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Oral history interview with Judy Freeman

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.0805 | RG Number: RG-50.094.0001

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    Oral history interview with Judy Freeman
    Transcript
    I am Judy Freeman.
    I'm a survivor of the Holocaust.
    Currently, I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
    My former hometown is a city called Uzhhorod or Ungvar.
    It is in a part of Czechoslovakia
    that changed hands between Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
    and currently as part of Russia.
    It was a fairly large sized city.
    And I had a very happy childhood there until 1944,
    when the German army marched into our city.
    And then everything changed.
    My peaceful, happy world was turned upside down
    by the events of the Holocaust and by the experiences that
    later followed.
    It is difficult to talk about these events.
    But I feel very strongly about the importance
    of keeping the memory of that horrendous chapter in history
    alive that has taken place during the Nazi era.
    Millions and millions of innocent people
    were needlessly and brutally murdered,
    including my entire family.
    And there are so-called historians today
    in various parts of the world who
    claim that the Holocaust has never happened.
    And when I hear that, I get terribly upset because there
    are still survivors like myself, who
    have seen the most horrendous, the most
    awful, the most terrible events with our own eyes.
    And how dare they claim that it is not true,
    and that is why I feel that it's important to remember.
    In 1944, when the German armies occupied my home town,
    I was only 15 years old.
    I had one sister, my parents, and our entire family
    on both sides--
    the maternal side and paternal side of my family, everybody
    lived in Uzhhorod.
    So I had many, many relatives living in our city.
    All of us were first removed from our homes into a ghetto,
    and then deported from the ghetto to Auschwitz.
    We were herded to the railroad station
    and placed into cattle cars, 80 and 100 persons
    to a cattle car.
    And they took us on an unknown journey.
    Nobody told us where we were being taken to.
    We were frightened.
    We were curious.
    Nobody gave us any answers.
    All we had more questions.
    The conditions in the cattle car were crowded,
    children were crying, sick people were moaning,
    and it was just terrible.
    They placed a bucket in each cattle car
    to serve as our bathroom.
    And as one can well imagine, it was filled quickly.
    And the rest of the journey was just an absolute nightmare.
    It took a while to reach our destination.
    And all the way there, as I said before,
    we were all frightened and wondering
    what will become of us.
    Eventually, we arrived to our destination.
    There was no railroad station.
    It looked like an open space with a lot
    of SS soldiers milling about and men in striped uniforms.
    We were ordered out of the cattle cars
    and they separated the families, men to one side
    and women to the other side.
    I looked around.
    I saw my father being herded into a section with the men.
    My mother and my little sister who
    was 12 years old at the time, taken to another area.
    The reception committee at that particular arrival moment
    of arrival consisted of Dr. Josef Mengele
    plus his assistants.
    Dr. Mengele is referred to in Holocaust literature
    as the angel of death, because he
    was the person who made the decision on the spot who
    shall live and who shall die.
    His thumb went up, you lived.
    His thumb went down, you were taken
    to the section that was going to be marching to their death.
    Only I didn't know that at that moment of arrival.
    I saw my mother being sent to the left
    and I was being sent to the right.
    I took a few tentative steps to follow her,
    when a man in a striped uniform grabbed my arm
    and told me in a very firm stern voice.
    You were told to go to the other side.
    I didn't know it at the time, but had I
    been allowed to follow my mother I wouldn't be here today.
    I had no idea where the people who were sent to the left
    were being taken to.
    Who would have believed it had anyone
    told us that new arrivals who just came out of the cattle
    cars, older women, older people, sick people, young mothers
    with children, pregnant women--
    anyone under the age of about 15 or 16
    were being marched to a section of Auschwitz
    that contained gas chambers?
    They were being herded into the gas chambers,
    being told to undress, jammed into chambers
    that could hold 2,000 to 2,500 persons at a time.
    And they're being gassed to death.
    I found this out later from reading about the Holocaust.
    And I could not quite believe it at first.
    And also later in my barrack while
    the Blockalteste or the person in charge of our building,
    told us eventually what happened to our parents.
    While the selection process was going on,
    I was trying to catch a glimpse of my family.
    But I couldn't see them in the crowd.
    I was very frightened.
    I was then herded into another section of Auschwitz.
