Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982
Disappearance of SS Guards
How long were you there?
I was there 'til the end—'til April the 18th when I got liberated.
What happened then? Can you...
Three days before liberation, I uh, things got very confused. Our uh, SS uh, uh, disappeared. Uh, there, there was uh, we could look out the window and there was like a standstill. Uh, we're again on an outside of a—outskirt of a city, but you could see the city almost. Like a, a, a quiet. One night they took us into uh, a forest like, because they claimed that they heard that, that the, the factory—the building where we lived and worked was going to be bombed. So they took us in for that one night into a forest. Not too far—it was quite a ways walking distance, but it wasn't too far. And I remember we lay down our heads to the ground and we'd hear that tremendous rumbling—a bombing—heavy machinery and we knew that they—somebody's going to liberate and we were just—be ecstatic. We didn't care. But we slept out there for that one night and then uh, the following night planes were flying over, but so low. And nobody bombed and nobody shot. I remember we had uh, uh, irons over our windows.
Iron? Bars?
You know, the bars. And one of the girls...
This is in the factory.
...in the factory—one of the girls wanted to open the window—they, they locked our windows up—to uh, put something white out...
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