Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Sonia Nothman - January 4, 1983

Square.

...square, yeah. Everybody should go. So what did I know, I went. And my younger sister, she's now no longer and my brother went. Like um, you know, I took a little coat, a spring coat on me. And they came with cars, trucks. And if somebody didn't want to go they had big dogs, German shepherds. I remember my sister, my younger sister. We stayed there for hours, hours. Brought something. Thought she want to bring it. And the German came and hit her so many times. And I screamed they should go away. He hit her once. Afterwards, after the--and during, in concentration camp when I met her, 'cause she went later. She told me she got four weeks, weeks. When she came home my mother put cold water. All swollen. They had those things and hit her once here on the back. She, she want to give us money or something. But then afternoon they took us away to Skarżysko. Me and my sister...And the men they took them on different. And my brother was to Skar...Skarżysko. But Skarżysko was ammunition factories there. And there were three barracks: A, B, and C. My brother they took to A and me they took to B, and my sister. And we were lucky because uh, we worked by potatoes. This is our lot. The first day they took us to barracks and what did we know. There is a few guys. I mean--older, from us they were young teens, but then to me they were old because they were--as a young. They had money. I found out later they went to the, to the ??? from the whole concentration camp and they ask him. They want to have a good job. Yeah they pay money and they send them. But what...We, we didn't know nothing. The following day they told us to go out, make a circle and they came three meisters from ammunition. The, they were am...they were ammunition factory. And my meister he was a Volksdeutsche. He had a mill from potatoes. From those potatoes they made flakes. And those flakes he put them in a soup. Like uh, when you put this thing in the soup, the soup got thick. And then it, it went to steam, potatoes. So I wa...so he came and took me and so I took my sister because we want to be together, and I didn't know what he's going to do with us, where he's going to take us. Later on we find out we were lucky. We worked in--some girls from our town they worked ammunition, they didn't last long.