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Alexander Ehrmann - May 13, 1983

What did you eat while you were in Auschwitz?

We were given, the last thing we were given after clothes and after shoes, we were given an enameled sort of a deep dish and we were told to hold onto that, that's going to be our eating dish. And we were given a spoon and a fork - no knife. We were then told to go by a certain barrack where we would be given food. We were given a very thick soup, which we were told was made of Doergemüse, naturally we inquired what's Dörrgemüse, it's dried beets and some cracked barley or cracked wheat, some other dried vegetables, dehydrated vegetables were boiled up with water and that was our food. Here and there there was a sliver of meat. We almost were going on that we were being fed human meat and so on, which wasn't true of course, but you know people were spreading all kinds of things. We were told that the soap we were using was human, was made of human fat, which was true, of course. We were, ... SS would come in, we were milling around, it was pretty disorganized but you know I guess they weren't worried about us, we were within barbed wire and at that point we said to ourselves, God knows how big the camp is. There is camp after camp after camp and we were all secured. There were towers, watch towers of course around us.

What was your state of mind at this point, how did you feel, physically and mentally?

Very, very disorganized and very worried, afraid. I have to learn how to speak German, otherwise I will be lost. Where are our parents? What's going to happen to us? Where are we going? Are they going? They must want to keep us alive otherwise they wouldn't have dressed us in prisoners uniform andgive us clothes, whatever bad it is, they gave us clothes and soap and dishes and they are giving us food. I couldn't get myself to eat the food. I didn't dare throwing it away. I was afraid somebody's going to see me, so I just kept the food in my dish, I ate some of the bread and then I passed it on to my sisters, that was bread brought in by prisoners that they were giving us. I wasn't able to eat the food during my stay in Auschwitz. Not even, we got a ration of margarine and some kind of a jam which they called marmalade.

Were you worried about starving?

No, no I wasn't. I figured sooner or later I'll eat it, I'll be hungry enough and I'll eat it. It wasn't my first encounter with hunger as such. I went hungry already before during the time when we didn't have enough food and there was a period when we had to eat flour or bread that was moldy. We had to hide flour and mice got into it and there was droppings in it, things like that. So we were already exposed to eating subhuman food. So I knew that sooner or later I'll be conditioned to it and I'll eat, if they'll give us enough food. But at that point I wasn't able to eat it. Whether it was the aversion to the food, probably it was a psychological state that I was in. I just couldn't eat.