Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

I find it difficult to believe. I mean...

You know, when I look back if I wouldn't be it--I find it difficult. I find it difficult that I made it, that I pulled this through on my own skin. That I--I just can't believe it. It was true plus more, plus much more. What one did to the other. I tell you, the nicest girls and the best girls were animals. They made animals out of us.

Can you give me an example?

No. The best example is when I remember that girl Salzberg or Selsa, I don't remember exactly when they threw her their recreation--that egg and that loaf of bread and she ran the first one and we all after her. She never got up, never got a, ??? and they were laughing. They threw it for their recreation. And they called us ???, it's like piece of ??? because we were, you know, so ugly. Uh, scary. How one human being can do this to another? I see those massacres--it's terrible. I tell you something, I suffer so much. That they were just shot, but they were in a terrible way. Many times I said uh, it--history repeats itself, no matter what part of the world. It does, and it shouldn't. When I heard what was going on in Vietnam, and I listened a lot, I couldn't live with it. It's, it's not the same, but it's similar.

Is there anything else you'd like to add before we stop the tape?

I probably will after you leave. I'll probably think of it after. I know it always happens, because I guess they would--we, we just ??? we were out there for dinner. I said, you know what, those things that you're telling me I don't remember, but it's coming back. And she was telling me things that I didn't remember. I remember that one time there were two sisters, uh, such lovely girls--and this was in the good camp, that I said there we will survive probably, ninety-five percent. I said, one time we came back we have to weed--we have to do other work after, after work. So she said that her shoes ro...they sent her to the woods, I don't remember where. Said--she just said that her shoes are torn and she doesn't have any shoes, how she was slapped in the face and how she was kicked around from a woman, an SS woman--it was not a man--like she was kicked around and then they put her to stay 'til late, late in the evening stay straight in one place not to move, and it was going on for weeks. And I don't know what happened to her.