Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982
Head Shaved
You were saying that they shaved your head.
They shaved our heads. And because I went in with my sister the same time to the shower, I looked around and I screamed, "Sasha, Sasha, where are you?" Because I didn't see her. So I was like very frightened. God forbid that something didn't happen to her there in the shower. And then sh...there she was staying next to me. But because she had her hair shaved off, I didn't recognize her. And she looked at me, but the way she looked at me, I looked at her. Now even though her eyes were so wild. All of a sudden we didn't recognize each other. But that what they did to everybody. They chased us out from there on the field, naked. We were staying there for another few hours 'til it was getting dark. They fed us with one soup and that soup was, was--we were staying in lines. There were five of us in a line, so they handed to us a little cup with soup. And everybody was getting a sip. And being in the line with the soup, standing naked, somehow I don't know, I looked like uh, couldn't care less. And I was staying in such a position that a SS man was walking by and he scream--pointed out to me, he said to me, "Bist du schwanger?" And I didn't understand what he said. First of all, I was confused. And I said to him, "yeah," not knowing what he asked. But I was thinking the best answer is to say yes. But somehow like from heaven, a voice came out and it was my older sister, Rivka. He says, in German, because she lived in Zdunska Wola and there were so many German people there, so she knew the language pretty well. She yelled out, "No, sie ist not, schwanger--she, she's not pregnant, she's still a young girl." But the way I was standing, somehow, that he had that idea. So that time I notice that she was with us in the line and that she was still alive with us. [pause] After having that soup, they asked us to sit down to lay down that we are going to be on that field 'til the following day, that we won't go into any barracks. Looking around, we could see just barbed wires, [pause] chimneys, and so many barracks. People walking back and forth. And we were just sitting and wait...waiting, what next. The next morning, they lined us up again. They came special SS women with whips. Treated us just like dogs. And they took us to piles of clothes and they threw at us a pair of wooden shoes or a pair of shoes, but a few sizes too big or too small. Some clothes. We got dressed and they put us in the, on ano...they put us on another train to go on, to go to another camp. So we went on the train, they handed over to everybody a little piece of bread. This was supposed to be our food. We didn't know for how long or whatever. From there, we stopped at the place, they called it, it was another big concentration camp, Stutthof by Danzig. We were assigned there to different barracks. My sister and I, Sasha, we were in the same barrack. My older sister, after a few days, we got a hold of her. And she was in a different barrack with other people. [pause] There we came, it was a concentration camp, not like Auschwitz, but very big also. It was a v...very close friend of ours. She worked with me in Łódź ghetto, when she looked at those barbed wires, she thought, this is enough. She didn't want to go through anymore with anything and she ran close to them and there were--and she got electro...electrocuted on this barbed…[pause]
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