Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lanka Ilkow - October 12, 1991

With the clothes on.

Yeah, they sprayed all over and just told us we should not breathe in and the head you know, full of lice. It was crawling all over. So this lice brought probably all kind of sickness. And uh, we had uh, underarms all over, we had all a red, like rashes, you know. And uh, our bodies was horrible. So uh, when they give us baths after, took off and give us baths. And uh, they give us clothing, dressed up already. Everybody got a brassiere, underwear ??? already in uh. And they took us to the--a clean camp where the German soldiers used to be. So they cleaned it and changed beds and everything and they put us there. And whoever was so sick, they took 'em away to the hospital, like my sister. So uh, I didn't heard if my sister's living or what. Then one time a girl come in, in uh, the barrack there and I recognized her. And she says to me, I, I says, "Are you Sarah Nedelman?" She says, "Yeah," so she says uh, 'Who are you?" I say, "I am Lanka Moskovitch from Novoselitz." She says, "I used to have, I used to have uh, knew a Lanka Moskovitch, she was a beautiful girl, but she was married already." So I start crying and I say to her, "Sarah this is me." "Oh, you look horrible!" She had already hair. She--from a blanket she maked a skirt, from a sheet already. She maked a blouse and she was--had black hair. The, the blondes uh, in one--they--in one camp, they uh, shaved us again after Auschwitz. The red heads and the blonds they shaved again in Breslau. Uh, we shouldn't mix in with the, we were working there in the factory, so we should not mix in. So we didn't--we was bald in Auschwitz. So she says, "Oh you look horrible," she says. And I told her I have a sister and I don't know where the sister is. So she found--she was going from hospital to hospital 'til she found my sister. And uh, then we went to sleep in the hospitals and Red Cross packages was coming in and who had that. They didn't give us never a package. So who was the big shots. Who, who knows who had those packages. So we went to sleep in the hospital, a few hid there in the hospital. In the ne...in the night we went and we steal those packages. And there was like a pound of uh, Crisco oil and cigarettes and chocolate and all the you know, goodies was there. So we open up and we just took what we wanted you know, and the rest we left.