Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Evacuation of the Ghetto
Mm-hm.
...well, you know, for him. And, well, in three days we had to be evacuated. We were not able, of course, to, to escape. We didn't know what, what will happen and we all--they told us to, to prepare, that we are going to go in the, on the farms and do some farm work because the men are at war and we have to provide the crop, you know. We said, well, the young people will work, the other one--we were not, of course uh, you know, farm people, but uh, we thought, well, it's not, not too bad, you know. Instead to be in the ghetto we'll be out, you know, in the country and you do work and uh, you get some food too. And we got ourself, you know, net, I mean, get into these cattle wagon and whatever, you know, to ride uh, back coaches and be taken away. And we still believed that we are going to be--well, we had our doubts, you know, will it happen, will it not happen? It was still Hungarian, you know, Hungarian uh, police which accompanied us. They didn't--although they allowed us to take as much food as we could have, you know, for three days, something the drink. They put uh, they put some, some uh, buckets in so everybody had to go to the bathroom, men and women and children. We were eighty, so it was really, really crowded. And uh, we, we started. It was in, it was the 1st of June, and uh, June 1944 and uh, they started on our, on our way. When we arrived at the, at the border, the wagons opened, you know, and we said oh, probably it was, they were right, you know, we were not going to go. Well it was for a very short time that, because they gave us over, I mean, to the Germans. And then it was the SS which took over. And we still didn't know where we are going. We understood that we are not going to be in Hungary.
Mm-hm.
And uh, and I think it was a psychological block. You know, you don't want to believe it. This friend of mine who was a nurse she had, she had a syringe and she had some other, you know, big dose of morphine and she said, "Well we are going to, to kill ourselves." She kept on fainting. She, she fainted all the time and uh, very, very soon we ran out of water, we ran out of anything to drink. The children cried a little--there were very religious people who had a lot of children and uh, beards and with payes and so on. And those children were--it, it was heartbreaking because they were hungry and they were thirsty and they were hot and, and uh, this friend of mine she, she said--I don't know if she meant it or she, she wanted me not to, to talk her out. She said "I cannot stand it anymore" and she took out the syringe, she said, "I give myself an injection." "But you don't know where we're going. Why should you, why should you kill yourself? Beside this, think of the other people. How do you do with a person here? You know, we don't know how long it will take." Until I hear in, in this heat and so on, I mean. It was, what impress will it have. Let's not do it. Maybe we can, we come close to the Swiss border. Maybe--we are young, we can run away, we can, we can do this, we can do that. And she always reproached me that I didn't let her take her, her, her life. Now, on, on the other hand, I was thinking later on if she would have wanted probably she would have done it, you know, because...
Yeah.
...I fell asleep from time to time, and I was not awake all the time. Well uh, after the three days we arrived in Auschwitz and we didn't know what it means. I saw this, right to the station, you know, and uh, it was uh, it was indescribable, you know, to, to see this because it was very hard and we were without any food and people started already to jump at each other, you know, and, and scream at each other and uh, there are people, you know uh, it is very, it is very distressing to see how people can change in a very short time, you know, when they are deprived of food or water. And uh, the sick people were taken in separate trains because they didn't even want to have to do with them. They sent them directly, probably now I know it, they sent them direct to the gas chambers. They told us, they, they, they really bothered to take the sick people just in order to have the other ones, you know...
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