Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982
Arrival at Helmbrecht
And after this we continue the road. I was again lucky, it was part of--I don't remember exactly--it must have been April, because it was already--you could see blooming already the snow was all gone. We were going again and they took us to a tartak--it's a lumber yard. A lumber yard where they cut, they sawed--is this what called a lumber yard? A lu...lu...a lumber mill.
Husband: And they cut there....
And it was bombed. It must have been bombed before--oh no, before this we had another stop. We had stopped on the road--well, this is before the lumber yard--on a place called Helmbrecht. That was a camp. Evidently this was a camp where all the political, not the only Jewish uh, prisoners, but the political--the, the Germans--the Polish politic uh, prisoners. This was hell. It was called Helmbrecht, it was hell--yet another hell. There we all had to undress. The, the shma'teh we had on. We had one dress and you put it on the floor. They put a barrel of some kind of a solution, supposedly disinfection. And everyone they du...put it all into there wet and everyone going in into the, into the barrack, take one, one thing, whatever you lucky--I was short, I was very lucky, I got a nightgown, which was--reached the floor. My sister was taller, she had a bra, she had something up to here. That's how she had to walk around. You had to take only one piece. That was it. We walked in there. The floors were like this--ground like, like uh, the roads. But not asphalt, just dirt. And we heard the bombs every minute. We were praying one should fall. One should--you know, there were windows--the windows were already out--the glass was out from the bombs. It was so close. We prayed that one should fall here. Let's get over with. Half of, half of the girls, we must have been the...by then probably three hundred already from the thousand fifteen--from the thousand five hundred. Girls, yeah, and that one time on the road a bomb hit a horse that our guard was riding and the horse got dead. So the girls--mostly Hungarian, the Polish didn't do this--grabbed pieces and they were eating it for days. So what happened? They got infections. They, they had all those, like mushrooms coming out of their mouth, you know, with the infections. So they took 'em there. They sent 'em to a Kranken, that's supposedly to a um, like uh, to give 'em help. But the minute they took 'em there, this was the end, they never got out. I don't know what they did to them. Never got out.
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