Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Anne Eisenberg - May 11, 1982

Again the selection was taking place. Many of us went for--put to the side at that point. Three days we were being selected like that and we were taken to Germany to ??? or Gelsenkirche whichever people preferred to call it. It was a oil refinery. Our job was to help a few men to clean away the debris and then to rebuild it. I'll never forget it, on a Monday morning, that day I was very sick and I stayed in the barracks. But in the morning the factory started to work and by evening the first fire started. And no, not, not much later the bombings have ta...started to take place. Our camps were surrounded by barbed wire. I wanted to run, we all ran into the field. I got stuck my--between the wire. My sister desperately tri...tried to get me unhooked. Most women to, we go out and you see, one moment you see a girl, the other moment we see just pieces of flesh. That night we lost all, between that and wounded over five hundred girls. The whole night fires were taking place. They were taking the Ger...the girls to the hospitals that happened to survive. Our Lagerführer was to...more on the humane side because he didn't tell the people in the hospital that they were Jews. So they gave 'em the right treatment. A matter of fact a lot of them even survived until the Russians came in. Three days the bombings were taking place. We wanted to run into the city to hide in the bunkers, but we were told that there is no room for the Jude. We were chased back like little puppies. The third day we didn't even move out. We stayed in the barracks. The Allies finished their jobs. The factories were demolished completely. From that place they took us to Sömmerda ???. That was a factory where we were working on ammunition. I was in that place for six, six months we were working in the ammunition factory. We came in--my first day we produced between ten to twelve thousand bullets per night. While you were working you had food, that was no problem. But no sooner, in April, almost to the year, the Allies were coming in from one side, the Russians from the other. And there was no room for Jews anymore in the factories. So they took us out from there and they put in different [pause] different people to work. They were Russians and Poles. But by not working, that means one thing. You still had to get up early in the morning. And you still had to be up all day, but you only received one meal per day. Then for some reason I heard some talk, but I had no knowledge what was taking place. And I just hollered down my nu... my number and my sister's. You see, a name we did not have, we only had a number. But by miracle some farmers requested some working people into their fields. And if you worked, like I say, you had food. So when we went out to the farm, the farm, farmers were waiting for us with big pots of soup and potatoes. Our job was to pick out sugar beets from the, from the ground that they took to the factories. We worked in the fields for about three weeks. We were able to steal some of the sugar beets to take 'em back to the camp for some of the other girls. [pause] And we managed to survive. Because when we came into the camp again we had food, a little piece of bread was given to us. The farmers even treated us to one of the raincoats.