Tag #135373 - Interview #101499 (Gotterer Borbala Piroska )

I was in Auschwitz two times. The first time I only stayed there a week, I think, they put us in some barracks, and after a week we marched to the doctor. We went to the train station, and from there we were transferred to Krakow. The camp there didn't have a name. Everybody told us we should be happy, because there was no gas chamber there and they didn't kill people. They told us to go there and stay there for as long as we could. It wasn't ok there either, but there was no gas chamber and there were barracks and there was better food than in Auschwitz. They cooked some surt hay soup, from thorns and thistles, and that's what we had. In the evening we had a small slice of bread, but very-very thin, bread made from bran: it was about five cm long and 5 mm thick. That was the bread for all day; except that we had coffee, a black liquid which contained who knows what. They put bromide in the water we drank, so that we would be calm and not rebel. We only found out that after the liberation. All people were like animals, passive. In Krakow, we sometimes had a teaspoon of marmalade on the slice of bread, and we had a soup in the after noon, made from cabbage and margarine, and it wasn't bad, it tasted like soup and it was food after all. This is what we ate very day, it was autumn and the cabbage was in season. The camp had connections with the Polish resistance from Krakow and they sent this and that with the carts with the hay for the militiamen's, the camp's general staff, horses, who enjoyed riding: of course, they had horses, just as fat as they were, only we were so thin. And they sent hay from the city and under it they hid sugar, flour, marmalade. They cooked and gave us to eat very quickly so that no one would see anything.