors. There were maybe three, four, and my sister was one of the survivors there. (end of side)

We were all in a state of euphoria. We jumped up and down and kissed and hugged. Of course I was inside in the barrack, looking through the window. I couldn’t go out. I was afraid, I was so weak I was afraid that they were going to trample me to death. They organized some wood from the nearby woods and they made a bonfire and they went in the kitchen and they took out potatoes and they made these baked potatoes and the noise, the popping. I remember the kitchen was right close to our barrack, as I said, and some inmates went in there and they found sugar and bread and they threw out bags with sugar and bread. One of them – I’ll never forget. I don’t know what happened to her. She was in the window of the kitchen and she opened a bag with sugar and poured it over her head! That was some euphoria! When it was all over, some time around eleven, twelve o’clock or something like that, we came back into the barracks and now we had no windows, we had no doors. Of course, first thing we took care of the smelly dirt. We were three days in our own dirt. We thought, “No, we cannot sleep now. The Germans are going to return and kill us.” And so we really didn’t sit down on the floor. Somehow we stood against the wall and we embraced each other, just like it was our last day. Who knew what was going to happen? And then at dawn we heard some trucks entering the camp and again we didn’t know who these trucks were. I went to the window and I heard they were talking English because I learned English. And I said, “We are free.” The Americans came and they gave us all kinds of canned food and cigarettes and chocolate and they said they had to continue. It was on May 8th, in the morning. I don’t know what time the war really came to an end, but they had to continue and they said the Russians were going to come and take care of us. The Russians came in the afternoon and they didn’t have chocolate and all that stuff to give us. They said, “You have three days’ time to go into the town, go into the homes of the Germans and take whatever you want to.” And so we did go, neither my sister nor I. They went and they came back with food and clothing – not much clothing. They were interested in food really. They ate and then three days later three hundred girls just blew up and died. Our stomachs were not used to….not so much food at all. Now, being that we were sick, my sister said that we were going to start with cereal, because they brought back cereal too. So we were lucky. We started with cereal.

Q: I wanted to ask you something. You said that the Russians came. Were you afraid of the Russians?

A: No.

Q: Not at all?

A: No. They were our liberators. Later we heard about what kind of things some of them did. No. They took us to a camp and we stayed there six months.

Q: Under the Russian supervision?

A: Under the Russian supervision.

Q: Where was this camp? So you remember?

A: I don’t remember the name at all. I thought we should have been already….what were we doing there? We should have been going home. And so I had an idea. I took the prettiest girl in the camp and smuggled ourselves out of the camp because the Russian headquarter was in the town. Here there were only soldiers giving us food and so on. And I thought that they were going to see this girl, they were going to stop - she was so pretty - and eventually ask us who we were and what we wanted. And it really happened. They were so stunned by her beauty they stopped and asked what we wanted. I talked. She was just there, standing pretty. I told them that we were there since May…

Q: How did you speak with the Russians? Did you know Russian?

A: No. We spoke in German. That we were there since…and I spoke to a Jewish guy. I didn’t even know that he was Jewish. I told him we were there since May and it was getting cold. “Aren’t we going home?” “Yes.” Three weeks later we were on trains and going home. I came back to Sighet to find out…this is where we started out from. I was looking for surviving siblings. I heard about nobody except my brother Yitzchak, who was in the labour camp and that he was somewhere in Bucharest. But I was also told that a cousin of ours in Sate Mare survived with her family, three children. She was hidden by a peasant. And so we sent there and I wrote a letter to my father. I remembered the address by heart. He lived in (?), New Jersey. I told him that we didn’t know about Toby, we just knew about Yitzchak and we didn’t know anything about my brother Joseph. He was in Siberia at that time. And so he wrote back that Toby was there, so she was there since liberation. She has a story of her own. My cousins Solomon, Molly and Alexander, or Shani, they received us with open arms. They were very well established.

Q: Where?

A: In Sate Mare. After the war. They were the owners of a nightclub and they had a store. They had a salesman and while he went to Bucharest he took me there, I met my brother and I told him that we have to go to Germany back and eventually try to get to the United States and would he come with us? He said he was involved with some woman and that he was going to come later. And then later he came with a fifteen-year-old woman as his wife. They were married. From Sate Mare we smuggled ourselves into Hungary and from Hungary into Austria, Salzburg, Austria. Then I just went around….we were in a camp, a displaced persons’ camp run by American soldiers.

Q: Do you remember the place or the name of the camp?

