Mrs. Roemerfeld - 1982?
Arrival at Budy
Tell me...
As we were walking.
tell me about um, what happened at Budy. You arrived there and...
Well, at first when I arrived uh, they, they told us you know, you have to take a body out of uh, the bunk in order to have a place where to stay. Well I uh, uh, we all said, "oh my God." You know, "we can't do that, how can we do it?" Well, we did it. We took a body out, everybody had to take a body out because ev...everybody in the barracks were dead, they were all dead. And uh, we took them out and then a truck came and took them away and we had to help put them on the truck yet. And uh, uh, there uh, there were some uh, Russian women sent together with us.
Jewish Russian women? RL: No, Gentile. Russian Ukrainians. What I was soon to found out, that that little piece of bread that I was getting a ration was stolen from me one night after the other. And we were just deteriorating to the worst uh, sh...we were in the worst shape that I could remember. And uh, finally my cousin says to me, "Well, if you're not gonna do something about it, you're not going to last another day. They're taking from you, you gotta take from them. So you can't just lay your head on the pillow." So what I did, I put the piece of bread within me and uh, uh, that didn't help because I fell asleep and they took it out from my body, not from under my pillow. Because they knew I was too naïve to uh, realize what's going on, so they figure, well, one more life won't matter. Well, I got together with my cousins, I had two cousins there, three actually uh, one died. And, uh...
One had died already in Birkenau.
No, she died. They took her into the gas chamber the day when they removed me from that Block 25th, when they took us back. And that was this Ronick's sister.
Oh.
Yeah, that was in the ghetto. And she happened to be a girlfriend of my brother and we were close together. So--and two other cousins were with me and we made up our mind we're not going to sleep, we're just going to stay awake. If we're going to do the same thing to them as they're doing to us. And we start doing it and finally they stopped, so they left us alone. So we got our ration to eat for twenty-four hours.
All you received was bread and tea.
And tea, leaves.
When did you--what time of the day did you get back?
In the evening.
At night.
Yes.
And in the morning they came in to wake you up?
Oh yes, early in the morning.
What time was that?
Five o'clock, four o'clock. It didn't matter if uh, it was one uh, the girl who was chasing us out wasn't German, it was a, a Jewish girl...
A Stubowa...
A Stubowa, yeah. And uh, then the Germans came out whenever they felt like it. And if one girl would stay out of line, we had to kneel for four hours in the mud before we went to work. And the same thing happened in Birkenau. We had to kneel in the mud for hours and hours and watch some victims hanging in front of us.
You saw them hanging.
Yes.
Because they were standing out of line.
No, because of different reasons. But we were punished for uh, stand...staying out of line. Like we were lined up five in the line and let's say the line was a little larger than uh, the five should be, we were punished. Or if uh, let's say, one girl missed the line-up and went to the restroom, that was a punishment for everybody. We had to kneel for that. So uh, it was uh, nothing unusual for punishment there. My body was beaten so many times. From head to toe I was black. I couldn't see no light skin at all.
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