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"And it was by the greatest miracle that I survived." | |||
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Bart Stern Born 1926 Hungary 
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And it was by the greatest miracle that I survived. There was, every barrack had a little cabin in the front, which was separation where the Blockaelteste, the Blockaelteste meant he was the, the chief of the, of the, of the barrack, and every such cabin had all the breadboxes, the bread was supplied, brought in with a box with a lock and nobody could get to it. That door, the hinge of the box was already torn off, and I was hiding in that box upside down. Here he comes in to search, he even kicks it, but luckily it gave. I was so skinny, it gave. I could see the...and I was sure this is it. This is how I remained alive. But when they already left, the Germans, about an hour they, they left, there was no sign of Germans, I wanted to go back to the barracks, but the Poles, the, the Ukraines, who were not taken on the death march, they wouldn't let me in. So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn't function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher. And I sneaked into, among those dead bodies because I was afraid they'd come back or something. So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived, January 27, I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated. This was my, my survival chance. | ||
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Charlene Schiff Born 1929 Horochow, Poland 
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How I lived in the forest, or in the forests, plural. I don't know, but it's an amazing thing, when one is hungry and completely, uh, demoralized, you become inventive. I never...when I even say it I don't believe it. I ate worms. I ate bugs. I ate anything that I could put in my mouth. And I don't know, sometimes I would get very ill. There were some wild mushrooms, I'm sure they were poison, I don't know, poisonous ones. I was ill. My stomach was a mess, but I still put it in my mouth because I needed to have something to chew. I drank water from puddles. Snow. Anything that I could get a hold of. Sometimes I would sneak into potato cellars that the farmers have around their villages, and that was a, a good hiding place because it was a little warmer in the winter. But there were rodents there and all. And, uh, to say that I ate raw rats, yes, I did. Apparently I wanted to live very, very badly, because I did undescribable things. I ate things that no one would dream of being able to. Somehow I survived. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did. | ||
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Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall Born 1929 Klucarky, Czechoslovakia 
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The train arrived in the middle of the night, so we were greeted by very bright lights shining down on us. We were greeted by soldiers, SS men, as well as women. We were greeted by dogs and whips, by shouting and screaming, orders to try to empty the train, by confusion, and by men in striped uniform. We didn't know it at the time, but the men in uniform were the Jews who were brought there before us, they were called "Kanada," which I found out later. Their job was to empty the train. One of those men saved my life, that was the first. When they had asked us to empty the trains, these men would come onto the compartment of the train and they would try and push and pull us off the train as fast as they could. These men were not allowed to speak to us, but in their own way they tried to help young people. They walked amongst us and in Yiddish would whisper to a child, "you're fifteen, remember you're fifteen." When we got off the train, they asked us to line up according to age. I lined up and I became fifteen years old. I lined up with the fifteen year-olds and I truly believe that that man whoever he was, saved my life. | ||
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Ruth Webber Born 1935 Ostrowiec, Poland 
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One of the selections that were going on, I was hidden with other children in a, uh, hole in the, uh, in the ground where they kept potatoes, right off the kitchen. And, uh, we were there, uh, up until the point when they were, uh, putting the people on the trucks already, the selections have been made. And somebody must have, uh, saw us going in there, and they had told, uh, one of the Germans. And there was potatoes lying over us so we were actually hidden, but somebody told him exactly where we are, so he came up and he, uh, uncovered us, he pulled up all these potatoes away, and he looked at us--there was a few of us there--and he said, uh, he was there with his handgun, and he said, "Stay here. It's not safe for you to come out yet." I, I, I guess he had enough people for this particular transport, so he had a change of heart and he decided to leave us there. We were children so we ran out. My mother was working in the kitchen peeling potatoes and she saw me coming, so a couple of the ladies and my mother grabbed me and put me into a barrel with sauerkraut in it, until the trucks were pulled away. And, uh, I was saved that time. | ||
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Sam Spiegel Born 1922 Kozienice, Poland 
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If you asked me how I survived in those woods for eight days in cold weather and everything else, I can hardly remember. I know we had frozen toes and at nighttime we used to go out from the woods. In... in Europe they used to have to put away potatoes in the wintertime outside and they used to cover them with saw... sawdust and then have a door on the south... on the south side that they used to take the potatoes out. And the sun used to come out during the day, so we stole some of those potatoes and we ate those raw potatoes and we had snow as water. And that's how we lived through till we survived from the camp... from those eight days. | ||
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Kate Bernath Born 1927 Szikszo, Hungary 
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We were, uh, in the midst of all our troubles we were trying to cheer each other up. If one was feeling very low, we, we tried to tell them, we, we dreamed about things what we were going to do when we got liberated. We were all...we never thought for a minute, I never thought for a minute that I'm really going to die. I, it just did not sink in. I mean with all these horrors around me I, I always thought that we were dreaming of, of things--when I get home I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and I just want to see this, this war end and just live for the day when we see the Germans defeated. And that kept us alive. Never to lose hope. If you lost hope, that was the end of it. It was so easy in Auschwitz. All you had to do is reach out for the barbed wires. They were electrified. We would not do them the favor. We said if they want to kill us, they'll have to kill us. We are not going to die. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
