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"The minute the gates opened up, we heard screams, barking of dogs." | |||
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Alice Lok Cahana Born 1929 Budapest, Hungary 
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Several days later we arrived to Bergen-Belsen. And Bergen-Belsen was hell on earth. Nothing ever in literature could compare to anything what Bergen-Belsen was. When we arrived, the dead were not carried away any more, you stepped over them, you fell over them if you couldn't walk. There were agonizing...people begging for water. They were felling...falling into planks that they were not pulled together in the barracks. They were crying, they were begging. It was, it was hell. It was hell. Day and night. You couldn't escape the crying, you couldn't have escaped the praying, you couldn't escape the [cries of] "Mercy," the, it was a chant, the chant of the dead. It was hell. | ||
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Helen Lebowitz Goldkind Born 1928 Volosianka, Czechoslovakia 
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Then you see these mothers coming down with little kids, and they're...and they're trying to pull these kids out of their mother's hands. And you know, when you try to separate a family, it's very difficult. It's very difficult. People put up fights. It...it, there was so much screams. So, there was a truck. I remember that truck. So the parents, the...the mothers that wouldn't give up these children and they, they were beaten up, and the kids got hurt, so they grabbed these kids and they threw them on the truck, and they really didn't look how they were throwing them on the truck. So at that time we saw that something horrible is happening--the way these people were behaving to little children, to little babies. And of course on that truck there were people, you know, very sick people going, you know, they were throwing sick people there and...and...and these children that gave them a tough time. They were just thrown on the trucks. And there were so many mothers that were running after the trucks, and of course they beat them and they pushed them back. | ||
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Leo Schneiderman Born 1921 Lodz, Poland 
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It was late at night that we arrived at Auschwitz. When we came in, the minute the gates opened up, we heard screams, barking of dogs, blows from...from those Kapos, those officials working for them, over the head. And then we got out of the train. And everything went so fast: left, right, right, left. Men separated from women. Children torn from the arms of mothers. The elderly chased like cattle. The sick, the disabled were handled like packs of garbage. They were thrown in a side together with broken suitcases, with boxes. My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me "Leibele, I'm not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother." | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
