Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

Auschwitz II

When we entered the shed Eva had given birth. The baby lay next to her covered with blood and mud. Drops of phlegm were pouring on his little body. It was a bloody little baby boy. We tore our shirts and made some wraps and diapers for him. His mother had high fever and was delirious. With the help of the doctor and the nurse and the mother was nursing the baby unknowingly, she remained unconscious for a whole week. We were sure she was going to die. The Blockältester, the head of this unit, said that there was no way to keep the baby any longer. If the German inspected the shed almost daily were to hear only so much as a child's cry, they would lock the shed with us inside and would set fire to it. It was the usual procedure in such cases. But one night, one of the lager personnel, non-German people who were in charge there, gave the baby outside and left him in the middle of the room. The Nazis were raving that their doctors couldn't have examined thirty-two thousand women to find who had just given birth, so they stopped searching. Miraculously the mother recovered. She was told she had a stillborn baby. I don't know if she believed it. By that time the Nazis let the other mothers know the crushing truth about their children who had undergone the fate of all the thousands of Jewish in the Nazi death camps. They had been gassed in death and burnt in the ovens which went into great flames in the black nights. Eva didn't cry, she didn't scream. She so talkative once was mute, she continued to work like all of us in a munitions factories. She was working, eating, even sleeping, but she wasn't living anymore. Nothing in her heart was alive. Her ??? was dead, her eyes dry. A year later she was freed. But never, never did she talk again about her child and her friends respected her silence." And this was part of the entrance in the...

Yeah.

...in the camp.


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