Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Hannah Fisk - January 24, 1983

What was the food like? What...

Well, we had uh, when we were in--like I say, when labor camp it was not too bad. We weren't full. I was always going around hungry. But when we were in concentration camp, was bad. They made uh, a spinach soup and they never wash the spinach. You can have the box and everything running in the plate, you know, or uh, they used uh, whatchamacallit? Turnips. Most the time they make a turnip--the turnip thing with a little flour, no fat, no nothing. Yeah, it was terrible. And bread they gave you every third day, they gave you maybe this much. I don't think it was a quarter pound. But I was working heavy, see, by that--like I told you what that day, you have to eat because if not, you, you wouldn't last two days. So, they gave me double soup and they gave me double bread and double margarine and sometimes a little Jell-o--jam, I mean. You know, so, it wasn't too bad, you know, I, I could pass by and then the prisoner helped me a lot. As a matter of fact, he wanted me to marry him after the camp. He wanted me to go with him to England. But I said, "Let me go home and see if I find somebody first." I come from a big family, you know. When I met my husband, he never let me write to him. I have a picture, too. I have a picture from him. He was good to me. He was comforting me. "Hold it, hold it, a little more, a little more". You see what's happened--they had from the underground, they had those uh, what you put it on them at night they could hear what's going on with the war. See, they were engineers there, they were doctors by then. They were brilliant people. They were older already, everybody was older. But they, from the--the director from the factory was living upstairs and they were downstairs. You know?

Mm-hm.

All the prisoners were living downstairs. They had barracks, too. So they put a cable from upstairs and they had those, what you call it...

Earphones.

Headphones.

Yeah.

They could hear everything. So every day he comes, "Annie, Annie, a little bit more, a little bit more. Germans go kaput. Germans go kaput." You know what's kaput?

Yeah. Sure.

They be out. "A little more, you hold on more. Hold on, hold on. Don't give up." And he give me a lot of courage. A lot of courage. You are really, some days I talk to myself, "Are we're going to survive this. Is it possible to survive this?"