Rudy
Rudy and his family stayed in the Ileresiendstadt ghetto for almost two years. Then in 1944, they were told to prepare to move. In the selection below, Rudy describes what happened next.
In March or April, 1944, we got the dreaded notice that we had been selected for resettlement farther east. The train cars they
took us in were actually cattle cars. We entered the cars and sat on our baggage. There was not very much room between us and the roof of the cattle car. Our car had from 80 to 100 people in it so it was quite crowded. We were sifting tight on tight. We had some water and some food but no comfort whatsoever. The cars were sealed. We could not open them from the inside. The w indows were small, open rectangles. Perhaps we could have jumped off the train and run into the countryside, but we did not know ff anyone on the outside would help us. We thought most civilians would probably turn us in. We could not speak the Czech lang uage. It seemed better to go along with the SS and do what they wanted. By that time the war had been going on four or five years. We thought the end might be in sight and we would be liberated.
Our train left the ghetto at six o'clock in the evening. At night as we traveled, we heard gun shots. We did not know why these
shots were fired. After the war, I learned the SS troops were on the roofs of the cattle cars shooting past the windows todiscourage people from sticking their heads out. The train was moving at a fairly great speed. We did not know what country
we were going through. There was no stopping.
At four o'clock the next afternoon, we arrived in Auschwitz (Ow- Switch) in Poland. When the train stopped, we again thought
of trying to escape. But we knew that in Germany most Germans would turn us over to the local authorities for a reward of
money or food. We had no way of knowing ff the Poles would be any different. Someone would have to hide us or bring us food. We had no money to pay for our keep. So in the end, to keep our family together, we dropped any plans of attempting to escape.
The doors of the cattle car were yanked opened. The first thing we heard was shouts of, "Out, as soon as you can, out. Your
belongings you leave there" Despite this we grabbed what we could and assembled outside. Before us stood an immense rectangle of land surrounded by electrically-charged barbed wire. This was the Auschwitz death camp.
We were assembled in long rows and marched between the troops of the SS special death-head division into the camp. We were marched up and down a broad avenue for foue or five hours between posts of barbed wire with a huge sign, EXTREME DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE ELECTRICAL WIRES. We saw guard towers high above us. We saw men with machine guns inside them, but even then we did not know that we were in a death camp. Back and forth and back and forth, they just kept us in motion. As it got closer to one o'clock in the morning, we were more and more desperate. You could hear more and more cries for food.
Finally they set out large boxes. Everybody had to put in their valuables. Women and men were forced to strip off their wedding
rings and hand over their prized possessions like lockets of relatives no longer there. Whatever we had, we lost. Those who
did not give up their possessions willingly or quickly were beaten. Then we were separated into male and female groups and
walked to what they called the B camp of Auschwitz. The women's camp was separated from the men's camp by a wide road. There were about 24 barracks for men and the same number for women.
The men in charge were called barracks' elders or capos. They were German criminals taken from German prisons and sent to
oversee the people in the barracks. They made us walk by a crate again and put in our valuables. The only thing I had that they
wanted was a leather jacket. I told my father that I regretted having to give my jacket. He said, "Child, if we ever get out of
here, I'll buy you ten of these."
The bunks we slept in were in three tiers, lower, middle, and upper. The mattress was just burlap filled with straw. We had not
eaten at that time, and we were not to get anything to eat until the next morning.
The Daily Routine at Auschwitz
In the morning we got metal cups and spoons. We were each given two slices of bread and sometimes a pat of margarine or a little bit of marmalade. The coffee was toasted acorns ground up. It tasted terrible. The midday meal was potato soup with maybe a little bit of meat. Potatoes were the main ingredient and the kind of beets you normally feed to cattle. We were already
hungry in the Theresienstadt ghetto because we did not get enough to eat. In Auschwitz we were beginning to starve. In the evening we go t another slice of bread, some coffee, no marmalade, no butter, no nothing.
Every morning we had the counting of the prisoners. We were arranged in groups of five with just small distances between us.
The SS trooper would come by and start counting one, two, three, four, five. If he miscounted, he went over it again. Sometimes we stood there two hours. I kept wondering why none of us tried to overpower this lone guard who had just a small pistol. But what could we have done? There were guardposts on either end and high tension wires in between. We would all have been killed.
We did not know that Auschwitz was an extermination camp or that we could be put to death. We did know that there was always this sickly sweet smell in the air. We saw a large chimney belching smoke 24 hours a day. We saw German military ambulances with the Red Cross symbol on them going back and forth. The Germans had painted the symbol on the vehicles to hide their true purposes from the camp prisoners and from overflying airplanes. Much later we found out these ambulances were carrying military personnel or cyanide poison gas cannisters for use in the gas chambers.
We made the best we could of the situation. My younger brother had hidden a book by the German poet Goethe. We read it
twice. We read it three times. We memorized it. We quoted from it. We had a deck of cards. We played card games. There wasn't anything else we could do. Eventually my brother got a job laying a stone road. They gave him a half a portion of food more. But the work was excruciating.
Nothing grew in Auschwitz. There was not a bird, not a living thing, no grass or anything. A drainage ditch ran through the B
camp. Daily the SS guards sent prisoners from other camps to lay sod along the banks of this ditch. We were desperate for food. My mother remembered seeing in our small village the geese eating the wild grasses. She knew there were plants growing in the sod that we could eat. She gathered them and whenever we could we ate them. We were starving. We were dreaming of food. We were talking about food. We had not had enough to eat for three or four months already. Yet we hoped in 1944 that the end of the war was in sight.
At Auschwitz people died of huger because they had come to the camps already weakened. The people who had died were thrown or stacked at the very end of the barracks row underneath the watchtower. They were stacked like cordwood, naked, without dignity. Nobody to close their eyes. They were stacked four feet high. Every twenty-four hours a cart came. People were simply grabbed by the hand and foot and tossed on there. We knew they were taken to the crematory to be incinerated, but we still had no knowledge of the gas chambers and that people were killed or gassed in such numbers as they were.