Judy Schreiber - February 1, 2013
A Child's Perspective on the Camps
Okay so, tell me, please, your history?
Um, starting with um, things, well, the, the way uh, I talk about camp is uh, or the way I think about camp is that uh, everything is seen from a child's point of view. I don't have like adult thoughts about it, I have thoughts about what happened to me that came later and that's been a life long journey of trying to figure those thoughts out. But the specific incidentses uh, that I recall are uh, you know, there's no timeline, there's no specific narrative. It's kind of um, a little dreamy...
Mm-hm.
And free association kind of things. Um, and they're basically the same things that have come up for me since leaving there. Which has actually been a long time.
Mm-hm.
But they keep reoccurring in my life and therefore I give them credence.
Mm.
Because if it was a transient memory of some sort and it would come and go and I never had it again, I--it's gone. But I keep having certain same um, emotionally tinged, some of them strongly negative, some of them actually positive uh, from that period. And um, I wrote down a couple of uh, the things uh, just to remind myself um, and that is that uh, interestingly enough one of the memories that I have, and I've had it since childhood, I found in a book as an actual occurrence and it freaked me out. It was like, that's what helped me to validate and believe in what I remembered. Uh, I remember standing--no, I wasn't standing, my dad was standing in a field with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people and it was a freezing, freezing rainy cold day. And the part that I recall is sitting on his shoulder, cause' I was very young, and holding on to his hair. He had like kinky, wiry hair, and uh, I just remember the part about how cold it was and my dad reassuring me and holding on to his hair and being in a line, and being scared. Those are the primary thoughts I had and that people were falling down. Well, fast forward, I don't know, sixty years later or something and I'm reading this book. And in the book there's a para...there's a chapter on the count...
Oh.
That they did in Theresienstadt, the Nazis in that idiotic, compulsive kind of way, emptied out the camp and put everybody outside, this was in November I read um, and decided to do a count. And uh, I did not know this at the time, but I have since then read that they took every prisoner that was there.
Hm.
Old, young, babies, whatever, lined them up between these two mountains uh, that were in Theresienstadt and began counting. And they would mess up the count, so when the count got messed up they would start again.
[sighs]
And I read that uh, I mean, this is, you know, many, many years later that people uh, were falling down dying.
Oh my.
Elderly and whoever, but when I read that I had such a, it was like I had goose bumps.
Mm-hm.
And I had like this instant recall, and I said to myself my god, I remember that that was when daddy was holding me on his shoulders and it was freezing cold. They had people standing out there, I read in the book, from 7:00 A.M. in the morning, all through the day until midnight that, that night and uh, hundreds died right on, on the spot...
Oh my.
Because they uh, especially the elderly and ones that were sick and whatever. And they never got the count.
Oh my god.
That--there was no accurate counts, so it was like a, a, it was like an, an some kind of an, I don't know, impulse driven bizarre-o activity that they went through at the cost of god knows how many lives.
Yes.
Um, and I just remember standing out there in the freezing cold rain holding on to my dad's hair for life and being scared.
Yes.
That, that, that was one of the clear things that I do remember. Uh, another thing uh, that I remember about the camp, and these are memories, the-- this memory in particular has been with me since I was very young, probably four and a half--five, whatever. There was a little hear uh, a little hill, like a nice little grassy hill, not to big, where I used to go and play. And across from the hill, on the other side of what was some kind of a street, there was a building, a small building. And uh, I remember sitting on that hill a lot 'cause uh, in the summer and spring there were dandelions there and it was just really nice. But at some point, I guess, and I don't remember exactly how or when, but I remember seeing wagons pulling up to this building. And it became, I became conscious of the fact that these wagons were hauling dead bodies there. Now, I did not know at that time what that building was, but I do remember these, like funeral wagons of some sort and just regular wagons. And I used to sit on that hill and watch these wagons bring bodies there. And at some point I think I understood that these people were dead. I don't think I ever connected in my mind their death to Theresienstadt exactly, because I didn't know that I was in a concentration camp. I did not know another way of living. I became conscious of how I lived in the camp and my memory preceding camp, you know, was slight. We lived in an apartment and I kind of remembered it, but my experiences seemed to have begun more, at least in my mind, from the time I was in the camp. So I didn't know that people really lived differently.
Hm.
I just thought, you know, that is the way we live.
Mm-hm.
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