Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982
Death March
At first we were driven out--it was snow to uh, about thirty miles, roughly. Some girls had no clothes enough to go for this. They were--they froze instantly. Then our first stop was in a city called Christianstadt. Very few girls remember this, I do remember. I don't remember what happened yesterday--don't ask me--but I remember this--the city of Christianstadt, because I was very naïve and I didn't know anything about war, I didn't know anything about mines. I didn't know. When we are seeing among the snow--we were walking on the snow. I seen--said to my sister, "Manya, you know what, I see here some wires." So I was playing around with to see--I was looking for food. And those were mines, I didn't know until I seen it explode. So when we got there in this Christianstadt, there probably must have been an ammunition factory. And I came to my se...my senses later, I didn't know then. But in this one area where we were, I thought it's a heaven after a thirty, thirty miles in the snow walking which girls sat down and froze and they were shooting. They didn't leave 'em just on that maybe they pretended they froze--they were shooting. You know, they didn't leave no chances. But when we got there, we stayed over night. In the morning some girls said, "I can't go on any further. Can I stay here?" So they said, "Yes." I wanted to stay there too. I said to my sister, "Let me stay here, you want to go, go." Said, "No, you're not going to stay." She probably knew better than I did. After we took off, the girls that were there, they--quite a bit of them left voluntarily they didn't know. We seen an explosion--the whole, the whole place exploded. Probably a bomb fell on them for what? This ??? the one I'm telling you, you're going to talk to her, she ran away. But she has her story. She wasn't liberated right away...
[interruption in interview]
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