Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Anna Greenberger - August 24, 1982

Arrival at Lübberstedt

Can you spell that?

Lübberstedt, I think it was Lübberstedt. [long pause] Lübberstedt. See the German, they uh, use this, Lube... Lübberstedt.

That was in Germany.

That was already Germany--in Germany not far from Hamburg or Bremen. I think Bremen was closer...

Mm-hm.

...and there was a munitions factory. We were making bombs.

Were you all women on that train?

All--it was five hundred of us--five hundred--the group. Then we were--we got a dress. One shirt, one underpants, but it was like a man's. And we got a knife, I show it to you, I have--we got a knife. I wouldn't give this away for no...because my mother said I should keep it. I have some other also from uh, see? "Garantie Rost frie," German.

That means rust free.

Yeah. So we got a knife and we got a spoon. I got a dress, I got a shirt, undershirt. It was uh, not a, a fancy slip or anything. It was a shirt, what kind--and underpants and wooden shoes. I don't remember if he had socks or something. And a coat. It was small on me, I couldn't even button it. But that was already from the Wehrmacht--from German who belonged to the factory. We got already, we were already for--from the factory settled and everything. So we got in the morning just black coffee, nothing else. If we were lucky we got the suds from the coffee, you know, the, the coffee...

The grounds.

The grounds, yeah. And we got one bread for five people. It was a small loaf, it was for five people. We used to fight over it, who gets the biggest part. And we got at night--once a day it was a soup. If we were lucky it was a few cabbage leaves in it. That was for the whole year.


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