Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

I remember one SS woman had a, a hard boiled--a boiled egg, which middle was soft. My, my mouth was watering. When I first--I said, "When I'm going to be libera...be liberated the first thing I'm going to have a hard boiled egg with the yoke should be soft inside." So you know, you know what they did for their recreation, they threw--you know, because we were total animals--we lost our senses, we lost our morals, we lost our hearts, we lost our feelings, we were animals. So they threw a, a slice of bread with an egg and for their recreation. So we all ran after it. The first girl that fell on the bread, she never got up. And everybody else fell on her had crumbs. No one had nothing. And they, and they were laughing, they were laughing. They called us the shmutsik, you know, like, you know, because we, we were like, you know, scarce to look at, like you see a walk...a walking dead--a shadow. That's how we looked. So for--they sat down after throwing this. I remember this one girl Selsa--also Selsa--she was on the bottom, she never got up because she was crushed. And the others from that slice of bread and no one had nothing because uh, uh, everybody wants it. It was crumbs, was disappeared. This--that, that was that--one time we walked--this was also--you know, we had those uh, we took--when we went out from the camp on the road, we took our blankets and we took that one bowl that we had put the night, excuse me, it was a toilet. During the day when they gave us--yeah, sometimes they made us soup like uh, a little starch uh, every morning a starch. It was uh, if, if the farmer was good, he wanted to barter and feed those um, uh, you know, animals with a li...it was a--with a little starch. So this was uh, our, this was our china, and when it was raining it was our umbrellas. And the, the, the uh, wax that we had--the, the, the blankets were already pieces. But if you let it--if you put it away, it could walk away, that's how lousy it was. We had, I didn't have a pi...a drop of water from the 1st of January 'til the 5th of May. Here it was so thir...I thought I'll never get this off from dirt, here and all over. I thought that dirt will never come off. It's so embedded all the way--I thought it will never come off. And the louse--lice were so thick they ate us alive.