Rose Green - May 21, 2008
Suicides in Camp
They did it...
Purpose, yeah. They couldn't take it, they couldn't take it.
Did you know any of them?
Yes, I knew one of them, one of--two of them. One was a doctor's wife. She was a beautiful girl. She sang for us before she committed suicide. She was quiet in the Lager; it was in Auschwitz, yeah and uh, she sang for us. Sang a beautiful Slovak song, and uh, she had a very nice voice. The next morning we found her at the, at the wire. And one was a, a girl from my--where my grandparents lived in other, another town. She was also--was a very beautiful girl. She was unmarried. She couldn't take it either. She touched it and she stayed there, you know. They picked 'em up in the morning, throw, throw 'em like sacks, you know.
Did you see people taking the dead bodies away?
Yeah, I saw. Not from the crematoria...
No.
...but from, from the wires.
And what about at the labor camp, were people dying--people were dying there too?
Labor?
At the labor camp.
No, you know, it's--maybe, maybe they did. I don't know.
No, no one you...
Not, not, not as much as in Auschwitz anymore. We got a little bit more food--very, very little food, but, but a little bit more food. They had to give us something to eat to, to survive, you know, to survive that work. And uh, the treatment wasn't as bad as in Auschwitz and the scare--the fright, you know, it's terrible you see and, and know what's going on in those, in those crematoria, you know, the smell constantly. It penetrated your clothes.
And around, around the clock, you could smell it.
Yes, around the clock.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn