They rotated us at work. One of us would cut the hair off the corpses, another would pull out the teeth, the third would throw the corpses on the fire. So the work was varied, you could say. Throwing the corpses on the fire was very hard work. When you threw those bodies for eight hours, you were terribly exhausted. Then, the next day, another group would do this, and I’d have a different job.
I knew this fate [gassing] awaited me, too. But I had a spark of hope that maybe, maybe I’d survive all this. There was talk that the Germans were near defeat on the Russian front, and that the front was moving closer. When they evacuated us from the camp, I prepared my escape. I had gathered civilian clothes and wore them under my camp uniform. As we marched, I gradually stripped off my uniform and, at a moment when the SS was shouting at us to move faster through a crowd of bystanders, I jumped into the crowd and then into a bomb crater where I hid until it was dark. Then I made it to a house where I was lucky: the host was already feeding other prisoners who had escaped.
I still have all this before my eyes; there is no forgetting those things. All these innocent people–people from all over Europe, from Hungary, France, Belgium, Holland, Greece, also Germany–destroyed. I lost my whole family–my parents, a sister and a brother.
