Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Being Transported to Auschwitz
Mm-hm.
...calmer and quieter. And uh, we arrived. I have I'll show you--I will read to you because this is--it's not the whole thing when we entered, because I--"The train stopped again. Some of us tried to look through the little bath rectangles up in the corner of the cattle wagon, which so crowded we could hardly breathe. Eighty of us were traveling. We read the name of the railroad station, Auschwitz. It didn't frighten any of us. Nobody was horrified by it. The Nazi secret had been so well kept, so well protected that none of us, not one single person knew what that it meant. The last stop of this frightful journey and for many the last stop in their lives. It was a station similar to all others we had passed through. Suddenly I saw the big station clock. After days and nights in a cattle freight in which we had lost the counts of days and hours, that clock was a signal of normal life and the nightmarish confusion in which we lived for how long. We went back in the overheated wagons for hours. From time to time I stood on tiptoes and fascinated by the hands of the clock. It seemed that fate was pushing time, hours, minutes. It was already dark outside and the station was very poorly lit. By now I could hardly see the clock. The others couldn't understand my interest, because according to them, we are not seem to see the dirty station. It began to rain. The heat in the steaming cattle wagon was unbearable. We were gasping for air. All of a sudden the quiet dark railroad station was alive again. We had order, orders, whistles. The train started to move again. The hands on the big clock showed 1:45 a.m. The train was advancing very slowly and after a few minutes only it stopped anew. It was the last stop. We had reached the end of a journey which seemed to be the limit of human endurance. We had arrived with our destination. Everything was brewing here. The noise of heavy keys unlocking the enormous locks, the noise of heavy locked doors being pushed aside, night was black. But fresh air was pouring in, and for that moment it felt so good. Each coach was entered by a group of men with flashlights, wearing striped pants and jackets like jailbirds. They told us to get out and to leave all our belongings behind. Even standing as they request, we give the children to the older people. "Why?" the young mothers cried, "why?" "We cannot tell you, we aren't allowed to talk to you." Their voices were full of despair. "Please understand, please trust us. We cannot talk. We don't know where you are, you don't know where you are. Give your children to the old people." No one could understand the meaning of those words. Back home we were told we'll be taken to farms in order to work in the fields so as to ensure the crop while men were fighting in the war. Some children went with their grandparents, others went with their mothers. No mother would have left her child in somebody else's care no matter how imploring the voices of those strangers were. For days and nights eighty people, old, young, children had been crowded in an overheated cattle car without food, water or toilets. This stop meant the end of a nightmare and the mothers held their youngsters tightly. It was a very dark rainy summer night and it was very quiet. Fear of the unknown silenced thousands of people. Like thunder came the loud cutting German orders and they sounded like steel. On the black sky long red flames were lounging out of the Nazi ovens and the dark thick smoke from the air with the smell of burning flesh. Who would have thought in those moments that the flames, the smoke and the smell came from burning human bodies? Whose imagination would have gone as far as to dare think of such a gruesome possibility? We were pushed ahead, then we were ordered to stop and to run out five in a line. SS officers were lighting each face with a flashlight. The ones who didn't seem young enough or the ones who seemed too young were pushed aside to form another row. This way they separated men from women, older people from young people, mothers from children. The little children were torn from their mothers' arms, all started to scream, out of anxiety and fear. The mothers wanted to go with their children. Arms through them back in line brutally. Terror and confusion shut their mouths. The screaming of the people in the..."
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