And we stayed there til August 24th.
On August 24th, 1943 we were put,
and this again I read in a book,
with 999 or 1,000 people
on this transport, went to...
we didn't know, destination unknown.
Now we know it was a concentration camp, concentration camp Auschwitz.
There's a lot of talk about people say, well, "we knew we were going to camp."
Well, as far as I remember, nobody, or if, very few people knew
we were going to a concentration camp,
it was always 'relocation to work for the Germans in Germany'.
And...
Do you remember what the train ride was like going to Auschwitz?
Yes. It was closed cattle cars.
Middle of the summer, many people in a car.
There was one pail in the corner where you had to go to the bathroom.
People were laying on their bags or whatever clothes that they had.
Because we did not have much clothing because we were picked up that night.
But people in the camp that had to report to work for Germany
and then went to the camp first there
and when they went they had a suitcase with blankets with them,
with blankets and this and that.
And they are still on display in Auschwitz
as well as in the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC.
And children crying,
we stopped a few times;
I don't remember what we got for food. No idea. The trip lasted about three days.
On August the 27th of 1943, we arrived in...
Auschwitz.
There, where the train stopped, the Germans hollered "Raus! Raus!"
and it meant get out! Get out! And everybody went out.
And at that moment, when we...
when I realized that we weren't getting our baggage,
when nobody else, whatever clothes they had,
nobody, we all had to get out, that they didn't get their luggage,
I felt something was wrong, some intuition and it can't be right -
we don't wind up getting the luggage.
And at that point we were separated, all the women,
the way I'm sitting here is where the German was standing
and all the women went to his right
and as the men walked one by one up to him
he would flick his finger to the left or to the right.
To the right would have been with the women,
to the left would have been with, later on with the so called ‘able bodies'.
My father came and he went this way, my brother came and he went this way,
and when I walked up to him he just stood there for...
you know, a couple of seconds,
not knowing which way to go.
He went this way.
Had he gone this way I would have been with the women.
He went this way, that meant I went with my father and brother.
We were loaded on trucks and taken from Auschwitz.
Auschwitz consisted of three camps, Auschwitz one, the main camp,
Auschwitz two Birkenau, the gas chambers, and Auschwitz three, Monowitz-Buna,
which was a slave labor camp,
and that's where wound up,
which was only about five kilometers from the main camp of Auschwitz.