Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982

You all shared the soup too then.

The soup we would share, um. I don't know, we always had it outside or inside most. I think it was bad weather it was inside, it was outside the weather was nice.

What was it like, I mean, you must have been starving and all those people?

Well, the first three days I remember not eating that bread because the bread was the size of a brick and it looked like a brick and it was split in four. And the girl that was standing, the first one on the five line-up would get either the whole bread and a quarter of another, or it was all split up. Well, if that bread wasn't evenly divided there would be chaos. Fight breaking out. So sometimes there were girls that knew each other or some relatives or cousins, they would command the resources and they would sort of um, get their order of bread for the five of them--the, the community food. And they would sort of eat it out of that. So nobody would get this, this fraction of a slice less than the other one. Uh, that bread was to hold you 'til the next day and you would get like a pack of margarine. Occasionally we'd get a, a slice of liver--not liverwurst, bludwurst. It's uh, it's uh, it's a type of a German sausage, looks like blood--I don't know what it looks like, like a salami-type of thing. A, a thin slice. Uh, the food you ate was soup. That was your main food supply would be, again, uh, drinking from pots.

What was in the soup? What was it made from?

Uh, I haven't eaten it since that day. Some kind of a, a, a beet.

A beet.

Okay, not, not the red beet, uh, it, it's, it's called a, a turnip, okay, turnips. Looks like a yellow beet, we call it a ???, but it's a, it's, it's a turnip. And sometimes there was a few little potatoes and a skin and all dirt with it. And occasionally you would have uh, some cabbage in it. I don't know--it was a most disgusting thing but people would have killed for it--as bad as it was, it was the only thing to keep us living.