A: Salzburg. I wrote to my father I didn’t know how long we would be staying there. He should send me cigarettes and coffee. I still smoked at that time. I also knew that for cigarettes and coffee you could buy everything under the sun. German money had no value. And there were smart people that used to befriend American soldiers and they would give them cigarettes and for cigarettes they would buy diamonds and they smuggled the diamonds into America and they opened factories. I could have had dozens of diamonds from the cigarettes and coffee, but I thought I would come to the United States, I would find diamonds on the streets. This was the mentality of European ignorant people. So I didn’t buy a single diamond. After loafing around a few weeks I looked for work. I was hired to work in an office as an interpreter – English and German. This is where I met my future husband. He was on the rebound. He was for five years in the Red Army, so he fought the Germans the other way. He was discharged as a lieutenant. He was very quiet. We were paid in chocolate and peanut butter, things like that, and I didn’t need that because for the cigarettes and coffee I bought chicken and I bought other things, regular food from the German people.

And then we were taken to different “Lagers” in Germany, from Salzburg. He wound up in Munich, I wound up in Wetslar. This is where they made the famous Leica camera. In Wetslar. It was famous for that. But it was funny how it happened. You don’t want to go into details.

So we got to Germany. He was in Munich, I was in Wetslar, and then he asked some American soldiers where could he continue his studies because he studied already, he had two years’ university in Lemburg. This is where the Russians took him. The soldiers gave him a list of five places and he chose Wetslar because near Wetslar there was Marburg University. And we met again and we worked again together in the same office and we went out about two years. He had to call me “Miss Sabau”. Why? I wanted to come to the United States and further my education. I wasn’t just another student at home. And then I would get my master’s, doctorate and look for Mr. Kransberg, but Mr. Kransberg was not going to be there. And so somehow we separated and two weeks later I realized what I wanted to do and I actually wanted to marry Mr. Kransberg somewhere in the United States and he was not going to be there, and so we got married right away.

My sister Rose – she married. His name is Mendel Kohn. He is still iving here in Netanya in a home. She married us in Bamberg and then we came to the United States. I came in 1949. She came about the same time, but she had twins at that time and I was pregnant with our older daughter. I landed at my father’s home and all of us survivors were there. They all had children and I volunteered to cook. It was not an easy job and so as soon as my husband got a forty dollar job, we moved down to a room, a furnished room, the furniture was only a double bed and a crib for our daughter. On December 22 I gave birth to our daughter Shelley and at the same time – through Ceasarean section, so I stayed there a week – at the same time my husband had an accident at his work and he was in the hospital while I was there. We were both at separate hospitals. He came home with a cast on his foot, I came home with a beautiful daughter. But somehow, I don’t know what happened, my back felt as if disconnected. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t lie, nothing. Here I had this infant. I was three weeks in a hospital in traction and it didn’t help. My sister took care of our daughter. An osteopath told me that I had a choice: to lie three or six months flat on my back or to wear a brace, and of course I chose the brace. I didn’t want anybody else to take care the child. I had a brace from here to here. I couldn’t bend. It kept me immobilized. It was very hard to attend to the kid. She would be in the crib and I would just stand. I would feed her and change her there. If I wanted to go down, pick up something, I would have to lean on two things with my hands, go down, back. I couldn’t bend and so on. What I missed out, regretfully, was that physical mother-child touch. I couldn’t pick her up in my arms. Everything happened there.

My husband got bad news that his job was taken while he had a cast on his foot and so he wanted to go to further to education. He went to a Jewish organization to borrow money and they said, ‘Well, we need people to work in factories.” So he said, “I was working in factories and things didn’t work out. I’m not cut out for that.” “Well, we need people in factories.” They gave him the money and he started to go nights to the university straight from work and in ’56 he got his degree and started working at Revlon. Meanwhile, I gave birth to our second daughter. I still had a brace, but not that type of brace. It was easier. I could pick her up. It was entirely different. He landed this job and went from work in the evening straight to school, to the university. The bus driver would wake him up, “Johnny, come.” And in the end it took him forty years to get his doctorate. He worked sixty, seventy hours a week and he would get paid only for forty. The thirty overtime hours went against a pension plan and this for us meant at retirement we were going to have a beautiful pension plus the government pension. But what happened, they let him go fifteen years later and he lost the pension plan and everything. It was one of those hardships we went through. I went to work and I worked thirty-five years. I would get up four o’clock in the morning and travel six busses. Before that I got up maybe three o’clock in the morning because the boiler man where I worked would give me a ride.

Q: Okay, let’s finish it at this. The only thing I would like to ask you – how you ever gone back the path that you went through during the Second World War? Have you ever gone back to Sighet since you are in the States?

