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Oral history interview with Agnes Sassoon

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.1285.34 | RG Number: RG-50.149.0034

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    Oral history interview with Agnes Sassoon
    Transcript
    Agnes Sassoon Reel 1.
    Agnes, can you tell me something about your early background,
    your family background, and the area in which you lived.
    Yes.
    I remember my darling parents, my father, my mother.
    My father was a school professor who was very unfortunate.
    Because in the days that he lived in Hitler time,
    he never could really teach properly.
    For a long spell of time, he was always changing jobs,
    and he was always looking where he is still
    allowed to teach for a Jew.
    Later I realized that I did not know
    he had many friends, Gentiles, who helped him.
    One was Dr. Barasch and many others.
    Solomon Michael, in Israel he lives now,
    he helped, I think, for Hannah Szenes even.
    But the thing is, you see, I'm not very clear of that,
    only what my father told me about this.
    Well, I remember, start to remember everything,
    every single thing, except I can't remember never
    timing and dates.
    It's blank for me.
    So therefore when Dr. Barasch suggested--
    he read my story in Hungarian novels and little bits
    in origin--
    that I don't want to have it historical because I wouldn't
    be able never to live up to it.
    It was just a child's story.
    Where exactly were you born and when?
    I was born in Czechoslovakia in a small town.
    I don't know.
    It was not maybe a small town or a big village.
    It was on the border, not very far from the Hungarian border.
    What was the town called?
    [? Villach. ?] I think now it's Carpathian Ruthenia.
    What year were you born?
    What was your--
    '29.
    '29, 1929.
    But my story was very, very funny with my years, really.
    Because as you know, there was everything
    about children and grown ups. Everywhere, all through my life,
    as you see me, I'm not an old lady.
    But sometimes I had to be older.
    Sometimes I had to be younger.
    But that was really the true time.
    When I was about 5 and 1/2, I very clearly remember that
    in Pressburg, Bratislava was Czechoslovakia.
    Slovakia belonged to Czechoslovakia.
    My father was teaching then in a gymnasium, Hungarian gymnasium.
    They called the top class teachers professor
    because they were higher up than teachers.
    There were no doctors, but they went higher up than teachers.
    They called them a broad professor.
    Therefore, sometimes people find it strange
    that they called, in Israel, my father Professor [INAUDIBLE]..
    Because it's not like a professor with a doctorate,
    but it's a higher degree than an ordinary [BOTH TALKING]
    Did your mother work?
    My mother, no, she didn't work.
    But she was a great intellectual.
    She played the piano.
    Did you have any brothers and sisters?
    I had a brother who was around three years older, 2 and 1/2,
    three years older than me who was a brilliant boy.
    He was shot in the Danube.
    He was hidden with antifascist in Rozsadomb,
    where that was a hill, a luxury area in Budapest.
    They had a bunker there.
    There were army people, Jews and Gentiles who did not
    want to obey the fascism.
    Somebody went and told about this bunker.
    So they shot everyone, nearly, except one army officer
    was alive.
    My mother told me so later, because I
    didn't see them many years.
    He could definitely testify that my brother was
    shot in the Danube with the others and was dead.
    He was the only one that escaped because they
    thought he was dead.
    He was a good swimmer, and he came out.
    How old was your brother when this happened?
    Well, when I was taken away, I was 11.
    He must have been about 13 and a half,
    .5, 13, just after his bar mitzvah.
    How much longer after this happened
    did your parents find out?
    Did they know immediately?
    No, after the war, they were looking for him.
    Can you tell me about--
    I'll tell you how it happened, why.
    Because they wanted to see us safe, my parents.
    The time from the time that I went to the German nursery
    school, when Hitler came to the other side of Czechoslovakia,
    which belonged, they called it Petrzalka,
    and in German, I think, Grunau.
    I wouldn't swear, but I think Dr. Barasch
    researched that for me.
    He was a historian and a broadcaster.
    So at the moment, you're living in Czechoslovakia.
    Yes.
    You're at kindergarten.
    I was nagging my mother because they came and told us that we
    wore dirndl with green aprons.
    My mom didn't have, and she had to make it through the night.
    What was this?
    A form of--
    Uniform.
    --national costume.
    --national costume, like the Germans have.
    As I went and I was standing, I was very small.
    They were children from the school.
    It started in Europe only at age of six you had to go to school.
    Up till then, it was a sort of nursery.
    So the older children who went already to the school,
    they stood behind, and the little ones stood before.
    When Hitler came, I didn't know it was Hitler.
    We had to go across the bridge from Pressburg,
    which was still Czechoslovakia.
    It was researched by Dr. Barasch that he really was there
    by the Statue of Masaryk.
    They picked up the third child from me, or something like that.
    I can remember vividly his face and his hand across.
    In a Nazi salute?
    In a Nazi salute with some officers by the statue.
    He was shouting something madly about the statue.
    I know the statue, after it came down, because my parents told me
    later.
    I heard even Jude, Jude.
    I didn't know what it meant, but it
    meant that all the Jewish children from those schools
    should be removed.
    What year would this be?
    That was in '38.
    I wouldn't very clearly remember.
    But my father did.
    He was alive.
    He died 11 years ago, about and my mother five years ago.
    So they could tell me the things which I did not know.
    Because otherwise, I wouldn't be able clearly to know it.
    After that--
    You left this kindergarten, then.
    --we left this kindergarten.
    It took some time.
    I don't know.
    And We went to this Jewish-- there were Jewish-German school
    in Pressburg.
    Because we spoke German, Czech, and Hungarian.
    Yeah?
    My father took very much attention that we should know,
    as my brother was older, we all should know another language,
    German and English.
    He respected very much the British people.
    He told us stories how polite they are, how nice.
    My heart was always near to Britain,
    though I never dreamed that I will be ever involved with it.
    It's true, I never knew that will happen.
    But it was in me embroidered that they're very
    respectful and very tolerant.
    How long did you stay at the Jewish school after you--
    Well, I must have off and on.
    I was all the time there till, maybe, age of 10, 11.
    I really started a bigger school,
    that small school there in Bratislava.
    But in the between, I disappeared for months
    when we didn't have what to eat.
    Then they used to send me to my grandmother, which
    was my mother's parents.
    They had a vineyard in a village, which also belongs now
    to Russia.
    I don't even know exactly how they call that village now.
    It was [? Nagyszolos. ?]
    They sent you from Bratislava to stay with your grandmother?
    My grandmother, right, because in those smaller places,
    they had more food.
    Even the gendarmes, they knew the families
    and whatever while they were, they
    had some respect to the older people, to the older families.
    Somehow in the vineyards, I don't know, I was hiding.
    That picture, actually, must come
    from there, which is in my first edition of the book.
    Were you aware of what was happening
    in Germany and throughout Europe in any way?
    We were aware, because I tell you why.
    I now recall it exactly like I did then.
    Maybe we were not knowing exactly what,
    but we know that when our parents told
    us to shut up or not to cry because we will be killed
    by the Germans or we will be taken away,
    we did so except when we had some terrific pain.
    Then they gave us some pills.
    All children and grown up who were troublesome, they got some.
    I knew it from my parents.
    Were there many soldiers or SS on the streets?
    Well, not in Czechoslovakia.
    I can't recall it.
    When I went back to Pressburg at the beginning,
    I didn't put very much attention on these things.
    I just knew that we are different than other people,
    and we have to be in this Jewish school.
    Then my father couldn't teach anymore,
    and he had to have some other job.
    Struggling here and there, they sent
    me and my brother between the two grandparents,
    hiding and eating and coming sometimes for me.
    It was also dangerous, I think, because it was not safe,
    anything.
    Finally, finally, when I was about age of 11,
    they took me away.
    We were living a while in the Jewish area in Budapest.
    You left Bratislava at this time?
    Yes, by this time, we were helping for other refugees.
    My father used to help for other refugees, not only
    Jewish but Gentiles who have to come over in desperation.
    We had a toilet outside because it was a yellow star house.
    We couldn't walk out when we wanted to.
    There was restricted time.
    But my father was very courageous.
    He did walk out without the star.
    There was a grocer in the house who was not a Jew.
    He was a Gentile.
    He was giving on points food for people,
    because they were some sort of ration.
    Rations.
    Rations, and for Jews were less.
    For my father, he put away all these side things.
    My father was a gorgeous, lovely person.
    He was also very democratic.
    Did you have to wear a yellow star?
    Yes.
    Where--
    I remember my mom sewing it on my coat.
    I had a family coming, we had a family coming over
    from Czechoslovakia whose parents were killed already
    somehow.
    I don't know, a young man, about 17, and a girl in my age.
    We didn't have money much, because my father worked
    off and on and not in teaching or anything.
    His friends gave him some jobs sometimes, research,
    or I don't know what really.
    I do not know, and very hard, it was, to survive.
    But this girl in my age, it was somehow a acquaintance family.
    The toilets were out.
    The neighbors were fascists, Hungarian Nyilas,
    they call it, Arrow Cross.
    Before, they didn't show it.
    But they would go and tell on us if they would see somebody go
    out to the toilet, a stranger.
    So we'd hidden these people in our small flat, which was not
    our real flat, you know?
    My father used to take out everything after them.
    Many Gentiles and Jews like this came over.
    He could place everyone with some underground help.
    There was also a French diplomat, Mr. Henri [INAUDIBLE],,
    I think.
    I can't express it how, but it was Henri [INAUDIBLE]..
    He worked on the French embassy.
    I do know he did help a lot for my father
    to give food and things for these people who
    were hidden there.
    How did your father get involved in doing
    this kind of [BOTH TALKING]
    Well, you see, he was going to school
    with many famous people in his age, Hungarians, Gentiles, and
    Jews, in his age.
    Dr. Barasch was, for instance, one.
    He was much younger, 10 years at least, than my father.
    That's a different story, though.
    So I don't want to [INAUDIBLE].
    He wrote a book that Horthy did send him
    to Turkey for the Allies, to speak to the Allies,
    to give himself up.
    His wife has the manuscript.
    Maybe you could talk to her.
    He found it out only after the war that they sabotaged him.
    Because Churchill said yes.
    After 30 years, he found the papers of Churchill, the reply.
    They sabotaged him away, and he had to come back to Horthy
    with empty hands.
    Otherwise, the Allies would have Hungary
    and the Germans couldn't occupy it.
    You see, these sort of stories, which I knew
    from Dr. Barasch and my father.
    But Mrs. Barasch, Lola Barasch, is working,
    I think, still part time BBC, Hungarian broadcast,
    and she has these papers.
    That was very intriguing because I met them by chance
    and he recognized me from my father's picture.
    You tell me you were living in a yellow star house.
    Yes.
    How did you come to be living in a yellow star house?
    Every Jew had to live in a yellow star house.
    Had you previously lived in a normal house within Budapest?
    Yes, a very nice--
    well, the thing was, really, I can't remember,
    when I was very small, that I had a Kinderfraulein as well,
    a so-called nanny that was before that.
    Later, I remember we had a nice flat, so-called really luxury
    with central heating, but we had to move.
    We were a short while there.
    I think after the war, my parents got it back.
    Were you surprised at the condition of the yellow star
    house compared to where you'd lived before?
    No, I just took it how it was.
    My mom was a very good housewife.
    She made everything go far, even to people who
    were strangers in her house.
    My father didn't do it for payment, for nothing.
    Sometimes, he really didn't have the money even to buy the bread.
    So that Gentile gentleman in the house in that road,
    he gave him on credit.
    Mind you, he was alive after the war.
    My father tried to reward him, though he
    didn't have much money, but with other things.
    Ay?
    Were you in a school in Budapest?
    Yes.
    Did you go to school?
    In Budapest, again, my brother was going in a proper gymnasium
    because he was very clever.
    It was numerus clausus, but with connection of my father
    and with his cleverness, he could
    get in in that school, proper school.
    But I couldn't because maybe I was not so--
    my life-- he was older, a bit, you see?
    It was all messed up.
    I was not ignorant, but it was not
    worth to fight for me for this number
    to get in in some, because I was only about 11,
    between 10 and 11 when we lived really in this yellow star
    house.
    Right?
    So at 11, they took me already from the school away.
    That school was a school where all the Jewish children
    from small till larger.
    It was a synagogue converted also in school
    also in synagogue.
    And I heard after the war they used the Red Cross to put out
    the list there to look for the lost families, which I never
    appeared.
    The reason was because major charter took me out from
    the hospital in a private house in [NON-ENGLISH],, registered.
    I was never properly registered, which he regretted very much.
    Can you tell me now about the day you went to school
    and came out--
    Yeah.
    --and was taken by the Germans.
    Well, first of all, every day we were
    prepared of things like that.
    You didn't know what can happen to you on the street when
    you had no curfew, even so.
    Had you had experience--
    I had been prepared, yes.
    --an anti-Semitic incident?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    It is the next door neighbor, where I
    saw that they are good, really.
    They lived always in that house, which
    became a yellow star house.
    They didn't move out somehow.
    But every movement, they told on us.
    There was a sort of housekeeper or what in the house.
    How you call it?
    They look after the houses?
    Housekeeper.
    A housekeeper, trustee.
    Well, you didn't know whether she is bad-willed,
    or anti-Semitic, or not.
    We didn't know that.
    Actually, she wasn't too bad.
    Because when this lady and this couple
    went and said something that some strangers are in our flat,
    she didn't take notice.
    She could have gone to the SS and said so.
    I tell the truth, you know, good and bad.
    But in other hand, we didn't realize it,
    my parents told me, until very much
    later that the young son who was going to my father's
    school once, and if he didn't understand something,
    he came in, even in the yellow star, to ask him,
    he was a Arrow Cross, and he was a dangerous Arrow Cross.
    He would tell of his own mother, maybe.
    Can you explain Arrow Cross?
    Arrow Cross is like the fascist, the movement of the fascists,
    like SS in young and in big.
    The Hungarian police.
    The Hungarian SS.
    And all what I can recall and remember,
    before they took me away, that one day, after all, my father
    made some research and teaching part-time.
    Because his Gentile friends tried to always make him--
    they knew what a great man he was and tried
    to make him some work and private, to show something,
    to make a living.
    One day, their own children, which he was teaching, quite
    big children, they were kicking him on the street
    and said Jew and Jew and Jew.
    He was all full with blood.
    I just came back home, because the curfew time and all.
    But I never can forget and forgive that, you see.
    Therefore, I always felt Czechoslovakia,
    though, whatever it might be now, was very democratic.
    Though my father was studying in Hungary,
    in high schools, university, teaching profession
    and everything, I remember Budapest.
    Later, I never I never could take such a liking,
    because I always had this memory before me,
    not hate, just this memory.
    What did you do when you saw this happening to your father?
    Well, I couldn't do nothing.
    Because funnily enough, in those days,
    children had more brains and more initiative than now.
    I can see intelligent educated children from good families
    today.
    They wouldn't be able to stand for it, even in age of 20 or 21.
    Then a six-year-old could take in things,
    you know, 10 year old.
    That it's something that you just--
    I run home and I said to my mom.
    I know that they had a couple of friends.
    But they couldn't do nothing.
    So you just couldn't do nothing.
    Then when there were the curfews for the air raids,
    we used to go down to the cellar.
    Then the Arrow Cross and the Germans came in,
    a blonde German, I never forget, very tall, very good-looking.
    He was smiling all the time.
    Everyone who just moved, he beat him there.
    Not in-- that was in Budapest in the cellar already.
    if a child wanted to cry, as I told you,
    they gave him a pill or her.
    The parents, it was very hard.
    We took down blankets from the flats.
    They raided the flats while we were down.
    One day I needed to go to the loo very much.
    I was always somehow a natural child.
    I said to this smiling German, because he was so deceiving,
    to let me go up to get some things and to go up.
    They said to go.
    I couldn't believe it, and he let me go.
    I was looking in his eyes, and he let me go.
    I came back with blankets and things like that.
    You know, incidents like that, I can remember in the beginning.
    Then my mother always made a very great point,
    that whatever we didn't have money, or what she had,
    they sold slowly.
    They bought good shoes, good warm clothes,
    and thermal underwear.
    If we are taken somewhere, then at least we have that.
    But as you know, later that was in vain.
    Because when they found you in good clothes, they took it away.
    Can you tell us now about the morning
    you went to school dressed in these--
    Well, I just went well-dressed, warmly dressed.
    When lunchtime we came out, it was a bit of commotion about it.
    Because we didn't know exactly what.
    But a few of these ones were standing before the school.
    Some parents had smaller children,
    or they lived further than I did, not in the area.
    And the parents used to wait them.
    That was always the time when the Jews could go out,
    of course, because otherwise it's not allowed to wait.
    There were about three, four of these trucks,
    I don't remember exactly how many
    trucks, and German soldiers, I did
    see it was Arrow Cross and Germans.
    They were working together.
    A very beautiful lady, Aranka, later, I knew,
    she was fat, but beautiful.
    Some I can't tell you.
    It's always before me.
    She had beautiful, made up nails and everything,
    blonde hair and blue eyes with yellow stars.
    She came by.
    When the people started to make a run for it,
    and they were beaten, and in the air,
    shots and all sorts of things.
    Then they were put on these trucks.
    They said to the children, the children
    should go in a separate truck because they come to school.
    They will have a good time and food and everything.
    They believed, you see?
    The parents let them go, whoever waited them,
    because they thought it's better.
    This lady Aranka, later I knew her name is Aranka,
    she hold my hand and she said to me, I was a little nobody.
    She told me, you come with me and don't go with those.
    Come with me on that truck because she was pushed.
    That was a German couldn't understand, maybe, Hungarian.
    I don't know.
    Anyway, she pushed me on that truck.
    I was really quite hidden there.
    Because they were all grown ups pushing each other.
    She told me that, look, if they ask you,
    you say you are very small.
    I was very small and very tiny, really.
    I didn't even look 11, you see.
    But she said you say you are 13 or 14,
    because then you can work when you get somewhere.
    She kept shielding me all the time.
    Then we went to a camp and we were in the mud.
    I remember so many bad things.
    I don't know times or days.
    Then we went to this big place where they collected
    all the Jews for the marches.
    But that was after we suffered already
    a couple of weeks or a week somewhere in a camp
    with the Arrow Crosses.
    Do you know what year and approximately when in the year
    it was that you were taken from school?
    The year, it was just a year before the war ended I think.
    1944.
    Yes.
    It was luckily late, you know?
    Is it near to the end of that--
    Yes, I think.
    Because I was about a year in the camp, 11 months or so.
    But that must have been well before.
    Because we must have been in that pre-camp and walking weeks
    or months, I don't know.
    It must have been weeks.
    So you were put into the trucks and then taken--
    We were taken to a camp.
    Because the children, I don't know.
    They were taken maybe straight to burn.
    I don't know or what.
    But that was still in Hungary.
    The grown ups, they were taken in a camp,
    in a muddy camp somewhere.
    There were a lot of Arrow Crosses around,
    and they had to go out to work.
    One of the Arrow Cross told me to have a run
    and to go back to my parents.
    But I didn't believe him.
    Agnes Sassoon, Reel 2.
    Agnes, you were telling me how you'd
    been taken to a camp on the outskirts of Budapest.
    Yes, I don't know the place.
    It was a terrible muddy place, as I explained before.
    They showed good will, some of the Arrow Cross,
    and he saw that I'm really a child.
    But I went to work, what they had
    to do I don't know, take water out from puddles,
    things, rubbish things.
    They didn't need the work to have done.
    They just didn't know what to do with us at that time.
    They didn't have their orders, probably later I realized it.
    I didn't know.
    This Aranka was with me.
    So it was OK, fine.
    He told me to have a run for it.
    Because when they take us to this [NON-ENGLISH],,
    I don't know, they called it a place where it was a big great
    place like arena, yes, and they collected--
    The sports--
    --the people-- sports, yeah--
    collected the people to take for marches, that I can escape,
    and so on.
    I don't know.
    Maybe he might have been.
    See, but I didn't know where I am,
    and I didn't know how to get home.
    I had an offer later as well like that, on my march.
    But I didn't take it up.
    Because I thought myself that I'm safe until I
    am with this lady.
    I wouldn't know where to go in the mud
    and where I would be picked up.
    I didn't trust.
    I didn't know whether he's serious.
    He was always drunk, anyway, that fellow.
    They always drunk.
    They always drunk.
    I don't know what they drunk, what they drunk all the time.
    How were you feeling at this time?
    Did you think much about your parents?
    I was just worried that my parents
    came to the same situation.
    Funnily enough, and I must tell you, in all sincerity,
    I always was worried, when I was worried, not for myself.
    I was worried for my brother and I was worried for my parents.
    I knew how much my father can do and what a great man he is.
    It's true he saved my mother, because my mother was
    taken by the fascists.
    He, with a few people, as SS dressed,
    saved her from the group.
    You found out all this after the war?
    After war, yes, yeah, and he was a very brave man.
    But he couldn't save his own son,
    because he sent him to a safe place with false papers,
    because they falsified like mad the papers with stamps.
    When he was arrested later in that cellar,
    that belonged actually to a relative of ours.
    Because the Royal Hotel belonged to the [? Korany ?] family
    and pastor.
    Mr. [? Korany, ?] he's the one of the managers
    of the [INAUDIBLE] Street Hotel.
    He is a very educated man.
    The SS cellars ran in his hotel.
    My father was very familiar with that hotel,
    even with the cellars.
    He gave orders for the Arrow Cross to let him out,
    to say what?
    I want to catch a few Jews more.
    He was beaten to death.
    It was dark, because it was curfew.
    They let him out.
    He collapsed in a policeman's arm.
    He told the policeman that he's in a safe house,
    in a Spanish safe house.
    He has a letter to take him there.
    He took him there.
    But he couldn't save my brother because he sent him
    with false papers to a family, and this family
    was very rude to each other.
    My darling brother came home and he
    said, Dad, Mom, whatever will happen to me, I don't care.
    I'll be with you.
    Because I just can't stand the man bashes the woman.
    He'd never heard such a thing.
    He came home, and that was it.
    Then my father and other people tried, with Gentile friends,
    to put him in that bunker, because he
    was much taller than his age.
    I was smaller.
    He was taller, you know?
    Unfortunately, I told you previously
    what happened with the bunker.
    The camp you were taken to on the outskirts of Budapest,
    this sports stadium, how long did you
    stay there approximately?
    I wish I would have known.
    Everybody asked me.
    I don't know.
    I suppose maybe a couple of weeks.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    It might have been 10 days, a couple of weeks.
    They probably collected there.
    And then we went back to the outskirts of Budapest,
    where they took all the Jews to marching to [NON-ENGLISH]..
    [NON-ENGLISH] was the border of where they took people
    to Germany.
    Aranka was still in a very good state.
    She could look after herself.
    I think she had a bit of money to give for these fascists
    there, and she could get things which she wanted a bit, right?
    When we started to march, then, as I described it in the book,
    some days it was raining, the blankets were wet,
    the clothes were taken away from us,
    which was a good shoe, or good this, or good that.
    Sometimes we got a soup somewhere,
    either on pigsties or outside on a football place,
    or whatever it should be for many people, you know?
    I don't know how many hundreds or thousands.
    On my way, again, once happened in a town,
    that one of the Arrow Cross, no German, an Arrow Cross told me,
    little girl go on.
    Get out of the queue.
    You ask someone, and they will take you somewhere
    to your parents' home.
    I didn't know where my parents were, if they were at home
    or not.
    I, again, didn't take the chance.
    Because as long as I was with Aranka, I was all right, I felt.
    You know?
    I didn't know what I'd find.
    It was an instinct.
    How often did you get food on this march?
    We were very hungry.
    I think once a day, maybe.
    What kind of food?
    Well, they made some soup on the way, usually and raw bread,
    sort of bread things.
    What I can remember, when we went to [NON-ENGLISH],,
    we had more food than later by the Germans because this peasant
    people, don't know, gave something probably to cook.
    I don't know.
    They had to cook.
    They have an organization.
    They organized it among themselves,
    and they were cooking some soups.
    I don't know.
    Rubbish sometimes, sometimes better, it depended where.
    But I can remember that even if we are hungry,
    it was more food than later after [NON-ENGLISH]..
    We had nothing then, yeah?
    So many people escaped during that period,
    grown ups. I was told after.
    They survived.
    It was really truthful.
    They let them go some.
    This was on the march?
    On the march.
    From the first camp?
    Yes.
    To [NON-ENGLISH]?
    Yes, yes, yes, but I didn't know.
    I just knew it later.
    You see, after I was a child.
    I was thinking, as long as I have a safety, this Aranka,
    this lady to hang on to, I don't know
    what I'd find at home, because it was all mixed up.
    I just felt unsecure if I go alone, you know?
    I was not encourage it, but I didn't want to leave her.
    She got shabbier every day and shabbier and sicker and sicker
    and so did I, wet, and no clothes, proper.
    We still had some good clothes.
    But if someone sewed, then they just banged it out from us
    with a gun or what.
    Suddenly came, I can swear, but I can't say it for sure,
    that that was Mindszenty, the highest priest then in Hungary,
    Cardinal Mindszenty, with a high tall chair in a village when
    the Jews marched, and with a lot of splendor.
    I never will forget that figure with a sort
    of popish crown of his head.
    What was that procession?
    They brought him, carried him, and he blessed us with a cross.
    But when I heard after the war, he
    didn't do anything against it.
    He didn't ask.
    He didn't plead for us.
    He himself was later a prisoner by the regime,
    not by the fascist.
    But he didn't do anything to help people, otherwise,
    or do something.
    But he showed himself up and I remember
    that because that was, in the dreary time, a spot of light,
    something to see.
    Then eventually, we arrived to that [NON-ENGLISH]..
    Whereabouts is this?
    That is on the border of Germany and Hungary,
    where all the trains were waiting.
    To take you to--
    To take us, yes.
    --into Germany.
    Yes, Wallenberg saved there a lot of people, Baron Wallenberg.
    I think one day--
    That's the Swedish--
    Yes.
    --ambassador?
    I think one day our wagon was opening, because they used
    to take out the dead bodies.
    We had to sling them out and get--
    On the train?
    On the train, yes, from [NON-ENGLISH] to Germany.
    Well, I don't know.
    We went to Dachau very, very long time, too many deaths.
    I was getting a bit passive.
    What were the trains like?
    What were the carriages like?
    Well, very filthy.
    They opened it every day, maybe once, I don't know, maybe twice.
    They made us to clean out the dirt
    and to take the dead bodies.
    Well, I didn't take any.
    I was realizing that I was sitting once on a dead body
    because we were very squashed.
    But it didn't affect.
    I was so shocked and so in a daze
    that I didn't react nothing.
    Were you still with Aranka?
    No.
    I lost her in [NON-ENGLISH].
    How?
    I were looking for-- because there
    were millions of other people from all sides
    of the world coming there.
    We were going together, and we were divided right, left, right,
    left, you know.
    They told us where to go, in which wagon.
    I went, when I was free, you were not free.
    Because they pushed you with the guns and everything.
    But funnily enough, I had a feeling
    when they told me you go on the right,
    and I went on the left hand.
    I think that was how I survived.
    What was the significance there?
    Well, maybe one went to Auschwitz to die.
    The other one went the other way.
    I just assume it because they looked at you like a chicken,
    you see?
    If you are enough, even if you are not fat,
    nobody could be fat.
    But you have got some--
    Enough to work.
    - To work.
    If you were young and not too sick,
    even if you looked like a skeleton, it didn't matter,
    you see.
    Then they couldn't tell your age, so you could say anything.
    But you see there were many, many things which
    you can't imagine that, when you get used to it,
    you forget your past and you live for that present day.
    You think tomorrow will be over if you are optimistic.
    If you are not optimistic, I don't
    think you would survive it.
    I think all those people who were not optimistic,
    who were only pessimistic and they
    had every reason to be pessimistic,
    but they did not survive it.
    My mother had a tendency of pessimism,
    and she suffered a lot more than ordinary people did,
    but she didn't go in a camp.
    My father was an optimist.
    He also, somehow, didn't go in the camp.
    The two children, you see, he lost one, my brother.
    He wanted to save him with false paper, and I just was taken.
    They say it can't happen, but it did
    happen that he was, in one night, all his hair gone white,
    when he realize it.
    With worry?
    Yes.
    What were these trains like?
    What were the carriages like?
    They were bolted.
    They were all with clean [INAUDIBLE],, I heard.
    There were some old people, some young people yearning, crying,
    some for their parents, some for their children.
    They were divided, you see?
    Some was with a mother and the mother died
    and they started to scream.
    They didn't open the wagon.
    There was not such a danger to scream.
    But later, it was very dangerous to scream,
    when we went in camps.
    But there, then they opened it.
    We had to bring some water in to clean all the dust.
    There was no facilities.
    There was no toilet facilities or sanitation?
    No.
    But you see, in these occasions, several times
    it happened, that some young people disappeared.
    A commotion was going on.
    They said you come off and you take the water.
    They never came back.
    I had always a feeling later, when I knew about Wallenberg,
    that one day it was open, and they wanted me to get out.
    I didn't dare.
    I didn't move.
    I was dazed and stunned and I just did not move.
    Who wanted you to get out, the Germans?
    Maybe, yes.
    You see, maybe because he worked with the Germans.
    This-- a lot of young.
    When I later thought of it, they didn't come back in the wagon.
    I didn't know who they were, because you couldn't recognize
    them, you see?
    You think Wallenberg saved them?
    I think some of them might have been saved.
    When they picked me and opened, and they
    gave some water and the cleaning,
    they told me I was getting out for making it a bit clean
    and standing by there.
    The German pushed me that I should go there.
    I didn't go.
    How many, approximately, would you say was in each wagon?
    If my imagination is right, which is a true imagination,
    but a child is different, I suppose
    they pushed in sometimes 60, 70 people.
    We were really on each other.
    Were they cattle trucks?
    Yeah, cattle trucks, yeah.
    We were really on each other.
    What did you have to eat whilst you were on this train journey?
    I can't recall anything, just they gave us
    once a piece of the soldier bread, very hard
    and water, maybe one or two stuff, some soups.
    But the soups were empty.
    I don't know.
    It was, I think--
    I don't even know what it was in it.
    It was nothing in it, like salted water.
    How long would you estimate the journey lasted?
    Well, I think it lasted about two weeks.
    Because we were all over around until I
    got to this Landsberg Dachau.
    Because it was bombing in the time.
    When it was bombing, they stopped the cattle wagons.
    My wagon was a good wagon, because it was not open.
    Some wagons were even open.
    Open topped?
    Yes.
    And then the people were frozen.
    You could hear the bombing going on?
    Yeah.
    I think one day they told us, I don't know whether it's true,
    that we are on the Berlin.
    How we got there, I don't know.
    But we were by Berlin, and it was bombed several days.
    They hit us, some of the wagons.
    On the--
    [?
    The lines. ?] Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So it was no difference whether they were Jews in it or what,
    because they just did what they have to do in the war.
    But all this bombing, I knew.
    I knew that it's the same danger for us from up until down.
    But I didn't know all this.
    I didn't realize it until after, when I was told, when I asked,
    when I could ask.
    So after--
    When I arrived to Dachau, finally,
    I didn't know which camp.
    But it was written, Dachau.
    And then Arbeit makes happy, you know?
    Work makes you happy?
    Albert macht frei, makes you free.
    I knew German.
    Did you know of concentration camps
    before you were taken to one?
    Had you any prior knowledge?
    Well, I heard this story.
    This is very strange.
    Because this Alex Petrushka, which I write about it later,
    he was in the first concentration camp.
    That was Dachau.
    Dachau, when Dachau was, there was no other concentration camp
    first time.
    Only they put in people, like, mixed marriages.
    They didn't want to divorce or rich people
    that they wanted to extort money, and they wanted to.
    Even from Czechoslovakia, or from Germany,
    if they put someone in Dachau, they
    have a chance, for plenty of money, to get out.
    But that I was told later in Pressburg and by Alex and later
    by my father.
    So when you arrived at Dachau, you
    didn't know what a concentration camp was?
    Dachau, I knew.
    Then, by that time, everybody knew.
    But first, when I was little, I'm going back with time.
    Dachau was the only concentration camp
    where even from Pressburg, every Jew was taken.
    There were millions paid for him to get him back.
    They did get him back.
    But then later. .
    When even Alex confirmed that his father was
    taken in another camp.
    They started to mushroom the camps.
    There were hundreds and thousands then.
    That's how I know from the source,
    because Alex is a good source.
    He was a half Jew and a German.
    Alex was the--
    Alex Petrushka, who I--
    The teenage boy you met in Dachau.
    That I met in Dachau, yes.
    But before I came into Dachau, and I got down, we got down.
    Who got down, who couldn't get down was just thrown away,
    you know what I mean?
    Down out of the truck?
    Yes.
    There was someone who recognized me.
    At that time, I was very, very bad looking,
    but not yet a complete skeleton.
    Someone from my mom's birthplace.
    Who was already in the camp?
    Who was already in the camp, recognized me.
    I had a little piece of bread and I thrown it to him
    because I knew he was a long time.
    I can identify that, even, because he
    lived in Israel after the war.
    He survived, and he told the story for my mother.
    He remembered you?
    He told for everyone this story.
    What were your first impressions, then,
    when you got down out of the cattle wagon
    with everybody else?
    Well, I did not know.
    It made me scared.
    But I thought, well, I can't go back.
    I can't go anywhere.
    This man who worked, who recognized me, told me his name,
    I didn't know who he is because I just know that his sister is
    a doctor and he's somehow related,
    or on the same town or village.
    He said I shouldn't give him the bread, because I
    won't have any other.
    He was very good, actually.
    But I did.
    Then they pushed me.
    They pushed me in.
    Then when I met, after plenty of queuing up,
    we got into this bars and to this.
    Then where I met Alex, where I get one high heel shoe and one.
    I was screaming, and they beat me.
    Alex came.
    He didn't then move.
    He didn't do nothing.
    But then he told me what to do.
    So can you go through the events [BOTH TALKING]
    I think then, when I got the first hysterical reaction
    and really started to scream, I was out of my mind.
    I said, what's going on?
    What did I do?
    What happened to me?
    You know that sort of feeling, that I started to--
    this was a feeling, that humanity came back into me.
    When I saw this man, gave him the bread, and he told me not,
    I won't have any bread.
    I saw this everything that is laws, laws, beating, beating,
    beating, pushing, beating, and people collapsed,
    and people die around me, just like in the wagon.
    I hoped.
    I had a hope for the future, for the next day, every day,
    you know?
    Every day I thought, it can't be worse.
    It can be only better.
    I didn't think that I will die.
    Then I thought, well, I'll do what I can.
    But this hysterical cry, this hysteria, it
    came out all the time, which I kept myself back yet.
    The Germans' response was to beat you.
    Beating, and in this water, and I
    didn't know whether it is the gas chamber or not.
    Did you know of gas chambers?
    Well, we didn't know really.
    I knew the rumors.
    I did not understand really, like the grown ups.
    But I knew it in Dachau later, because we didn't have soap
    to wash ourselves.
    They gave us a soap which was very nice and very good.
    It was called riff, written on it riff.
    R-I, I think, double F. I don't know exactly the spelling.
    That was from human bodies then.
    How did you find that out?
    Well, you see, in the camp was no secret.
    For me, I was a kid.
    Don't forget.
    So even if I was clever, even if I tried to do what they--
    I heard what they talk.
    So they sometimes came through, messages, you know,
    and everyone buried it.
    Because it was--
    Yes, yes.
    I didn't have any soap for myself ever from that riff.
    But because some people who had, it was a blessing to have soap.
    But you see, they still buried it who could.
    Because it was made from other inmates' bodies.
    You also can't imagine that, for instance.
    When I tell you, in short, that it was the screaming,
    not only from me, from other people who were really killed
    or even shot sometimes for this.
    So I learned not to scream.
    Then Alex, as he distributed the clothes,
    he tried to find me the best.
    But I was very tiny.
    it was very hard, after I did.
    One, he found me an evening shoe and the other was, I don't know.
    He tried to do his best.
    He himself, he didn't have marvelous clothes,
    though he was there 10 years.
    He had a cap over his head and an alabaster face, skin.
    He was not like a mummy, like a dead mummy or something,
    you know.
    But a beautiful-- he didn't have a dry skin or what,
    because he had some food from the soldiers or what.
    I don't know.
    He taught me how to steal, what to do.
    What was the living conditions like once you
    got through the introductory period?
    We had this barracks.
    But we were not sure any minute in this very cold.
    There were some straws.
    It was nothing, just a bunk, no separate bunkers,
    like you used to see in the camp.
    Just all one room.
    As many people they bashed in as they could.
    We were all shrunk, anyway, small.
    But still you needed space.
    We warmed each other, you see, no blankets, very torn some.
    They had some [? not, ?] and straw.
    There was an oven.
    I remember an oven.
    Sometimes it was fire, sometimes.
    It was not a large fire.
    Sometimes they brought in, I don't know how it was.
    Sometimes, when we got a bit of slice of bread,
    then they had what they cut the cheese with now, it reminds me.
    They cut it so slim that they can keep a slice of bread
    for three times.
    They tried over the oven to eat it just bite and bite and put it
    away for next day.
    When Alex came in, with risk of his life sometimes,
    he used to put me in the kitchen.
    Told me that I shouldn't steal whole potato just because they
    will look for me everywhere.
    But if scraps of the skin, I will eat slowly.
    Because they looked and watched you.
    Just two or three scraps, better than nothing.
    Enough that you could hide?
    Yes.
    Not things will be.
    And that's what I did, for a time.
    Sometimes they were good to him, sometimes they were bad to him.
    So it was depending how I was, then, you know?
    The poor fellow, well, it was so bad,
    I went to peasants to work out as well.
    I didn't have any energy anymore and nothing.
    But they made us appell.
    You know what is appell?
    Roll call.
    Roll call.
    You see, when you went once and you had,
    once in a blue moon, a little fire, you could go in your bunk
    and just think of the future or the past, or Alex,
    somebody had children to think of.
    I thought of my mother, my father, just like anyone else.
    Sometimes I cried inside me.
    But many people cried, and many people
    wanted to be good to each other, you see?
    But it was never true that we were stripped to animal.
    Because even if they were jealous that the other one has
    a bit better, they were only in hundred, one,
    that he would go and say it on you, you know?
    The majority.
    The majority didn't.
    We tried to help if they screamed, start to.
    Like I said, when that girl was shouting, when I was shouting,
    when they pulled out my tooth, they wanted to shut me up,
    you see?
    We tried to help, really.
    What were the sanitation arrangements like in Dachau
    in your barracks?
    Well, every minute, every two hours, every half an hour,
    call out in the freeze.
    In the freeze, hours and hours they counted out for nothing.
    They just wanted to kill us, Right?
    Then the toilets were closed for a number of hours.
    The washing rooms closed the water.
    If they caught you that you go without permission, if you could
    get out somehow, it was not far, and they found you,
    they pushed you in, and they made you clean the dirt.
    As I say to you, as I sit here, I done it myself.
    So I know.
    So when this doctors on that BBC interview
    said the story with wholeheartedly,
    and they said that people say that they can't imagine it,
    I felt very bad about it that they can't imagine that when
    they explained that the Germans had in their toilet
    this luxury that they could vomit, sorry to tell you,
    and if we wanted to be in hygiene and not
    to be reduced for inhuman, then we
    had to go and be pushed in in the dirt and clean it.
    Agnes Sassoon, reel three.
    Agnes, what kind of work were you
    expected to do whilst you were in Dachau?
    I saw other people working, going out in groups
    to work very hard, whoever was able to.
    And I had the opportunity through Alex' connection to go
    to the kitchen sometimes.
    And don't you think that you could
    sit in the kitchen and clean potatoes and not to be--
    not to be watched.
    You were hit.
    While you cleaned the potatoes, I got a lot of bangs on my head,
    on my shoulder.
    They say schnell, schnell, quick, quick.
    They didn't really need it quick.
    You know what I mean?
    I mean, we didn't have the energy or so on.
    And I never saw those potatoes for us.
    That was probably for the staff.
    And then one day, it was very hard to get out
    to the village to the peasants because from Dachau they
    took people who could cut trees and things like that.
    But Alex arranged it one day that I gone in the group,
    and he thought I can get some food.
    How would Alex be able to arrange?
    Well, he had one or two soldiers there
    that he was the favorite of.
    And he had sometimes when they were in good mood,
    as I mentioned in the book, they treated him like a favorite dog.
    And the other day they kicked him.
    But when he was lucky and he played some music,
    he could get a favor out of them.
    And even sometimes, they fed them.
    But if he would give it-- if they would know that he gives it
    to someone else, they would just as well hit him and punish him.
    You know, it was very strange world.
    They were always drinking beer, and he was playing music.
    And they realized that he's half-Jewish, actually.
    What kind of music did he play?
    He played Tchaikovsky.
    I don't know.
    I was there not understanding at all, just a bit of music.
    What instrument did he play?
    Yes, he played-- he knew to play piano, I know.
    But he played violin and piano.
    And he played to the Germans.
    And he played to the Germans, and they
    used to-- they used to like classical music
    and all sorts of music.
    And they served the beer.
    They drank the beer, and they did it.
    And that's what he told me.
    I never was there.
    And when we could--
    we couldn't talk like I can talk with you.
    I mean, you can imagine it was only scraps of minutes
    while he passed on to me something, when
    he smuggled something to me.
    Other people didn't have to see, because if they saw,
    they got, for instance, jealous, like I mentioned before.
    I could have just one person that reported, and I'm dead.
    And I was very ill, and he did try to keep me alive.
    And in the end, he was shot.
    And I will never forget him ever in my life-- ever, ever, ever.
    And he got you onto this work detail going out of the camp.
    Yes.
    But then in another time when I worked on the farm--
    when we slept on the farm, and I mentioned it in the book.
    And I wanted--
    I picked up some grains from the chicken feed, and a very fat
    German woman, peasant woman, who was
    the owner, big farm, one of the owners, she was reported it.
    That few grains reported to the German guard.
    There were many guards.
    And he nearly tore out my mouth and took out the two or three
    grains which I had in my mouth.
    So that's what made me think that they say we didn't know
    about it and only the soldiers.
    Well, what the hell was it, an ordinary woman of a peasant
    farm to do such a thing with a little girl or an old person
    or any person, to go for three grains?
    Instead, I never can imagine myself,
    even if they would be my biggest enemies and murderers
    in Alcatraz, everywhere I would do
    and try to do my best to give them something,
    what ever criminals they are.
    So I just think myself that they were
    under mass spell of Hitler, mass spell,
    that they were not in their right mind.
    They too treated the Jews--
    They were like from another planet,
    but they were not the same human being, what any human being is
    supposed to be.
    And today, Germany, I see individuals,
    but it took me a while.
    I never hated them for the past.
    I don't know.
    I can't hate.
    I just thought that they were the dehumanized people which
    were not humans, and we were the humans.
    That's what I thought always.
    And that's how I could survive, because I just
    thought they are just like mechanized games,
    like Doctor Who now or something or these stories
    which is unbelievable and is not really true.
    And it's just a dream, and I was thinking, thinking many times.
    There were one or two who you could
    say that in all the time, one or two only in the whole time,
    that I could say that they have some human feelings.
    So suddenly the new Germany wants to know,
    and they don't let them know about it.
    Because the Holocaust is not the same
    like books like mine and individual papers.
    Many people write about hate, and that I
    agree they shouldn't have.
    Because this book, a child's book,
    has to be objective or a [? grown ?] [? up ?] book,
    and to say, well, they were not normal, really, it was a phase,
    a not normal phase, and it should not happen again ever.
    And that's the whole reason that I'm willing to go all through
    and repeat it and go out of my way to get it
    for no earnings and no money.
    And I would do anything to get it to Germany,
    because the kids there shouldn't be not left and not right,
    because they would understand with their heart.
    Because from all this Holocaust they couldn't understand it.
    And Anna Frank was a nice story, a true story.
    But then she was unfortunate as well.
    But she was in a house.
    Whatever bad circumstances, on the end
    she came to Bergen-Belsen.
    But yet she didn't stand so much Appell.
    She didn't live among those outside.
    She had a lot of anxious minutes,
    but she was still looking out for the trees, you remember.
    And that's a marvelous, adoring person
    she was, but it's not the same to go through
    like the grown ups go through.
    And we survived.
    And they were family camps where they could buy out
    people for money in Bergen-Belsen later
    from Switzerland.
    So I heard it later, and I was going through all this
    and couldn't escape because when they told me, go right,
    I went left.
    And they told me left, I went right.
    And when I look back, I played a game like a child.
    And when I was in the dangerous minutes,
    I felt it very bad, very dangerous.
    I always hoped and believed in God.
    And I always hoped that tomorrow will be better.
    And it was worse.
    And I thought worse can't be.
    And when Alex gone, I finished.
    I thought I finished.
    Can you tell me about this incident
    where Alex came to visit you in your barracks when you were ill?
    Well, I was very ill.
    And he came several times, but that time he brought--
    I don't know from where he took some little milk or something.
    And usually when they recognized him,
    even if he would be coming in, they
    wouldn't shoot him from the tunnel.
    And as he climbed, he always knew
    when the lamp goes around, because it was not
    allowed to speak to women.
    It was a woman's barracks.
    Yes.
    Yes, it was separate from the men's.
    This is all so complicated to explain it, you know?
    And it was a big danger even to him, that.
    But a couple of-- or three or four, he
    had probably some people that they knew him.
    And then it was also the kapos were very dangerous,
    Jewish kapos.
    You know, they were just the same
    under the terms of who can be--
    I mean, for your own good you hit your fellow friends.
    Once I came across with a Kapo as well.
    And she was a rabbi's daughter.
    I heard it later.
    She looked beautiful.
    As I described it, she had boots.
    She could travel with certificates.
    And she used to bugger me all the time.
    Sorry for this word, but all the time.
    And she looked-- and I was the little mangy thing.
    I once wanted to go to that place, to the ladies.
    And this was not allowed.
    It was curfew, and she came with me just for no reason,
    so to hit me.
    And she was alone.
    There was no German soldier beside her then.
    And I came, and I told her in her face,
    I can't understand what do you want from me.
    I'm a little nobody.
    You are going in these nice elegant clothes
    and with good food, and you are a rabbi's daughter.
    So what do you want from another Jewish girl
    or for any human being?
    I thought she will kill me, and she didn't.
    She kept away from me since then.
    What do you mean?
    She kept away.
    Whenever she saw me in the camp, whenever she counted me,
    and she was with the stick, she looked away,
    and she didn't come near me.
    God saved me.
    So previously she'd hit you regularly with her--
    Yeah, but you know--
    I mean, regularly, what I mean, not every day.
    Whenever I came across somehow or she was near me.
    Just not really hard.
    But then when that time when I was on my own
    and I did irregular thing, well, I told her what I thought.
    I thought if she kills me, she kills me.
    A child has no fear.
    And she left you alone then.
    She left me.
    She never could look at me anymore in my face.
    She always left me out.
    When they counted Appell and they said, you go here,
    you go there, she never told me anything.
    What did the rest of the inmates feel about the kapos?
    Well, I don't know.
    I don't hate them, even them.
    I have no hate in me, but I think they lynched a few,
    and they jailed a few.
    And I think if somebody could come out
    from a camp well looking, she must have been a Kapo, or he.
    Because I don't think that anyone after that,
    even to being a few weeks or a few months in a camp,
    could come well looking out.
    So that's what my own feelings and opinion is.
    Because you can't-- you couldn't-- you couldn't.
    If there were family camps where they paid up money, let's say,
    they get to have some passes or something.
    But in an ordinary camp, no way, no way.
    And after Dachau, when Petrushka died,
    Alex, I thought it's end, really end.
    And I didn't even think of the future
    when I wanted to touch that wire.
    Can you tell me about that incident now?
    Alex is coming-- he got out.
    He was always watching the lights.
    He knew exactly the minutes when the lights
    are coming in the evening.
    The searchlights.
    Searchlights, right.
    And somehow the searchlight didn't come regular time,
    and they didn't see who it is, anyway.
    And he just shot.
    He was an idiot.
    Because I think if they would have known that he's Alex,
    he wouldn't have shot.
    He just did not know whether it was a woman or--
    He'd come to give you some milk.
    Yes.
    What was the matter with you?
    Well, I don't know.
    I think I had by then typhoid.
    Already keep coming and going because all my hair fell out.
    They shaved it, but it came out anyway, my hair.
    And I was very sick.
    When I was in typhoid later in the hospital,
    I knew that I had maybe that disease the same.
    It was just going on.
    I just don't know how I survived.
    And as Alex left your barracks--
    And as he left there, I heard this shot,
    and everyone looked out.
    And then the Germans came in and pushed everyone,
    and everyone had suffering, not only me.
    I didn't care whether they shoot me or not.
    I jumped out after him.
    And then his body, I described it.
    And Alex was everything for me.
    And even though I never, never--
    nothing can make me upset.
    When I'm upset and really upset for no camp reasons,
    no, that's gone, by, finished, gone.
    It shouldn't happen anymore.
    It's gone.
    But I always see his face with his black, beautiful eyes
    and alabaster skin, well very deep in.
    I will always see that eyes.
    And it was just a few weeks away, the liberation, really.
    And how long had he survived in Dachau?
    10 years, nearly.
    And he was shot three weeks before.
    So you know, it's not three weeks before.
    It was more, but then we had to go in other camp.
    You see, the Germans were in disarray then, by then.
    I thought it's finished now.
    But it wasn't finished.
    It was even more and more and more walking.
    What happened when you were holding Alex's body?
    Well, I thought they will kick me, they will shoot me,
    they will do anything.
    But funnily enough, they just--
    I didn't even feel the pain, you know?
    But they didn't kill me.
    But then I went, and I wanted to touch the wire, the fence.
    And I didn't care if they shoot me.
    And an older man, an older SS man, or Wehrmacht--
    I don't know even what, but he was not a young guy.
    This is the only German face in uniform that I can remember.
    He said, no, don't.
    Don't do it because there is no electricity at all.
    We haven't got-- in the house, there's electricity.
    They don't put electricity now in the fence
    because we haven't got it.
    Will be soon finished, the war, and you will survive,
    and we will perish.
    And that's what he said to me, and I really, truly
    remember only this man's face.
    And I as a child, I wrote the truth.
    And I tell the good and the bad, right?
    And that's how it was.
    And he was in tears because he loved Alex,
    and I think he wanted to shelter me because of him.
    His guilt came up or something.
    This was the only one, when I came with a human face to face.
    Yeah.
    Were you shocked at his reaction?
    When he told me there's no electricity in the wire,
    I mean, he risk his life, really.
    I mean, they didn't have anything any more to eat.
    They were in disarray.
    They were running.
    I didn't know that, right?
    But we had to walk then because, again, walk and the dead bodies
    were put on the wagons, and I don't know what to do.
    And if they told-- if somebody couldn't walk,
    they told them to go on the carriages.
    And I knew that they told us-- they told us
    who goes on carriages that they are going to hospitals.
    I knew who was going to hospital, he will be dead.
    So I had this instinct in me.
    Nobody-- I wasn't enough big or clever, but I had this instinct.
    I never went to that carriage.
    Like I didn't go to that wagon for the children.
    Were there any gas chambers in--
    Dachau?
    Yes.
    In Dachau?
    Yes.
    Did you know what they were?
    I didn't know, actually, then.
    You didn't know at the time.
    No, I didn't know at the time.
    They told us, but I somehow--
    Alex told me.
    I thought Auschwitz is only for the gas somehow, you know?
    Did everybody know about Auschwitz?
    Yes.
    The one soldier came to the other soldier.
    The kapos were lovers to the soldiers.
    Yeah.
    It somehow came through between the older people, you see?
    Grown ups. But for me, I was everything like in a dream.
    You know?
    And I just did my instincts, what I wanted to do.
    But then I was very sorry there were some people.
    I was crying.
    I saw people crying for their children.
    I saw praying people, you know?
    And then when I wanted to cut out my mind
    not to see the dead bodies, not to see the beatings,
    not to feel it.
    I cut out my brain, and I wrote my book chapter
    by chapter, everything what happened.
    In your head?
    In my head.
    Because a few times I tried to get hold of paper and pen,
    and my writing was not that fabulous
    because I was not so much that fabulously educated, right?
    So the scraps of paper, once they nearly killed me for it,
    yeah?
    They found them.
    Yes.
    And since then, I just wrote my book in the minute I was free.
    What did they do when they found your scraps of paper?
    Once, they made me kneel down, and they hit me here.
    On the back of the neck?
    Back of the neck.
    Once they squenched out my hand like this.
    Squeezed your wrist?
    Well, when they burned it, that was later.
    But I can't tell you.
    I mean, so many things they done for what.
    It was not the torture.
    The torture common, but just the way that they beat you.
    They didn't care whether it's on the head
    or on the neck or on the--
    Sometimes I thought they shoot me when made me kneel down.
    But you see, I'm speaking a lot about beating.
    Many people won't find it that they were beaten so much.
    But you see, the thing is, who worked,
    they were not beaten so much.
    But you were too young.
    And that is not only because whoever couldn't work
    wasn't enough strong, and it was not in the gas chambers.
    It was not that.
    They had more opportunities to beat us
    and to have us for the Appells, you see?
    And that is the explanation.
    Many people say that I can't understand how
    you were beaten so many times.
    They had much more opportunity to get hold of us to beat us.
    Because you weren't working.
    Because we weren't working, and we were all the time going,
    doing some useless work or some work which they just
    repeated to do, or standing hours in the Appells.
    A woman collapsed behind me, and we wanted to steal her away.
    We still were human.
    We wanted to help her.
    And when they realized it, that we wanted to steal her,
    they beat everyone, everyone around us.
    And they made us stand two hours longer in the cold.
    On Appell.
    Because we wanted to hide the woman.
    Were you clothed during Appell, or were there any naked--
    Slowly they took away.
    What they did, we went Dachau, and then I
    was also in Landsberg.
    In Landsberg 11, it was near to Dachau, I understand.
    I don't know.
    They said then that it belonged to Dachau.
    That was, for me, a bit better because there
    was a German medical woman who put me in the ward there.
    It was a little bunker with four beds.
    She made me like I would work, do something there.
    And there were-- every time they done it
    with us, every camp, new camp, whatever we had still on,
    on the top, underneath that clothes what they gave us,
    some underwear, they always took it away.
    I think that was only for suffering.
    We had to strip, because they called it the delousing.
    Delousing?
    Yeah.
    And they took the stick, that soldier or that officer, and--
    alles herunternehmen!
    Everything.
    I understood German, so I was quite lucky with that.
    Because when they spoke German, the others didn't know.
    I knew what will happen.
    So he'd pull at your clothing with the stick.
    So he said, herunternehmen.
    All right.
    So I made myself.
    I do it.
    And then he looked over the other one already following,
    continuing to tell to the other one.
    And I put it back quick and put back my striped clothes.
    So you managed to keep your underclothes.
    So I really swindled.
    I did learn from Alex.
    He told me how to do this.
    If you get frightened and you do, and they beat you anyway,
    you just try to get away with it.
    So you'd have to get dressed again quickly
    to keep your underclothes.
    Otherwise, they'd take them off you.
    Yes.
    And they said to take it off, but occasionally I didn't.
    And then I got somewhere else something else, another rag.
    So the rag got lousy.
    Put it in the snow that the lice should go out.
    It's not nice to talk about it, but so it was.
    So who was the human, I ask you?
    Who could do this with old and children and-- not children.
    There were no children, really.
    I mean, in family camps there were lots
    of children, and family camps.
    But not many children could survive.
    There was another young girl with me
    who was older than me a bit, and she went crazy, unfortunately,
    on the end of the walking.
    And she started--
    Is this walking from Dachau to Landsberg?
    It was between the walking after Dachau, that we was in a hay,
    and she slept, and her bread was stolen.
    And she accused everyone that--
    maybe it was true it was stolen her.
    And she from then started to get crazy.
    And you know, we had to hold her back because--
    Hold her down.
    --we didn't want her to be killed.
    And that was in between we arrived--
    before we arrived to Bergen-Belsen.
    And she was a very beautiful-eyed girl.
    And though she was older, she stuck to me.
    She felt that I'm support.
    And she didn't have confidence later when her bread was stolen.
    And my bread was stolen as well.
    Not the same time, another time.
    But people were hungry, so they did these things, you know?
    And once we got bread for a week or what
    they said it should keep, but I know
    that is forever, because we will never
    have-- we will be dead by then.
    I thought so because they gave us a whole bread, a hard, hard
    bread.
    You know what?
    We had to throw it away because we couldn't carry it.
    We didn't have the energy.
    So they gave you the whole--
    Yes.
    The whole ration.
    The whole ration for the walk, because I thought we
    will never see anyone.
    And this girl on the end, I saw her in Bergen-Belsen.
    I went to look for her when I had an opportunity.
    She was in this crazy ward where I saw she couldn't recognize me.
    What were the food rations like at Dachau?
    Nothing, so to speak.
    There were soups occasionally.
    And you didn't know even the timing.
    Would you get something each day?
    Sometimes maybe-- maybe a week or two gone without any bread,
    but maybe we got a hot, warm something soup-like thing.
    But no bread.
    Bread-- very rare.
    And if you had a piece of bread, you
    had to save it, really save it to cut it with this wire
    to save it, even if it was one slice.
    How did you come to leave Dachau?
    Then what happened?
    Well, I think they had to evacuate,
    because they had to run, and they wanted
    to kill how many they could.
    And they made people who couldn't walk anymore to walk.
    And some they put it on these carriages and everything,
    and I think they just shot them or just they let them die.
    And we went in a sample camp on the way for one night.
    I thought it is a heaven, because the first place
    in winter I saw flower, I saw cleanliness, tidiness,
    and Red Cross flag, and all sorts of things.
    And it was everything organized.
    I thought here will be fine.
    Maybe it is the end.
    You thought you were going to stay there?
    We're going to stay.
    Well, there was a sample camp.
    They call it Mustercamp where the Red Cross comes to inspect
    it occasionally, yes?
    International Red Cross, so they told me later.
    And I had there a terrific toothache,
    and we had to queue up for soup.
    And I didn't have any more any energy.
    What was in the soup?
    You had tins.
    And if your tin got lost, you couldn't have any other tin,
    so you couldn't have even a soup.
    You understand?
    So it was up to you to hang onto things.
    And you couldn't sometimes because they made you lose it,
    you know?
    And somebody was shivering, couldn't get soup.
    And if you wanted to help, then you were nearly killed for it.
    So you had to be very careful to do these things.
    And we did it.
    We did risk our life for this.
    And then when I went back to this bunker,
    very clean, very tidy, and there were really good.
    And they still they came on me, and I started to scream.
    I knew what it means, screaming.
    It means death.
    And then two soldiers kicked me all over,
    and they said they take me.
    They wanted to shut me up.
    They pushed me down, my inmates, like I did with this other girl.
    To save her.
    Yes, and I couldn't.
    I just had a terrible toothache, and I just--
    everything I could bear, but I couldn't that.
    I had to scream.
    They came in.
    What's los?
    What's los?
    And they kicked me all the way, miles down in the camp.
    It's a very tidy camp, it was.
    I didn't see so many soldiers with guns and so many inmates
    outside.
    And it was really a barrack of hospital.
    And there was a dentist with white clothes and SS women--
    oh, they're beautiful.
    They're all beautiful, they were-- and a Jewish dentist.
    And they apparently, later I found out from someone,
    they were lovers.
    I don't know why that was.
    And he just sat me down in the chair, pulled out my tooth.
    He said, sorry I haven't got any anesthetic.
    Pulled out my tooth.
    They gave me something, and the soldiers
    took me back, kicked me back.
    But I didn't believe it that I'm alive and I'm out with my tooth.
    Thought they'd kill you for screaming.
    So unpredictable story, which is true, everything.
    You didn't know from one second to the other.
    Then the next day, we were on our way.
    What was this sample camp?
    Was it what the Germans were saying
    they usually kept Jews in?
    That's right.
    That's right.
    That was probably what they said,
    that that is like a heaven to the other camps,
    because it was clean.
    It was given some food and a bit of bread,
    and there were flowers, and were tidy.
    It were doctors and dentists, as you see.
    So this was the kind of camp that the Germans
    were telling the Red Cross that all the Jews were in.
    That's right, probably.
    I think so.
    I don't know.
    But I think so because that's what they told me.
    This is a Mustercamp.
    I do understand.
    The others didn't understand.
    It was not written Mustercamp, because it was written--
    I don't know what was written.
    What exactly does that mean?
    Arbeit macht los.
    But I don't know what camp it was,
    but I know that it was the Germans saying
    this is a Mustercamp.
    So I know.
    Can you translate that?
    I translated it, this is a sample camp.
    Yeah?
    So next day, on our way, I just couldn't believe it.
    I always hoped God will help me.
    And--
    Agnes Sassoon, real four.
    Agnes, you were telling me that you now were just
    about to leave this sample camp where
    you had stayed overnight and seen the dentist
    and had a tooth removed and been beaten.
    Not beaten but pushed with the guns all the way there and back.
    And I was relieved, despite still my tooth was aching,
    but I knew that it's out, and it made me more comfortable.
    And when I got back in the barracks,
    nobody wanted to believe it, that I'm back.
    And, well, I prayed, and I really prayed,
    and I prayed to mighty--
    I prayed.
    I really didn't know what I wanted.
    I wanted to see my parents with me,
    to find them somewhere on the route,
    like other people find their relatives sometimes.
    Or not to find them.
    I didn't know what is better for me, if they would survive
    if I don't meet them, or they will survive with me
    if I meet them.
    So I really did not know what to pray for.
    And whenever new groups were coming in any camps,
    I was watching out for my parents.
    And I prayed that I should see them.
    And another minute, I prayed that I shouldn't see them,
    because maybe that's bad, you know?
    So I didn't know, really didn't know what's happening.
    Then we started to walk, and we slept in pigsties, in farms.
    And that was the time when it happens with this grain which
    I don't want to go back with the story
    that the woman went to the soldier
    to say that I picked some grains and put it in my mouth,
    and it was a terrible thing.
    And then we slept once in another pigsty
    with the pigs warming us because it was very cold.
    And then we slept.
    We ate the roots from under the snow and under the snowy path
    because I don't know whether it was so wintry,
    but in those Bavarian and wherever we went--
    I don't know where we went.
    We went the whole Germany.
    Even we went to Sudeten Deutschland
    somehow on all our ways back and forwards.
    I don't know because they themselves were on run.
    They themselves didn't have anything
    to eat, bread or something.
    So we got even less.
    So we couldn't carry the last time what we got.
    And then suddenly, when I couldn't walk anymore,
    I really gave up.
    I didn't give so up that I had rags on my feet
    and holding me and everything.
    And the soldier saw, and he told me,
    please do go there and have a rest,
    and then you join the group.
    And then when he shot me, and he thought he shot me in my heart.
    And after a while, I don't know how long I was there,
    I heard voices.
    And someone came, and they were Germans
    with French prisoners of war.
    And they heard the noise that I said, uh, uh, you know?
    I did not know.
    I was just coming unconscious.
    And I thought I'm in the other world.
    I thought I am in the heaven.
    You know, I thought I'm dead.
    Where had you been shot, whereabouts in your body?
    That was in my leg.
    He didn't want to shoot me in the leg.
    Even now, you can't make it good plastic surgery with it
    because it was disfigured, because it was-- you see,
    here it's gone in.
    It was a bullet, a German bullet.
    And they took it out, ordinary doctor.
    After I will tell you the story.
    So anyway, this leg, I did feel first when they shot me.
    I didn't feel anything.
    Then I felt a heaviness, and then I probably conked out.
    I don't know whether I was out days or hours or what, you know?
    I just was in a great, hot, heat fever.
    Fever I had.
    And it was in the snow lying between Christmas trees,
    you know?
    So you were all marching along.
    How many was there of you?
    Well, I don't know.
    There were rows and rows.
    If I would tell you, I would lie.
    100 maybe?
    Or I don't know.
    They're all marching because the soldiers,
    they didn't know where to go.
    They directed them all.
    And you felt you couldn't go any further?
    I just couldn't.
    They saw me that I'm out of the way, and I just--
    they told me to go to rest.
    And I didn't believe and believe.
    I didn't know what to believe.
    I went up to there and sat.
    He just came there quietly and shot me.
    And he laughed.
    He didn't even bother to look.
    Did you see who shot you?
    Did you?
    I did.
    I saw the gun against me.
    And that minute I said finish.
    No, what can I do?
    I thought finished.
    I didn't feel anything else.
    And then I felt a great heat, and I
    thought I'm in the other world.
    I mean it.
    It's true.
    That feeling is even now in me.
    And then I started to open my eyes.
    I saw people.
    First of all, I saw civilian ragged people, then
    with soldier hats.
    Then I saw German soldiers.
    And they argued.
    And again, they spoke French.
    I know a bit French.
    And the German argued.
    He said, nein.
    These Juden, they will go.
    I am a Jew, and I will go in other places.
    And they were soldiers.
    They were, I think, prisoners of war.
    They were also evacuating them from the camps
    probably, as I found out later, my luck,
    and they insisted that they should take me with them.
    And they had a little Red Cross carriage, and they put me there,
    and I was in terrific pain after.
    I didn't feel my leg.
    And I said, no, I'm finished.
    I thought I'm dead first.
    And then when I saw these people, they took me there.
    There was a doctor, a Hungarian doctor
    with these French prisoners.
    And he came from a Hungarian town.
    And he had just a hand knife, and he took the bullet out
    with a hand knife.
    And they cut off some trees and put the trees and made my leg.
    Made a splint.
    A splint, because it was terrible.
    You see how ugly it is after so many years.
    And my father didn't let it to have an operation because they
    would have to break it, to cut it, and I might have not--
    I might not be able to walk properly like this.
    It's not shorter, you know?
    And I can walk on it properly.
    He said so it will be ugly, and that's it.
    Because if they make a plastic surgery,
    it's not enough they cover the skin, because it's crooked.
    Yeah?
    So you're left with a fairly big scar.
    Anyway, I had a lot of great pain and temperature,
    and they didn't have no medicine, nothing.
    They did what they could.
    It was a bit of alcohol, and the Germans argued.
    They didn't want to take me.
    And the French, they were probably holding something
    about the prisoners of war.
    There was a high ranking officer, a French.
    And he insisted that they should take me.
    What did you look like at this stage, physically?
    Well, I was just like one of those corpses of Bergen-Belsen.
    I mean, by then I was not--
    Skeletal.
    They didn't know.
    They didn't know that--
    you couldn't tell.
    You could tell that--
    I don't know how they could tell if you are old or young.
    I don't know.
    Was your head shaved?
    Head was shaved.
    The hair was falling out, the hair from the typhoid, because I
    had constantly.
    I think I was constantly ill.
    I don't know.
    By this time, you'd have been skeletal.
    And by then I have the ribs out, and brown crumpled skin,
    like they have now in these children--
    What did the French prisoners of war
    think about the way you looked?
    Were they shocked?
    Well, they know.
    They were not because they so many camps by now.
    They told me that Hungarian doctor was a Jew as well,
    and he somehow came to that camp because they
    didn't have enough doctors.
    And now they went through a lot of camps.
    They were evacuating, and Bergen-Belsen
    was the last place, I think, or not the last place.
    I don't know.
    So we got to Bergen-Belsen somehow.
    And by then that I got to Bergen-Belsen,
    it started to be disarray, you see.
    It would be in 1945 now?
    Yes, yes.
    Where?
    The end of the war, end of the--
    end of the story, really, when it was before the liberation.
    And I know that there was a Weberei.
    Weberei, it means that you do with knitting
    things or whatever, materials.
    And beside that was a family camp,
    where families could exist on very little,
    but could exist with children together
    because they were paid up by--
    I don't know.
    They told me.
    I don't know whether it's true.
    But paid money?
    Paid money from Switzerland.
    To be left alone.
    Somebody to get them out.
    And--
    What exactly-- can you tell me about your arrival
    at Bergen-Belsen?
    Oh, I was very ill.
    You were still in the Red Cross van?
    Yes, I was.
    And because I were with French soldiers,
    they put me in this Weberei building,
    which the Weberei meant that it's not the camp where
    they kill each other.
    They were working people, but I couldn't work.
    But in that time, it started to be
    that I saw the heaps of bodies, the corpses in heaps,
    and I couldn't walk properly because I had terrific pains,
    and I was hopping around, and all
    what I wanted to look for-- the kitchen.
    Where were the heaps of bodies?
    Outside?
    Everywhere, outside the block barracks.
    Everywhere.
    Was any attempt--
    And some people-- some people who still were corpse but they
    used to carry in the deep ditches,
    they couldn't burn enough or didn't
    have any more fuel or what.
    So they carried them, and there were heaps on carriages,
    and they carried people like a chain,
    carried the dead bodies who were maybe not dead.
    Just put them in that, what is in my book, in that graves.
    And they themselves fall into it, and they were still alive.
    And that's true.
    They'd be buried.
    And then when people saw this, noticing that they were not
    moved, they were not dummies.
    They were all in tears in their eyes.
    And they said, Shema Yisrael.
    Hear me, God, adonai.
    And they were humans.
    They were not dehumanized, but those who dictated it,
    they were dehumanized.
    So we thought we were really the humans, and they are just--
    I can't even call animal, because it
    must have been something extraordinary machinery.
    So you're saying that the Jews weren't dehumanized,
    that they still felt.
    You see, when in the camp, when we were five in one bunk,
    when it was not the long bank, when it was separate bunks,
    they put five sticks, and one body died.
    So we were discussing, we didn't know who we are.
    We didn't recognize each other and what you are.
    But we discussed it, if this body,
    we can't move the body because the Germans don't
    let us move it.
    We have to sleep with them.
    With the dead bodies.
    So if somebody had a blanket or a rag,
    some of the dead who died, if we should take it off her
    and use it as survivor or we should leave it from respect.
    So that much human we were.
    So when they told that they found us dehumanized in heaps
    and begging for bread, that is really not true,
    because they were begging for sanitary situations and things
    like that, but not begging.
    They just saw that we are--
    maybe they saw they are liberated.
    They wanted to be taken notice.
    Because I myself was on a heap that they wanted
    to bury and push, shovel away.
    And because I spoke out--
    How long were you in Belsen?
    How long was it before--
    I don't think I was very long there.
    I don't think very long.
    I can't tell you the time, but I must have been by the end
    a couple of weeks maybe or so.
    I don't really know.
    And did you stay in this work barrack?
    No, after they started to go with this white thing,
    it was end.
    It started to be disorganized.
    They were not anymore.
    One, it happened to me on the beginning,
    though, that this potato, that I found that potato.
    I started to say I went to the kitchens.
    Because that was my priority always, Alex told me.
    And I really found the kitchen, and I don't know.
    I can't tell you.
    It is very complicated story.
    I got hold of a small potato on the dead bodies.
    And where they burned them on heaps and clothes, things,
    I put it, the potato on because I couldn't eat it raw,
    to have it warm, to have it a bit baked.
    It didn't matter.
    It was not because I was dehuman but there was no other choice,
    you see?
    The fire was burning, the clothes.
    The fire was burning, so I put the potato in.
    And a beautiful woman, I always think of Irma Grese.
    I don't know if she was in Bergen-Belsen,
    but she looked like Irma Grese and with a beautiful strong shoe
    with nails and beautiful face.
    Oh, they were beautiful.
    And she told me, oh, yeah, it's a nice potato.
    Warm your hand over it.
    And I put my hand over, and I looked at her.
    She smiled like she was good, and she
    started to push my hand down until they squashed
    the potato in the fire.
    So even now I have signs on my hand from it.
    It was broken, one of the bones.
    And that was the last experience which
    was that terrifying from bodily harm.
    Then in the bunk, as I said, when the doctors did
    this program, which it amazed me and also affected me very badly,
    I was crying and wrote a letter to the producer
    that they were very good-hearted people, these doctors.
    The doctors who went to Belsen from England.
    Yes, I know.
    But then they said that the Hungarian,
    they were in charge, and the Hungarian soldiers, on the end,
    to help to put them.
    So in very good hands we were then.
    God saved me from that.
    I didn't know that because they were fascists, all right?
    So can you imagine how good they'd done?
    They left us in the hands of the fascists, right?
    So when I woke in the hospital, they took me from the hips
    because I opened my mouth.
    How did you end up on the heap before?
    Because I didn't have really any more energy, I think.
    After when I hopped around with this very painful leg
    and everything, and I just--
    Had you collapsed at some point?
    --sat down, collapsed, sat down.
    And I was still working, my mind and my--
    half sleeping, half up.
    And I just started to speak.
    Had you returned from--
    had you returned to your barracks after
    you'd had your hand--
    It was all messy.
    It was all-- also the water wasn't open.
    The people started to attack the warehouses, the grown ups
    and who had some energy.
    They thought not from robbing.
    They robbed us out everywhere every time before.
    So these clothes which were there,
    they were just our own clothes.
    And for food, the warehouses, they broke it up,
    and they wanted to go in, and they wanted to get new clothes.
    But not because of robbing for having
    the thing-- because of hygiene.
    And that's what they can't understand.
    Even then, the hygiene, it was more important than anything.
    But the water wasn't there.
    And then they started to change their clothes.
    But you see, what they couldn't understand, that it was typhoid.
    It was lice.
    They deloused everything together,
    this beautiful Persian and ermines and what
    they robbed from everyone.
    It was there.
    It was worth a fortune for the Germans which was [? there. ?]
    And they just went in on these heaps.
    And I tried to do the same, but I couldn't.
    And I went back, and I just collapsed.
    And I was speaking out when I saw soldiers
    around me, because I was aware of something happening,
    not German.
    And they took me to this hospital because I woke then.
    And there again I was hysterical.
    I started to scream when I came to me.
    And I don't want any-- they explained me,
    I don't want to be experimented on.
    I don't.
    Because I heard German voices, you see?
    The good nurses and all, they came to help, yeah?
    Did you know about these experiments on the Jews?
    We knew and learned everything, yes.
    And I went to look for friends when I could hop and everything.
    It was all mess then.
    And I didn't understand that much what
    other people, but some people, they went still with this white.
    The Germans stood on.
    Some, they ran away.
    And when--
    What do you mean this white, a white armband?
    White, it means that they give up themselves
    before the camp was given over for the British, yeah?
    And then when they came in, then I was opening my eyes
    and talked, and luckily God helped me.
    I always believed it.
    And they took me off because they saw I am alive.
    And they took me to this hospital.
    Who had put you on the heap?
    Somebody when I was collapsed somewhere.
    Someone had found you collapsed around?
    And they just put the people on the heap.
    There were many alive.
    Believe you me.
    Believe you me.
    And anyway, these people who tried
    to change the clothes, first of all,
    they took back-- the British took back everything.
    They said there is no way that they can keep it,
    even if that was a mink or what, because it's lousy.
    But at the beginning, I didn't understand it.
    I thought they are bad, you know?
    And other people, because they didn't understand it, that they
    must be all cleaned up.
    So they had this hospital.
    And then I woke in that hospital on the procedure
    of delousing again and all, but in better condition.
    I started to scream because I heard German voices.
    And I said-- they tried to quieten me down
    and say what language I speak.
    I said, I speak German.
    I speak English a bit.
    I speak this.
    I speak that.
    They started to explain me that they are not the baddest,
    you know, and all this.
    And I said, well, I don't want Germans still to touch me.
    I don't-- if it is true, I don't want any.
    Ich will nicht.
    Ich will nicht.
    And then a nun came.
    And my father taught me a nun or priest I should respect always.
    And I agreed with the nun.
    Because you see, the education from the past, despite I
    didn't have went to schools.
    Hmm?
    It came back.
    So and that was the end of it.
    Then I was in the hospital.
    They didn't want to give me a mirror.
    I had all sorts of illnesses and typhoid and went through that.
    And then one day--
    well, of course I wanted to eat onion,
    and I wanted a mirror, because I saw on the other bed
    it's very clean, very nice.
    But I saw how they looked, yes.
    Why did you want to eat onion?
    Well, I always wanted to eat onion.
    And all the time that I was in the camp,
    I was craving for onion.
    And when I went to a farm where peasants were,
    I tried always to ask for onion someone when I could.
    And I didn't have anything to give for it,
    and I didn't have any anybody good I didn't meet in a farm
    that they would give it to me on farm.
    But I was craving for this onion like mad.
    So they asked me what I would like, because they gave--
    you see in the camp, in the meantime,
    Bergen-Belsen, many people died after the graveyards.
    They were put in the graveyard from eating.
    Because they wanted to be good people, the Allies, and they
    gave them the tins of food.
    And if they gobbled it quick up or they ate it quick
    because they were hungry, they just blown up the stomach
    and died.
    So I was saved from that by the mighty,
    because they took me to the hospital, and I was fed hygene
    And when I wanted onion, they said
    I can't have now because my stomach can't take it.
    But I will have a little.
    They give me just a tiny little.
    That was-- I wanted always onion.
    And since that day, I love onion.
    I can't afford in my social time not to eat it because it stinks,
    right?
    And also I have a habit to have two loaves of bread
    at home, never to run out of bread.
    Even today?
    Even today, yes.
    Even today.
    Well, if somebody comes to my house,
    it's not for worrying for me.
    It's concern for others and is hungry.
    Some children go like my son in America round,
    and they are from good parents, and they have not enough money,
    and they come in my house, the first thing
    will be that I feed them.
    And a professor from Poland, from a Catholic lecturer,
    came just over with 30 students.
    And he had food from--
    they were placed in a-- don't know-- hostel,
    and the solidarity probably helped them.
    I don't know who, but they went out and got 10 pounds a day.
    But the boys were looking the fruit.
    They couldn't afford to buy it.
    So that professor came.
    I invited him.
    He's very educated.
    Invited him to the Mikado, and I gave him a few good meals.
    And you know I was so happy to do that because there's
    no starvation, no.
    But he was really in the world where is everything here,
    and he could not afford, despite he came out from Poland,
    to buy fruit or things like that.
    You said that they wouldn't give you a mirror when
    you were in the hospital.
    Yeah, they wouldn't give me a mirror, no.
    They said, I have to wait a bit.
    And so I started to be a girl.
    I started to be wanting to know.
    And I must have been by that time 12.5 or so, you know?
    What did you look like that prevented them giving you
    a mirror?
    Because I looked like the next door.
    I looked like when you see these starving children in Ethiopia
    and in Bergen-Belsen on the film, when
    it was the liberation.
    Therefore I tell you, if someone looked well
    after the liberation, they must have been helping to the Germans
    because it can't be otherwise.
    What happened?
    Did you see anything that happened to the kapos
    in that camp?
    Well, they asked me.
    They found that women who did push my hand with the potato.
    Always I thought it was Irma Grese, and I don't know.
    I don't know, but they told me, Major Chutter,
    who wanted later to adopt me, who came to the hospital
    and picked me up because I was really--
    he liked me.
