Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

It was a day of leisure. It was obvious the camp administration was in disarray. They didn't know what to do with us. They were screaming senseless orders but didn't bother to see them carried out. But here I talk about this friend of mine who did not--I went to see ??? in order to take and wash her dress. I tried to explain to her that things were looking better. That imagine, go home that she would be with her husband again, that her brothers would be there too. Her whole system was so badly run down that she was beyond help. She said only, yes, yes. A weak smile then was on her lips, but the meaning of the words didn't penetrate her mind. Lately her digestive system didn't retain any food. She defecated in bed like a baby. I used to wash either her shirt or her dress one at a time. She lay on the bare straw mattress more dead than alive, only a moving skeleton. She was so young and had been so beautiful. She was tall and had had the body of a Greek statue. They didn't kill her because toward the end they didn't bother to transport sick people to the camps provided with gas chambers and crematoria. Fortunately some escaped death this way. But the majority that were taken to hospitals after liberation couldn't be helped in any way and they died after regaining of their freedom." I will--"Uh, I saw some red flags--it was uh, I was sitting in the, there thinking of what had become of us. Through the window in the distance at dusk I saw lots of freight trains with red flags. But those weren't Nazi flags or swastikas, just red flags. I then I thought that the twilight might, made the swastikas disappear. Later I found out that those were indeed the Russian trains and at the time we regarded the Russians as our liberators. Night had fallen over another day. We crowded into the bunkers by twos, not knowing how to figure out what was going on. We didn't dare to hope. The German women seemed to be in control still. We couldn't sleep and every group was reacting in a different way. The French girls always more optimistic by singing happy songs in a low voice. The Polish women who had been in the Nazi camp for a much longer time was less hopeful, less hopeful. They were sighing all the time and kept repeating that we are going to, that we were going to be killed. It was hard to trust fate, but I was young and when I fell asleep I thought that in spite of everything I would soon be riding the passenger train to freedom. But they were showing its first gleam when a Frenchwoman prisoner who was working in the kitchen burst into the door screaming at the top of her lungs "Up, up, wake up, it's over!" It was over at midnight. "All those guards who use to take you to work throughout the camp they are gone, we are free!" For a few seconds I thought I was still dreaming but the next moment it was, it was like lightening. The truth about what happened struck me. I jumped from the highest bunk and ran into the room of the SS women so fast that I almost fell through the door. Had they still been there I would have paid dearly for my audacity, but it was true. And the best SS uniforms lay abundant, the first sign for us that Germany had fallen. They had run away in civilian clothes in their cowardice. I was soon to learn more about their cowardice.