Sonia Nothman - January 4, 1983
Skarżysko II
Mm-hm.
I remember there were benches, wooden benches and we lay there. So he used to come in twice a day to ask, see what we're doing. When we saw him we took up ??? nothing to do. And I remember I cried and cried. He got up once and he told us that a year ago his wife died. One of his sons is in the, at the partisans. German. One son is an SS. And one son is a meister there in the army. "What can, what can he do?" he said. We should--we young, we survive and everything. And then when, in a few weeks later the potatoes came, and we worked. We worked twelve days, twelve hours a day. And when the shifts changed from Sunday to Monday, we have to work eighteen hours. We worked eighteen hours. We have potatoes to eat. And we have, we put the flakes in sack, in paper sack. See, that's what our job, this was our job. If the flakes came out from the sack, we would have to put them down. So a certain amount of uh, weight should be...And then the special people who saw those flakes and they put them, sent them to different barracks. So we got taken and we didn't have any sheets like here, no straw or nothing. So we took home sacks, sack, those paper sacks. And I got on my bank uh, bunk bed, I went in and I slept. In uh, winter we didn't have shoes. So we took the papers with string and that's what we wore. I found out that paper's warm, on the snow. Because I found out later that uh, I, my brother is in ???. And my brother's not the kind of guy he should go and he should grab and this. No, he would, he wouldn't survive. Nothing. So we got two pieces of bread, me and my sister. So we ate one portion and one portion...
[pause]
...and the other portion we took to my brother is all. Sunday I went to my brother and I got seven portions of bread. I sold that.
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