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"When it drizzles and it's cloudy, it brings memories of the day when they took us to be killed, the first pogrom." | |||
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Frima Laub Born 1936 Volochisk, Soviet Union 
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We had the pogroms and we had starvation. We had everything. There was a lot of atrocities going on. Uh...horrible experiences. Always frightened, always feeling you're being followed. In fact the nights when I used to walk the streets and I used to hear the German Shepherds bark, to this date I dislike these dogs. Afraid so. And I always used to feel that any minute, you know, they will detect something, attack me although it was at night and I used to walk, like you...against...against building, between...between trees [so] nobody should see me, nobody should hear me. And everything brings memories. When it drizzles and it's cloudy, it brings memories of the day when they took us to be killed, the first pogrom. When I hear a German Shepherd, it brings memories. When I walk the streets, everything seems to bring memories. It's quite frightening. | ||
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Madeline Deutsch Born 1930 Berehovo (Beregszasz), Czechoslovakia 
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I was 18, but I was, in fact, only 13 because those years were nothing. Those were erased from my life. So I was 13 year old in a 18-year old girl's body. And I didn't know anything. I was a frightened little girl. I could not communicate with anybody except the immediate family--my mother's sister and brother-in-law and their son, their only son. And then we went to New York, again, my mother's aunt and her cousins. I...I couldn't go out to the street. I was petrified. I was afraid that the Nazis are still out there. I was having nightmares for years and years. For many years, I was still reliving everything. The trip to Auschwitz, the...the beatings, the killings, the dead people that were taken off the train, the...the beatings and the...and the dogs that were, uh, released and ju... jump on the people and...and tear them apart. I lived with this. Years and years. I still live with it, but I don't have these horrible nightmares anymore except occasionally. After a day like, for example, today I'm sure I'll have some of it. But this was for years. And it was a horrible, horrible thing. | ||
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Ruth Meyerowitz Born 1929 Frankfurt, Germany 
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The crematorium was just a uh few minutes away. We could see the chimneys from uh...uh wherever we were and of course we could smell the uh first the gas when it was left...let out from uh the gas chambers, and, and then we could smell the burning of the bodies, the human flesh burning. And then they cleared the grates and we could hear the grates uh being cleaned, and it's similar to what your own oven would be like when you move the grates around except in a much, it was much noisier that we could hear it all the way in the barracks. And, to this day when I clean my own oven, I am reminded of that noise of the cleaning of the grates in the crematorium. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
