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"A skeleton covered with skin, with big blue eyes. And as I turned to look whose reflection I saw, I realized that was my reflection." | |||
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Nesse Galperin Godin Born 1928 Siauliai, Lithuania 
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I tell you what I looked like. I weighed at liberation sixty-nine pounds. I'm not a very short lady. I don't know how tall I was at that time, how much I grew during the war, when, uh...I am five four and a half now. Can you imagine sixty-nine pounds? My face was swollen because I was beaten up severely on the death march. My hands had frostbite. My toes were black from frost. I had one dress, a blanket that was wrapped around my body. Between the blanket and the dress, my ba...body was wrapped around with straw. Somehow we found straw on the ground and we tried to insulate ourselves with it. | ||
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Nesse Galperin Godin Born 1928 Siauliai, Lithuania 
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Uh, let me tell you how I saw myself a few days after liberation. I have not seen myself in a mirror for almost two years. A few days after we were free, the Russians carried us, bodily actually, to the village, put us in little houses, until the makeshift hospital was made. And as I was laying in one of those houses on a straw sack, I saw a door with a window pane. And I thought, "I'm free. Let me look outside how the free world looks." But as I looked through that little window pane, I saw a reflection. A reflection of the most horrible thing that anyone can imagine. A skeleton covered with skin, with big blue eyes. And as I turned around to look whose reflection I saw, I realized that was my reflection. This is how I looked. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
