Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Olga Adler - July 26, 1982

All of a sudden, I see uh, one of the Nazis coming with a piece of paper. The man was standing as close to me as you with a gun. And the other one. And he said, "Hey, hey, wait, wait, wait a minute." Uh, he's reading a piece of paper that under this and this and this section, this and this and this, we are going to, we are not going to shoot this girl. I don't remember. I just know that he, he read off some, some number and that they are not going to shoot me. That I remember. Uh, he read something more there, but I don't remember because I, I thought I died, you know. So um, and actually it was... I can't tell you my feelings, because under the cir... under circumstances like this you can't tell your feelings. It was just... I remember the movements but I don't remember my reactions or my mind or what... I don't remember if I looked at those girls again or not. I just remember he helping me putting my sweater back and taking me un... at my elbow, back to that uh, a little bit farther from the stall where we were. There was, we had to go up some wooden steps, there was the kitchen, the camp's kitchen and giving me soup. And as I was eating the soup, I woke up already that I'm eating soup and I am not dead and what, what happened. So, I thought to myself I will dare to ask what happened. I said, "What happened? What happened to me and what happened to those girls?" So, he said, and I said, "And I thank you that you didn't kill me." He said, "Don't thank me, thank fate that you are such a beautiful girl and so young that we didn't have the heart to shoot you." And with that, they gave me another Nazi who took me back, back for a few miles where my main camp was where I stayed. And that was a Friday. And then came Sunday. And the church bells were ringing. People went to church and we had an order, everybody out in the schoolyard. And we went out. I don't know it was two hundred girls, three hundred girls, I don't remember. We were standing in two lines like this. There was five girls in front of that digging graves in front. And he said one, two, three, four, five, this goes up to ten. This was the man who was with the gun, who was supposed to shoot me. So, I think to myself, oh my God, what they did to me, they didn't want to shoot me there, but they wanted to bring me back as example that this what happens to girls who will run away.

Mhm.