Describe the journey.
Describe the Journey Describe the Journey?
Well, we left Westerbork on December 14th,
there were ten cars
and approximately, I don't know how big the group was,
but approximately every car had about 100 people,
sometimes less, sometimes more,
100 people in the cattle car. There were two pails,
one we could use as a bathroom and one for drinking water.
There were older people and there were young people
and there were children and there were men by themselves,
whose wives already had gone,
and we could all have a loaf of bread before we left
and then we left,
and I tell you,
I couldn't wait to be in Auschwitz, to already...
this... this was so indescribable, you know,
people were hysterical, old people were crying
and it was terrible.
We left on a Tuesday morning
and we arrived in Auschwitz on a Thursday morning,
and they tore open the doors of the cattle cars
and there were SS with dogs
and we were beaten out of the cattle cars,
they had trucks on the side
and they separated the men from the women,
the mothers and children and the older people
and they loaded them up on trucks
and that was the last I saw of my husband.
He died in March '44 of Typhoid in Monowitz,
it was one of the camps outside Auschwitz.
Out of this group the women were separated
into young ones and old ones.
Out of the group of women they took 100 women, married,
between the ages of 18 and 45, and 25 men.
My cousin, who was my age but was not married,
went with the other group.
We later learned that they went straight to the gas chambers,
the rest of the group.
We started walking,
because by that time the tracks didn't go to the gas chambers right away,
there was still a walk from the train station
to Auschwitz or Birkenau.
We had to leave our luggage on the train station
and they told us we would get it later,
so when I came out of the car,
in the car next to me was woman my age,
I had gone to school with her,
to kindergarten, elementary school, high school
and then we lost track of each other.
She went with another group and I'm in another group,
so when we came out of the cattle cars, she grabbed my hand,
when we were waiting with those 100 women and she said,
"I don't know what's going to happen to us,
"but whatever is going to happen, we are going to stay together",
and so we started walking
and all along the way we saw men in striped suits,
some looked like skeletons, you know,
and she said to me, "where are we going?"
And I said, "I don't know, we are going to little houses."
She said, "well, this looks like a prison",
and it didn't even dawn on us that this was Auschwitz concentration camp
and we walked about 15 minutes and then we came by the gate of Auschwitz,
with the sign "arbeit macht frei".