Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Anna Greenberger - August 24, 1982

Evacuating Camp

And all the five hundred women were smelling my coat--it was still from Poland what I was using at home. So I exchanged the sleeves with a lady--excuse me...

[interruption in interview]

...from ???, from uh, Mrs. ??? was her name. She had two daughters. And I went to her and I said, ???--her name was Lillian--I said, "Would you give me your sleeve and I give you my sleeve?" We had to exchange it. I said, "Maybe we will be liberated and I will give you back your sleeve and you give me back." So we took it out. She had a beige coat and we exchanged it. So I have that coat. And we were so hungry because the food--we worked very hard. So whenever we went to work in the factory every morning and it was raining, and if something happened, somebody did--dropped something, we had to uh, kneel in the mud in the rain and cry and they made us sing. We had to sing. So we went to the factory and there were shrubs because the factories were in the woods. And the spring came and the little leaves from the shrubs and grass we ate. We ate up all the green from little leaf from all this and nobody got sick from it. That's what we ate. And uh, that we survived. I was so skinny. Everybody was skinny. I don't know if I weighed eighty pounds, maybe. Maybe not even that much. So we were there the whole year working, making bombs 'til we had to evacuate, because the Germans were losing the war and we helped them go away.


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