Eva Cigler - March 17, 1982
Last Days of the War
Nineteen forty-five.
Forty-five. And uh, but so many little things go between uh, you know, that, here we move and that we was doing uh, and we was cleaning uh, that bathroom the
Scheisskommando.
Scheisskommando because it was too full already and all the girls who could work there was no place to go. And uh, after that uh, we were starving. This was the first thing. And people was just dead all over. Everybody get the typhus, not just our block. It start to go around. And the Bergen-Belsen was a death camp. You just see people--and finally when we start to walk, start to got better and we was going uh, organizing a little food from the kitchen and we see a wagon dead people there are girls already you know, all uh, just like a baby. And we star uh, we was envying her, my God, what we couldn't be like her already, all that uh, misery should be over. And uh, then already you know, people would just... You step on the dead one you just step on a cockroaches. You didn't even feel no uh, you didn't have no feeling, who was there you know, who was there. You just uh, drop a tear sometime, even tear doesn't come out from your eyes already. You were so uh, uh, you didn't have the feeling, not like a human being, just like animal. So uh, came already uh, around uh, April and we know something is happening here in the camp because we didn't see too much SS anymore around. And around April the 10th...
Were you still going out for Zählappell?
Uh, not much.
No, and what...
First of all, our block didn't go anymore because all of them almost, from the two hundred fifty people who was in that uh, block, thirty of them came out alive.
Do you remember the name of that block?
I don't...
No.
remember, just was a wooded uh, place.
Mm-hm.
Uh, and was all around that fence uh, a white fence was there. I don't know what the hell they uh, put a white fence on it. Looks like everybody--you couldn't come in and you couldn't go out. Nobody came in that block.
And was the camp electrified wires too?
Uh, I don't think uh, was in the camp so much electric wire. Outside was electric wire because this was a big camp too.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn