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It happened at the workplace, one night my machine was kaput, so it was broke down. My master wasn’t there. I set down on the boxes, and due to the fatigue, exhaustion I fell asleep. Right then the executioner, the commander-in-chief came to verify us, his eyes were full-blooded. I could see he was out of his mind. He said: ‘You present yourself to me in the morning.’ I knew what it meant. When the sichta was over, so at six in the morning, when the other turn arrived, we were going in the concentration camp, the office was there, and one had to stand in front of it. It meant that he would put me at one meter distance from the wires. I could stand hunger, but I suffer terribly of being cold. I said to my colleagues: ‘Guys, I won’t stand there. I won’t bear that.’ They implored me. ‘Dear Bella, we will all bring you hot bricks.’ When we went to the factory, we got a boiler suit, a work clothes. They said: ‘We bring you a warm overall.’ I told them: ‘No, because I won’t bear it anyway.’ ‘Bella dear, he will put you in the bunker.’ There the water was high like this. I said: ‘It is all the same if I die this or the other way! I won’t go. Don’t be upset, we will all suffer, I’m one with you, but I don’t want to die like this. Believe me, I saw he had no idea, he forgot it a long time ago, you didn’t see how he looked like.’ Well, and that’s what happened. I didn’t go. We were watching all day if he was coming, but he didn’t. That’s how I escaped. I can’t imagine how anyone could bear it. I felt I couldn’t. I would have lost my balance because of tiredness and cold, I would have fallen on it [on the wire-fence]… I didn’t suffer at all from hunger during one year. Others suffered a lot. I never had a good appetite, and I ate every shit they gave us. I said: ‘You want to survive this, so you must eat everything.’ I wanted to live to see what would happen after that. This was my slogan. Especially when it was coming to the end.
Period
Interview
Bella Steinmetz