    I do remember seeing the gates with the sign called
    Arbeit macht Frei, or work that liberates.
    And I wondered what does that mean here
    in this place, the name of which I didn't
    know at the moment of arrival.
    I thought we would be made to work.
    I found out later that it was only a guise,
    that Auschwitz was really a place--
    it was a place where a slaughter industry was flourishing,
    where people were being brought from all over Europe--
    Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners,
    and anyone that the Nazis felt were inferior to their Aryan
    race, and they were being put to death deliberately,
    meticulously, and by the thousands
    and hundreds of thousands.
    I was taken to an area where there were wooden buildings.
    We were told to undress and to leave our clothes in the entry
    room.
    Then we were herded through a room that
    had shower heads in the ceiling, and we got a quick cold
    or lukewarm shower.
    At the other end of the room, we came out dripping wet.
    We never saw our own clothing ever again.
    We were given a garment, just a dress, no underwear,
    no stockings, no sweaters, or any outer clothing.
    At that point, we were told to hurry, hurry, hurry.
    Then we filed by a table where they shaved our heads.
    And we looked rather horrible in an ill-fitting dress
    and completely bald.
    I found myself with a group of young women some of whom
    were my age, some of whom were a few years older.
    Then a German SS then addressed us,
    and she told us that we must follow orders
    under all circumstances.
    Anyone disobeying will be killed.
    Then she asked who among us was under 16 years of age.
    I stepped out, thinking that perhaps they
    will consider giving me an easier job to do,
    since I was a young girl or just barely a child.
    And perhaps I will get more food.
    Neither of those facts were really of any importance
    to them.
    I was then taken to Birkenau into a section called Lager C,
    and housed in a low wooden building where
    there were 1,000 young girls in the same building.
    There was no furniture.
    Both sides of the wall were lined with three-decker bunks
    or shelves.
    And we were made to live on these shelves, 10
    persons in a space of about 4 feet by 8 feet.
    We were terribly crowded.
    There was constant noise.
    We were always hungry.
    We were always dirty.
    Not only couldn't we have a daily shower or a weekly shower
    or a monthly shower, in the seven months that I was there,
    I think there were two times that I can remember
    when we were taken to what was called a bath house
    and given a shower.
    A typical day consisted with having to go outside
    in the courtyard for roll call.
    I could never understand and I can still not
    understand to this day why it was
    so important for the Nazi hierarchy to make sure
    that the numbers tallied in the various buildings
    and in the various sections of Auschwitz, when
    they were killing people by the thousands
    and by the millions on those very same premises.
    But the Germans were very meticulous.
    And so they counted us twice a day.
    We had to stand in rows of five and wait
    until the SS women or the SS men come and count us.
    This sometimes took several hours.
    After roll call, we were allowed to go
    to the washroom which was a building with water spigots,
    and cold water trickling out of them.
    And if I was fast, I could manage
    to get a few drops on my fingertips
    and just wash my face or wash my hands.
    Then to the so-called bathroom, or latrine,
    which was a wooden building with benches and holes
    in the benches.
    And there too we were only allowed
    to go in the morning after roll call and in the afternoon
    after roll call.
    And the rest of the day was spent
    with doing absolutely nothing.
    After several weeks of this routine,
    I saw that many of my bunk mates were
    losing any kind of expression or emotion on their faces.
    And they were just staring straight
    ahead with a vacant look in their eyes
    and this frightened me.
    I tried to make a very serious and conscientious effort
    to remember what I saw around me.
    And in order to keep my memory alive,
    I would tell stories, well not really stories,
    but give book reviews of the books that I have read,
    and tell and retell every single movie
    that I have ever seen in my life up to that point.
    Some of the girls on my bunk were girls
    from villages who have never seen a movie in their lives,
    nor could imagine that there is electricity or images moving
    on a screen.
    And they were fascinated by this.
    So I kept my own mind functioning, plus I
    kept them occupied.
    And I felt that this was very important.
    We also talked about food a lot, because we were always, always
    hungry.
    The ordinary everyday necessities just simply
    did not exist in Auschwitz.
    There was not a scrap of paper to write on.
    There was not a book to look at, no towel, no blanket, no sheet,
    no pillow--
    nothing whatsoever.
