Sonia Nothman - January 4, 1983
Conditions in Skarżysko III
Did they issue you clothing there? Or did you...
No. What kind of clothes? You have to, you, you sold your bread to buy your clothes. What could you do? Once they brought clothes from out of that people, probably they shot them and they brought to our camp. And they put them underground it was either summer or winter, outside, and they told us to go out from the barracks and they said they count to three. Later I found out everybody go and grab but I couldn't go out. I didn't care. So my sister cried and cried because I know friends of mine they went out and brought three--four dresses so they could live. Or pants or shoes, socks, anything. From dead people, of course. But I told my sister--she's now no longer, my sister. I couldn't go. I said, "I--I'll die!" You know, at a time like this, you don't care. You don't care if you are alive or if you're dead. And they brought in, I remember, they brought in clothes. My sister brought two dresses with this. She said, "You see, you could go, you could help my brother." I said, "Listen, I get my bread, I, I send it to my brother. I go and give it to him." But they don't give us clothes. No. People sold the soup. We, we, when we worked at Skarżysko at the mills, so the peels from the potatoes we throw it out. This went for the pigs. The people went down uh, through and they tried to grab this to eat. Oh. So the Germans, they could, shot them. They beat them to death. They did nothing. From--when I worked at the night shift, so if you have a potato, so we took, we got in big canister soup. So it was eleven o'clock we got a break and we could drink the soup. So nobody from us drink the soup. Because the girls who got potatoes, they saw they have a piece of bread in the soup, it was, it was impossible to eat. Of course for us, but for--not for others. So I used to take the canister soup into the barracks at night. I remember when I came in it was eleven, eleven-thirty, everybody was sleeping. The girls ran out from the ca...from the...And everybody, put everybody out. When I worked at the nightshift--I always did it, always did it--there were Jewish policemen. You know, I know already and I told them.
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