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"She was lighting the candles and saying the prayers, and we found this somehow encouraging." | |||
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Bart Stern Born 1926 Hungary 
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We were pushed up on railroad cars, actually cattle cars. But the amazing thing, what I still remember is, that on the way, being driven, or herded, by the Hungarian gendarmes, we were singing so...songs of hope. I do not remember exactly how to translate the song but I know where, which part of the Psalms it is in. And we thought that we are already enough in it [the cattle car]. We were about 50 people or 60. Twenty more, 30 more, so we must have been in that little cattle car, which is about a third of the size of an American railroad car, about 120, 140. And before we knew, whoever didn't make it of the family in the same car was cut off and they, they just slammed the doors, and those who were outside, they still had to put barbed wire on the little bit of opening which was on the outside on the top of the railroad car. These car were usually used for cattle transports or for grain. In the car the situation got by the minute worse and worse. People were looking to find a spot for the older...elder people to sit down. There was no space to sit down, because if you sat down you couldn't get up, because we were herded in, squeezed like in a sardine box. The journey actually lasted--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday--three nights and about three days. If anybody had something to eat--because in the ghettos we already used up most of the stuff what we have been successful taking out of our homes when we were taken out into the ghetto--had to share it with others. But we realized that it is not a simple journey of just a few hours. People were holding back, or they couldn't as generously pass it out to others. Then suddenly we start seeing that people are taking care of their needs in the cars, and the stench got worse every minute. | ||
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David (Dudi) Bergman Born 1931 Velikiye-Bychkov, Czechoslovakia 
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After about five or six days, they had arranged there, we told...we were told to march out and, um, to get onto a cattle train. And we were in that group about, um, 13 people--13, 15. Or in that range. And we got on the train, uh my father said that today's my Bar Mitzvah. And he had secretly hidden, risking his life, a little bottle of wine. And he took it out. And he passed it around to everybody, and everyone had a little sip and had a toast. And that's how I celebrated my Bar Mitzvah. It was very sad. But there was no time to think then on this. The time then was survival. | ||
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Norbert Wollheim Born 1913 Berlin, Germany 
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Somehow, uh, for reasons that are difficult to explain, we felt a certain, uh, amount of relief because after all these weeks of waiting and these weeks of expectations, knowing that so and so many trains and transport had left Berlin already before, we thought, now it's, now it's a, it's a new chapter and we were looking...we were actually, um, looking forward to that chapter with optimism and, uh, hoping or believing, envisioning that we would be taken to some kind of a labor camp and so where we would work, but survive, and wait for the end of the war. And, uh, uh, well I was with my, with my child and my wife, uh, the child slept a lot and, and, uh, when, we had difficulties to find out where we were going, but when we saw that we were going toward the east, we, my wife and I talked about, um, the time when we had made this trip in this direction voluntarily on our honeymoon a couple of years earlier in the direction to Silesia. And also, uh, she and others wrote cards, postcards, because we knew it from, from, from things, um, from transports which had left Berlin before, that, people had thrown out these cards, and these cards had been picked up on the outside and had been mailed, interesting enough. So, uh, to repeat, we, we were in such a rather good mood that we even started to sing. There was a song in the youth movement--it's, it's in Hebrew--"How nice is it when friends sit together and are together in friendship." So therefore, I say in general, it was um, um, a mood of, of expectation and, um, since it was Friday evening after darkness fell in, one of the elderly ladies, uh, uh, remembered that she had taken some candles along. And, she was lighting the candles and saying the prayers, and, um, we found this somehow encouraging, um, though it's, it's so absolutely irrational now, it's so irrational that here--but nobody, but nobody knew about it--that 95 percent of the people on that train would not live to see the next evening. | ||
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