Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982

Description of Daily Routine II

This was after zahlappell?

After zahlappell. And there's a, a couple of girls there. And uh, slosh some of their water in the pot or in the smaller containers and handed over between so many lines--say per five, say every uh, every so often you'd get a few of the pots handed out. And everybody would get a community sip out of it and you would...

???

...hand it--pass it to the next person, and that was your breakfast. After that you'd go in. Uh, probably go toilets, you go to before, before you uh, line up for zahlappell. Uh, you'd go in, then they would select people for dif...various jobs. Nobody, nobody ever told you. Uh, they need a group of people uh, so that, to take a few. And they said, "No, I need a stronger one, I need a big one." So they would haul out another one. Usually the little one, if they needed for something more manual, they would shove the little one aside. After the third day at that barrack sixteen, they came to me. I don't know who it was, it was not the SS. It was one of the uh, Jewish women in charge. Put me in a barrack eight, and she said that's a, a Kinderblock--a child--a, a barrack for children. Well, well I, well I cried. I didn't want to go because already I have ties. And uh, but I'm forced to go. And uh, when I get there, there aren't too many. There is about a total of five girls. There was two thirteen-year-olds and maybe about three or four sixteen-year-olds. And I think I'm the only one that is fourteen-year-old. But there are, there're sisters and some of the mothers of those younger girls.


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