Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Ignorance of German Civilians
Mm-hm.
...and this helped us survive. You know, this was the, the thing that helped us survive. Besides this, this foreman made sure to it that we get the same food the Germans get. It was very, very little. I mean, one couldn't live on it. But uh, and when it was a bomb alarm or so on, they, they throw us out in the fields and they have their, you know, carrots and peas and so on. And we used to pull them out, you know, and eat them, with the dirt as it was, you know. But we did eat those uh, things. And they run away, ??? found out that their fields, you know, are completely, I mean, devastated. And uh, after six months the Russians came closer. You already could hear, you know, the bombardments and so on. They evacuated us from, from Reichenbach.
This was what, in early January, February?
It was, no, it was the 28th of February.
February.
And we walked. Everything was on foot. We, we ??? that women like this and we walked the first day thirty-six kilometers, this means twenty miles, without resting, without sitting down. And many dropped on the way there. A friend of mine asked one of the guards who were again the SS who knew us to kill her and he said "No, I will throw you in the ditch there and you'll die of frost and, and starving because I'm not going to, to waste a bullet on you." So we carried her. We slept once in a, in an abandoned factory, you know, with broken windows. Once we slept in uh, in barns. We were thousands I think in this transport. And we, we slept in a barn where at least it was on the hay, on the...
Yeah.
...you know, and it was warmer. And uh, they gave us a hot soup in the morning. As I said, some of the people, most of the people from the countryside, they couldn't, they cou...they didn't understand what happens to us. But uh, many went "Tsk, tsk, tsk," and, uh, I don't know if they all knew or whatever, they gave us a warm soup--I don't know what it was...
Yeah.
...in the morning. So we went on. And we slept in a, in a theater in one night. Anyway, the fifth day we arrived in Parschnitz, which was I would say worse than Auschwitz even. They had gi...they gave us only three boiled potatoes and, I don't know, three hundred grams is a half a pound of uh, of bread.
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