Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

What was it about the number seventy-seven?

That was—that means that’s the year when he came. He came in 1942 and he survived because there’s only three or four left. Like in that one camp that I was in, sur…survived that I know of is three, four people. In the first—in the coal mine—four people. In the other camp, only one survived from our—from this number. We, we knew by the number where the people are from. Or he is Italian or he is uh, Hungarian or he is German—where he came from. There was no name at that time. You didn’t call by name. Only seventy-seven thousand, period. This—it’s funny, as a youngster, I had a boyfriend—we went to cheder together. Before the war his family left for Belgium. And he was a youngster—only eight, nine years old. Left for Belgium. Soon forget about it. We were in camp—in Auschwitz on the coal mine there. So every evening you had to be what they call an Appell—they uh, counting. You know, you have to uh, see, you know, if the same amount of people came back as they went out. Somehow the SS commander calls a name, Bruk. “Bruk?” I said, “The name is so familiar. Bruk. Belgium.” And we were in the same block—you know what a block is—a barrack—in the same barrack. He slept on one side of uh, in other words uh, uh, three—what they call it? I can’t think of the name right now. Not beds, you know, the three…

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