    And when I went to down to Hanover,
    I was put in Bardowicker Strasse in a villa next to [INAUDIBLE]
    and baroness if it is true.
    That's what she said her name is.
    And she was Hungarian, and her name was Illa.
    And I researched it in Germany.
    No, it must have been.
    It's true that it existed, [INAUDIBLE] baroness.
    And she was being a housekeeper because her husband apparently
    was a war criminal.
    I don't know if it is true, but he told his name--
    her name is like that, and I can remember
    her blue eyes and blonde hair.
    She must have been then--
    to me, she looked old, but she must have been in her 40s.
    And I don't know whether it was belonging to this Baron Thiessen
    or not.
    I don't know.
    I never will know because this is not
    a film that I can tell you.
    But it is true that when--
    The woman who crushed your hand in the camp.
    In the camp.
    They found her.
    Well, they found a few, and they wanted me to come to the jail
    and identify when I was better.
    And I didn't want to go.
    I said, no, I would not do to anyone anything.
    She could do to me.
    She could do to other people.
    I don't.
    I don't want.
    Once in my life, a Jewish Kapo did bad,
    and I told her off because I felt that she will be ashamed
    because her father was a rabbi.
    I heard it from someone.
    But I think if these people done to me,
    they were not people that I should go and give it
    back revenge.
    Because with the revenge, I know in the Bible
    it is written eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
    But it's not so really.
    It's not so.
    I didn't feel anything.
    Was she a German or what?
    Yes, yes.
    Well, they were all equals to me, these Germans.
    They looked all equal.
    But nowadays, I just couldn't do it.
    I just couldn't go.
    And not because I was afraid.
    I did not want to do harm to anyone.
    I said, if God will punish her, it's God's will.
    Who exactly is Major Chutter?
    Can you explain?
    Major Chutter was the town mayor of Hanover.
    He's the one who's in the book.
    And he came to visit the hospital?
    Yes, and he found me there.
    And then he made arrangements to come to Hanover,
    because he had in mind to adopt me.
    I didn't know then, but later.
    And then his wife joined, joined him in '45.
    And he was put in another place, but he always cared for me
    and came because I was still '47 in Germany.
    Because until they found my parents--
    because he took me off from the list,
    from the registrar that I was in private houses,
    a few private girls, and I was not registered properly.
    And he regretted it always.
    I had a lot of problems from this because he put me down
    as I work in the Hanomag factory that I should get the ration.
    But I couldn't work because I was ignorant an alphabet.
    And they put to me somebody like Jeffrey to entertain me,
    to teach me a bit English.
    Who is Geoffrey?
    Geoffrey Lesson, who is in the book.
    Yes, reading the book.
    Agnes Sassoon, reel 5.
    Agnes, you were just telling me how
    you'd been taken under the care of Major Chutter.
    And you'd been allocated this person called
    Geoffrey to entertain you.
    Can you explain who Geoffrey was?
    Geoffrey was an British officer, who was very kind and very kind
    hearted.
    And he's in my book.
    And I'm very great friends with his wife, his son, and himself.
    He is like a brother, you know, and older brother to me
    because he is retired now.
    And he's a great, great person, and his wife as well.
    And we are in touch very closely.
    We like each other very closely with this family.
    And when I found Major Chutter through the war office,
    he came three times to visit me.
    But he was assigning Geoffrey to a few girls,
    and especially to me, to take us out swimming, to theater,
    to concert.
    But I was not catching up with anything, so he taught me also
    how to write, what music.
    Piano he plays.
    You know, he taught me a lot of things
    that I would not know ever.
    Catching up later, I had some more schools, you know.
    But at that stage I didn't.
    And I wrote my story, immediately.
    What I put in my head in the camp,
    I put it down on paper in the primitive way, how it is.
    And I never let it change.
    I was a journalist, a well known in Israel.
    And I never gave this story, just some chapters.
    But I never, never wanted to change it
    for a book for plenty of money to pay me
    because I want to come through like this, that it should not
    happen ever again, not only to Jews.
    But also it is a third world and the hungry countries,
    where primitive people and simple people live,
    they think they can't feel.
    They can feel.
    They can cry.
    They feel their child is getting stiff in their hand.
    They feel their parents lost.
    And they do get emotional.
    When we were working, like bodies in the Holocaust,
    the Holocaust then was made like the Germans wanted to see us.
    They were not people without emotion.
    They learned to overcome the German thoughts.
    And they started to obey the laws in their way,
    that she should walk without moving, without batting an eye,
    because if they put attention on a bat of eye,
    they put attention on themself personally.
    And they would even less survive than they did.
    So when lot of people nowadays ask the question,
    why didn't you rise up?
    Why didn't you rebel?
    Well, everybody has this question.
    But how can you rise if you are going with--
    they put something in your food, first of all.
    Women didn't have the periods, they told me.
    Because I was a child, you know, I never--
    I had a lot of trouble with it until I got it
    because I was in that age when, after the liberation,
    I should get it.
    And I had a lot of doctor troubles and problems.
    But then it came right.
    But the women who had it, they didn't have it.
    How they didn't have it?
    Because they got so-- they told me they put bromide--
    I don't know-- that they should be quiet.
    I don't know whether it is true.
    You know, I don't know.
    But that's how they told.
    They gave orders that they should be quiet, and those are.
    But they were not.
    They were crying before me.
    They were yearning after their children.
    I was yearning after my--
    when my brother was shot in the Danube, I swear I felt it.
    I dreamed that a door is turning round and round
    like in a hotel, a door which is it never comes out from it.
    A revolving door.
    Yes.
    And that's what-- and I felt that it happened, something,
    to my brother.
    You know?
    And if people had all the emotions-- and when somebody was
    very ill, they tried to help.
    And it was no way when you wanted
    to get-- anyway, what I want to say,
    it should never and ever happen.
    And now I am with Germans very friendly.
    And I don't make any difference between human being
    and human being.
    And if I explain it, some they don't want to know.
    I said, I don't want for you to put it under your nose.
    I would like you to know, as a human to human,
    not as you saw it, as you wanted to see it.
    You saw there were no brains.
    There were no spirits.
    The spirit was there.
    The brain was there.
    And that's what made them survive,
    that they went by the law, and they were the superior race
    and not the Germans.
    Because I felt superior that I can do what I did.
    And I felt superior that we could discuss it
    as a young child and with other old people.
    I don't know, old or young, if the dead body should
    be respected to leave on the things
    or to take it off to save someone lives.
    I don't call that dehumanized.
    Yeah.
    After-- how did you find out that you parents were still
    alive?
    Major Chutter did.
    It was no post, you see.
    There was a field post, field post.
    And there was a British delegation in Hungary.
    Yeah?
    And I wasn't on the Red Cross list
    because I lived in that private--
    somehow he didn't, he failed to do this.
    He made me a document later.
    You see?
    And when I was in Hanomag factory,
    registered again for older because you
    couldn't work in that age.
    Right?
    But I didn't work.
    They sent me home.
    Major [? Eve-- ?] I remember his name-- was the leader there.
    And he was with a little mustache.
    He was very friendly with this baroness in the next door villa.
    [LAUGHS] And then when I went to the next door villa
    and I disturbed, a man used to come every so often.
    She used to send me out then.
    And she used to take a jewelry box out, this lady,
    [? Isla, ?] and give it to him.
    And now when I went to the library, I made a research.
    And I found out that a certain Baron Thiessen was arrested
    sometimes later in Switzerland.
    But I don't know whether there's any connection or no.
    And I don't want to prove anything
    because this is not a book for history or for spite.
    This is only plainly to explain that I came across a quite
    interesting story, and I met quite interesting people
    and good people after that.
    And I would like to point out, it is unforgivable
    but I can't help it.
    Many Jewish community leaders are annoyed maybe
    with me and they don't support maybe my ideas that I don't hate
    and I don't hate even Germans.
    I have friends.
    I just can't hate.
    What can I do?
    I think it's better this way.
    I think if you put aside politics and color and race,
    then you can be a better human being.
    Eventually you returned to your family
    in Budapest, your mother and father.
    Yes.
    What effect do you feel these experiences of the concentration
    camp has had on your subsequent life?
    Well, when my father came, I was--
    that chapter, if you read, I was so astonished, so overcome,
    that I couldn't move from that bed where I was lying
    and saw him to come in.
    I was so overcome.
    I loved him dearly and deeply.
    And his blue, beautiful eyes-- he
    was not a big tall man, a small man
    but a very lovely, smiling man.
    You know?
    And I remembered him, despite I wasn't very much with him
    like that.
    And when I saw him, he was in tears.
    And I just couldn't get out a noise, a word.
    And I was stuck like I would be--
    I would be bandaged down.
    And after a while, I was bursting out.
    And I was, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.
    And it was very, very, very touching.
    And I was feeling deeply.
    And I always felt deeply.
    It was this gap, like it would never happen.
    The contact between me and my parents
    were always deep, even if this gap
    of the time and the suffering.
    My mother was a bit changed because she was losing her son.
    And that she never could forget.
    And of course, she was happy to see me.
    But they did understand it, that I did not want to stay despite I
    loved them.
    I wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia to study.
    I was born in Czechoslovakia.
    And though he was nationalized as Hungarian
    because he was teaching there after he got back,
    he got a high job back, my father.
    But he left everything because I came to Israel.
    I went out from Czechoslovakia after studying illegal.
    I went back once more to Hungary.
    Then I came out illegal because I didn't want him
    to make trouble for his job.
    You left illegally.
    I left illegal.
    But I was legal in Czechoslovakia because I--
    but I helped for a young man who smuggled
    stateless people, so-called, from Poland and Hungary
    because they didn't let the young out, only
    the old ones legally again.
    You see?
    So they smuggled to Israel.
    So Czechoslovakia was always, in my heart, more modest.
    Eventually, you yourself--
    Eventually, after my studies, I went back.
    And I went back when the state of Israel
    was established so that I go to Israel.
    And I was very heartbreaking for my parents and me.
    They thought I will have a better and a more free
    future because they didn't like anything which
    is restriction in a country.
    And I did remember beating my father, kicking my father,
    these boys who did it.
    And so I had better memories about Czechoslovakia.
    And when I went to Israel through Czechoslovakia,
    I was stuck there till '50 because I
    helped with my language, knowledge
    that I knew German, I knew Czech,
    to smuggle with the so-called people to Israel,
    but so smuggled that the Czechs were also in the Eastern bloc.
    Right?
    But they were sometimes more easy to deal with.
    And they knew these things are coming.
    And they go to Vienna.
    Sometimes they had a control, and they were redirected back.
    So I did help with a young man, who
    was sent from Israel to help for these people.
    Eventually--
    And eventually--
    You, yourself left for--
    And eventually, we were also arrested.
    And my uncle made the whole--
    whole works nearly not working because he wanted--
    he thought, I live with this boy.
    And he came.
    And he was a rebbe, and he wanted me to go with him.
    And I did go with him.
    And that made, then, the story that this Jay, which I--
    no secret, but I'm still very friendly with him.
    He was a good boy, but he was not
    that I wanted to marry him yet.
    But I did not know that it was all false papers, that I will
    have to go through all the ceremonies because
    in Jewish law, if you have a paper with your Hebrew name,
    then you had it.
    And we were very friendly, on the end, even now.
    But it took me a long time and plenty of difficulties.
    I made a good career there.
    I had to fight for everything.
    But I did because one thing I had before me, freedom--
    freedom, liberty.
    And if you have freedom, if you start something
    to do in your life, and you are not going in bad ways,