A: No, I have not gone back. We never had financial means to go anywhere. Maybe I would have gone back…to Auschwitz I don’t think I would have come, but maybe to Sighet, to Petrova I would have gone, but I never did. I just want to mention that at retirement I started to write. It was my life-long ambition and I put it on the back burner. After my husband got his doctorate and published a book, I started writing too. I retired, but two years later I stopped, I went back to work and now I am working on my memoirs. I wrote four plays, I wrote a book for our granddaughter. I am involved in writing a play for children and I don’t care whether it will be published or not – I have to write, I have to get out what I have here in my mind. When people say, “Have you travelled here, there?”, they ask me and I say, “No, I travel in my mind.”

Q: As long as you mention this, have you ever told your daughters your whereabouts during the Second World War?

A: No, not in the beginning, but they found out in the streets, so later, when I started talking already, the older one knew more than the younger one. And when I started talking to students and she attended a few times and she said, “You are telling strange children about things that you should have told me?” I didn’t want to tell our children because I wanted them to grow up without any….like any other normal child. But they found out that no matter what, they were not considered as another American child because somehow the American Jews, they didn’t look at us with friendly eyes. I don’t know why. We gave them problems, right? They had no problem and then we came, the survivors, and we started stories and all this. They had a life there and some of them had it very good, and then we came along. Especially our older daughter felt this very much, that somehow we were not welcome. It was a problem.

Q: Is there anything that you would like to say to the very end of this interview?

A: Well, I would like to tell our children that I love them more than I could say. I am very proud of the fact that they took the values that we instilled in them, combined them with their own, and are conducting their lives accordingly, and now they are instilling the same values in their children. And I just want to tell them that I hope that our Jewish tradition will live forever through them, through the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and inasmuch as I am not orthodox, I am a very strong Jew. I have a very strong identity and I am very proud of being Jewish. I don’t want to talk about other things here, what I see here in Israel.

Q: Okay. Thank you very much.

Pictures:

A: This is my mother. This picture must have been taken around 1938 because the background I see is still Petrova. Her names was Rochelle Rosenbaum, her maiden name was Rochelle Rosenbaum. Of course, she married my father and was Sabau. She perished in Auschwitz, was gassed the same day as she arrived there, holding her grandson in her arms. She was gassed the same day.

A: This is my father, Bezalel Sabau. It must have been taken just before he came to the United States in 1938. He lived in the United States, came to Israel and he passed on here, is buried somewhere in Jerusalem.

A: This is my brother Haim with his wife, just before he died in a labour camp.

A: This is my brother Joseph, Yoseph Martel, with his wife Minna. It seems like when they just met. I don’t see any children here, so it is probably in the ‘30’s. He is now in Jerusalem, over ninety years old, and I love him. I love the both of them and their children.

A: This is my brother Victor. It seems that it was done before he emigrated to Palestine. That means like in the ‘20’s, in the late ’20’s. I remember when I came to the United States the first time and my brother Victor bought me a dress. I think it was for thirty-two dollars and I didn’t like the way it fit. See, in Europe we had custom-made clothes. It was supposed to be an expensive dress accordingly and he was sort of insulted. It reminds me.

A: Now, this is me. I was maybe thirteen years of age, I was maybe in the second year high school.

A: This is me again. This is after the war. This is a picture taken when I was by my cousin in Sate Mare. That was in 1945.

A: Whoever watches this picture will recognize me at the left-hand side. At the right-hand side is my brother, Yitzchak. And of course, the woman next to me - I want to mention her and the child – is our best friend after the war and now, yesterday, we got in touch with them. It’s Ruth and her daughter Miriam.

A: Especially for our children. This is your grandmother, Hannah, and your father, Sigmund, at the age of three. It’s for our children and grandchildren to see their grandmother who perished during World War II.

A: On the right-hand side are me and my husband on the day of our marriage and on the left-hand side is my sister Rose and her husband Mendel. It was taken in 1948 and our anniversary is on March 9th, so this is when it was probably taken. I paid some coffee for the veil and somehow, under the “huppa”, the canopy, one of the women there had a candle and my veil caught and there I was on fire under the canopy, so that reminds me.

A: This is my husband and I. It seems the picture was taken about two and a half years ago. This is after fifty-one years of being married. We love each other like the first day we met.

A: On the right-hand side is our daughter, Shelley. We love her. She holds a degree in English and is multi-talented – drawing and writing. She is single now, raising her child almost single-handedly. In the middle there is my husband, peeking there. It seems that it was on a Passover eve. And on the left-hand side is our beautiful granddaughter, Amy Rose, and we love her and she is very, very smart and very, very talented in sports. We are very, very, very proud of her.

A: On the right-hand is our younger daughter, Beth. She, too, is multi-talented. She is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and just adopted a darling little child, Chinese little girl. On the left-hand side is Nancy Middleton, her partner in life, and we love them all.