    Our food was served to us from a communal bowl or dish twice
    a day in the morning, a lukewarm liquid called coffee in a bowl
    where the 10 of us on each bunk sipped from it,
    several prearranged sips.
    And the same for the main meal which was a horrendous tasting
    ugly looking green soup.
    And we would take a few sips in rotation.
    And in the afternoon, we also usually received
    a small piece of black bread.
    Some of us were thrifty and put a little piece of that
    away for the next morning.
    But many a times we were so hungry that we couldn't really
    bear to spare it, and we figured, well
    who knows what tomorrow brings.
    The average life span in Auschwitz
    was about three months.
    Somehow, I managed to survive there for about seven months.
    I was never quite sure of the exact date or day of the week.
    Because there was no way to keep track.
    You mentioned 10 people to a bunk.
    Would you describe that for us, please?
    It was a three-decker bare wooden shelf with sides,
    I suppose, to hold us in so we won't fall out.
    We slept five from one direction.
    And five from the other direction,
    like a can of sardines.
    When you open a can of sardines, you
    see the little fishes lined up on their sides,
    and that's the way life was there.
    There was no space to get out of those bunks and stand anywhere
    except outside in the courtyard where we were
    being counted for roll call.
    Otherwise, if the thousands of us
    would have come out of our bunks,
    there was no space in the actual building to hold everybody.
    If at night somebody wanted to turn around, it was impossible.
    Only if the entire row agreed to turn around was it possible.
    That's how we lived, day in and day out.
    You mentioned a garment, a dress.
    Did you have anything else?
    We had absolutely nothing else, no underwear, no stockings.
    I had my own shoes.
    Some of the girls left their shoes in the bathhouse
    when they first arrived.
    I grabbed my shoes, which was lucky,
    because they were sturdy shoes and at least I
    had that to stand on.
    It was summer when I arrived.
    Well, it was spring when I arrived there.
    It was May.
    And as the weeks went past by it became very, very hot
    during the day and very cold early in the morning.
    And when we were sent outside for roll call
    in the early hours, it was terribly cold
    and we were shivering.
    And many a times we would hold on to one another
    in the row of five, and try to keep each other warm that way.
    By afternoon roll call, it got to be so hot
    that we were standing in the blazing sun,
    and some people were practically fainting
    from the heat, all this on the same day.
    Did you have any other experiences at Auschwitz?
    The days passed in this horrendous monotony.
    And I kept thinking to myself, if I ever survive it,
    I want to remember everything that goes on in Auschwitz.
    One of the things that I remember very vividly
    was the barbed wire that surrounded
    every section of our camp, plus every other camp.
    There were many camps in Auschwitz,
    not just Lager C. They indicated them
    by letters of the alphabet.
    So the one I was at was called Lager C.
    The barbed wire that surrounded us
    had live electricity running through it.
    During selections, other than roll call,
    I could see that people who were sickly looking
    or who were getting skinny were taken away.
    We never saw them again.
    Other times, people who looked fairly strong
    or still had some flesh on their bones were also taken away.
    And we were told by our Blockalteste or the person who
    was in charge of us-- and incidentally only two women
    were in charge of the 1,000 of us,
    so there was absolute obedience no matter what--
    that some people are taken to work camps and other people
    are taken to the chimneys.
    We didn't quite understand what that meant.
    And so she explained that those of us
    who allow ourselves to be run down and get sick,
    and will not be able to walk anymore or get
    any kind of disease would be taken to the gas chambers.
    And we would be burned to death, and go through the chimneys.
    Well at first, we didn't quite believe her.
    But then I realized that there was this terrible odor
    permeating the camp.
    And there are ashes floating through the ground.
    And if ever I try to venture out in the night, middle
    of the night to go to the latrine which in itself was
    a dangerous thing to do because if the floodlights would have
    found me they would have shot me for just going to the bathroom,
    I could see the sky being lit up red
    from the flames of the crematoria ovens.
    And so she left no doubt in my mind
    that indeed there were killings going on there,
    and gas chambers and crematoria ovens.
    As we know now, there were five gas chambers
    at Auschwitz where people were being killed,
    not because they were sick or weak.
