Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

And we just talked yesterday--if they wouldn't send us away from this camp, we wou...ninety-five percent of our girls would be here. But good things don't last very long. And what was good? We were, we were working eight hours, getting up early in the morning, and going to the factory, and when we came back from the factory, and we--the, the um, uh, weeding the lawn and whatever has to be done. But they gave us food enough to keep soul and body together. They needed that work. And every once in aw...and like this, we could survive. In this camp we could survive. And on top of this, we also had, everyone there in this factory had somebody. You know, for some reason--she will tell, if you talk to this ???--she will tell you what happened there in this camp when we--when they had transferred us--this was 1942. In 1943 we had a, a commission um, called ???. Gestapo came, we knew there is a change. Then there were concentrating small camps like this--we didn't know there were more--concentrating mostly those small camps into the concentration camps. We didn't know where we were sent to, but it happened that we winded up in uh, a camp called Gruenberg. It's Middle Schle...Middle Silesia--there's Oberschlesien and there's a Middle Silesia, a couple, probably two hours. When we got there--some girls were there for a long time--we were already like strangers. For us what's--what--for me--for the girls from this camp was a very hell. But yet, I asked a girl, "What are you doing here?" Said, "We are working." Some work on the Baustelle which is on the roads and some in the factories. Because you see, they needed the labor. We as qualified uh, vagrants weave...weaving from the weaving factory, they took us to a weaving--another weaving factory but different machines because this was already heavy. It was like the blankets. You know, the, the--for the army--the blankets. The uh, for the machine was--there I operated four machines but they were shorter. And this was two, you have to be really very good. It was--one machine was this size, and you had to operate two. In those, the foreman in ??? were mean. They were mean. You, you, you were afraid to breathe.