Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Henry Konstam - October 25, 1991

So they put you in, from Posen to Auschwitz they put you in a train again.

Yeah.

Boxcar this time?

Boxcar, yeah. In a box...

What was that like?

There was no more passengers can come on.

So what was that like, in the boxcar?

Well uh, pretty miserable. But uh, it was, you know, it was only about a couple days or something like that, then we got there.

Were there any stops along the way, do you remember if the train stopped?

I don't remember. I don't, I don't remember that. But we were again uh, for five days in the camp, in the, on the trains when we went from Jaworzno to uh, to Buchenwald. That was a terrible trip. People were for five days without uh, practically food or water. And uh, you couldn't sit, you couldn't stand uh, sit on a, on a floor on the train. And my s... my spine was uh... You feel terrible you know sitting on the hard floor. But the people um, in some other kind, were on open cars, people froze to death, they just threw 'em out.

To make space.

Uh?

To make space?

No uh, if you died, you got, you know.

What did people do who were in the train for two days from Posen to Auschwitz to Birkenau?

Yeah.

What did they do to relieve themselves? Was there a bucket?

You just dropped to the side of the row and you just, you know, piss there, whatever that, that we had to do.

What was it like in the car? It must have been...

Well, it's stuffed with people There was a soldier in there, a soldier or two, I don't know. That's how they transported us or whatever. Uh, we uh, I remember we were going to, from one uh, from one condition to a worse condition. We, it always was the case, you know. Some people must have known where we're going. But they uh, they did not uh, nobody told us anything where we're going.

Did they give you any food before you got on the boxcar?

Yeah, they gave you a piece of bread, you know...

Did people fight over the bread?

They stole it from you if they could. At night some uh, concen... If you get at night a piece of bread to last you the second day, you know. Whatever it was, a piece of uh... Most of time, the, the uh, food uh, was that uh, that Schimmel, you know what that, that thing that has uh, that kind of a uh, from age, old age--that has uh, what do you call it?

Mold, you mean?

Hm?

Mold?

Mold, yeah. Well, I ate it anyway, you know. Uh, uh, but if someone could at night steal from you, they did. They're hungry. So they steal.