Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lola Taubman - December 22, 2009

No gas chambers, though. Not in Ravensbrück. A crematorium...

I don't know how they killed the people there.

They shot them.

Shoot them. So we only stayed, luckily, two weeks. First of all we arrived to Ravensbrück after Auschwitz, I saw--it was another place where we saw electric fences. They brought us here to kill us. So we were on the trains again and they took us to Mecklenburg by the North Sea. It was just a holding camp called--what's it called? Agi was there with me too, and a lot of people from Munkacs, it was Malchow. Did you hear that town?

Well, I heard from Agi.

Malchow. We stayed there in a holding camp. But typhoid fever and lice, it was just natural. So I was in a room with twenty-eight girls, almost everybody got typhoid fever except me and a few others. And, and, and there was uh, dysentery. And they took us to the, to the latrine and the whistle blew, blew to, to get back to the, the camp and my cousin said, "Hurry up, come on, let's go," I fainted in the, in the, in the latrine. When I came out the soldier was pointing a gun at me but for some reason didn't shoot me. I got back. I'm trying to think--that was still in Ravensbrück and I slept there were three, three kojas, koja.

Tiers.

What?

Tiers? Tiers?

I don't know.

Tiers.

Daughter: Different levels are called tiers.

Tiers, yeah, right, but they call them koja. And the woman next to me--I didn't know she was pregnant. She was giving birth and they didn't have scissors to cut the umbilical cord, so they tore it and they threw the baby away so that she should survive.

Did the baby survived? Was the baby born alive?

Oh, no, I don't even know where or when, but they threw it in the latrine.

But it was born alive?

I don't know, I don't know. I don't remember hearing--and if the baby cried they probably stopped it from crying.