Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Prior Knowledge of Camps
Yeah. When you were in the train going there, did anyone have any idea, did anyone talk at all about... Anyone know where you were going at all?
When we went there.
When you were in the train, when you were heading for Auschwitz.
No we didn't, we didn't know.
Nobody knew.
No, I mean, there were...
Yeah.
...you see, before this soci...when I, I uh, as I said, I was a--I had students. And I came home late to a student of mine and her mother was, you know, out of her mind. I mean, she, she was screaming, and, and, and hyste...absolutely hysterical. I think, for heavens' sake, I mean. I was very close to them. It was uh, it was a, you know, the situation in general being so bad...
Yeah.
...the ones who were together, you know, were very close to each other and this is what happened. She had a friend uh, uh, sister in Czechoslovakia...
Mm-hm.
...and she told me that the daughter of the sister--they had taken Czechoslovakia before Hungary, and uh, her daughter, the sister, she said, I loved so much and she understood I would have, you know, carried her under my, my heart. She said, like, I would have given birth to her. And uh, yeah, but her sister wrote to her that the Germans came and they took her daughter away and they don't know anything about what--then we, we knew what happened to, to them. They were caught nine thousand girls from Czechoslovakia between fifteen and twenty-five. And out of nine thousand only three hundred were alive. Now even some of them were taken to brothels in, in, in Russia and they had, you know, ta...tattooed, you know, Greeks who, I mean, were, were... which uh, I think later, even they had to thought that they were able to take it off, I don't know. And uh, again, she knew that her daughter was taken, she knew that she, she might never see her again. But we really didn't know what, you know...
Right, sure.
...about this, this monster was an apparatus of destruction. I mean this was such an enormous thing when I was looking there, I mean, this is of course shortened because I, I intended to write more developed or something. But uh, I was looking around myself and I was saying, "God, what mind was able, you know, to invent such as"--because it was miles and mile and it was very well organized. You know, that this crummy food what we got, nobody remained without food, they had for every single prisoner his portion of, of bread or whatever it was. And I heard once on a Canadian uh, this uh, front page calendar or so on, they had Canadians and they took them you know prisoners of war and then they considered them as spies and we were about ten and fifteen of them. And they were given the same treatment as--they didn't kill them, you know, in the gas chambers that they built...
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