    But upon arrival, as I described before,
    when they first arrived to Auschwitz,
    they were selected and herded to the gas chambers.
    Where Zyklon B pellets were placed into trapdoors,
    and then the doors inside were opened.
    And when it mixed with air, when the pellets mixed with air,
    they became a lethal gas.
    And within 15 to 20 minutes, everyone inside was dead.
    It was then the sonderkommandos' job
    or the men who worked there, who themselves were prisoners,
    to take out those bodies that were intertwined
    and shovel them into the crematory ovens and burn them.
    Well with that knowledge clearly in my mind,
    I tried to avoid selections as best as I could.
    I tried not to be on the edges of the crowd.
    I tried to mingle into the middle.
    Staying on the edges made us more vulnerable to selections
    and it also made the inmates much more
    vulnerable to beatings and kickings
    by the SS women which were constant.
    They carried whips.
    They carried dogs at their side.
    They had weapons in their holster.
    And they were hitting and kicking
    and beating indiscriminately.
    For about seven months, I managed
    to avoid the selections by staying
    in the middle of the crowds and somehow was lucky to do that.
    One day when there was a mass selection in the entire camp,
    I tried to go pressing myself against the building,
    try to go from building to building to building until I
    reached the very last building.
    But by then, they were finished with that part of camp.
    So I escaped the selection.
    Well one day, I wasn't so lucky.
    I was caught in a selection.
    And together, with a very large group from Lager C,
    I was marched through the gates and to an area where
    I saw chimneys spewing smoke and ashes.
    And I knew exactly where they're taking us.
    They were taking us to the area where
    the gas chambers were located and the crematoria ovens.
    And we were all told to undress.
    And they herded us into a huge, huge room where there were
    bleachers or wooden benches.
    And we were told to sit there.
    These metal doors opened and half of the room
    was emptied, and heard it through the metal doors.
    And then they closed.
    And in actuality, I knew at that time
    that I was in the anteroom to the gas chamber.
    And as soon as they're finished with the group they just went
    through, it will be my turn.
    And that was about the closest that I
    came to being exterminated in Auschwitz.
    But before they could empty the room entirely,
    an air raid siren sounded, and we were removed from there
    and taken back to Lager C. This was the fall of 1944.
    And we could hear explosions and shooting in the distance or not
    so distance.
    The Russians were advancing and the Germans
    were losing the war.
    And so they were trying to eliminate all the evidence
    at Auschwitz quickly and thoroughly,
    and there were constant selections day in and day out.
    They were also exterminating the remnants
    of any of the European ghettos that still existed,
    such as Lódz and some of the transports
    that came in from Greece.
    At that point, they did not even select at the arrival time.
    They just took entire transports into the gas chambers.
    I found out about this from later readings.
    Of course, when I was there I didn't know.
    Eventually I found myself in a selection after this episode,
    and I was taken by cattle car across Europe,
    or a good part of Europe, to a camp near Berlin called Guben.
    It was a labor camp.
    And there were fewer inmates than at Auschwitz.
    There were defense factories located in the city,
    and the camp was located on the outskirts.
    We were made to march several miles while it was still
    dark to the factory, and worked about 12 to 14 hours there.
    And then we were marched back to our camp.
    It was my good fortune at that time
    to meet two women from my home town at this small camp.
    One of them worked in the kitchen and one of them
    worked in a warehouse.
    And my two friends were wonderful.
    They were helpful to me.
    They gave me extra food, most of which
    I shared with some of my roommates in that camp.
    But it meant an extra few bites for each of us.
    By then, we have lost a lot of weight
    and we were still hungry all the time.
    So even that extra potato or a half a potato
    meant life a little bit longer.
    And my friend who worked in the warehouse gave me a coat.
    So while it was winter by then, it was November and December,
    at least I had a coat to wear.
    And that was a much welcome article of clothing.
    I was in the labor camp for approximately 2 and 1/2 months.
    When new groups started arriving to our camp, they were ragged,
    they were emaciated, they were infested with lice.
    They have been on the road for weeks by then.
    And this was a kind of rest stop for them.
    We were horrified to see their condition.
    Very soon after that, we were taken away or evacuated
    from this labor camp.
    And all of us were taken on what we refer to as the death march.
    We were marched through the roads of Germany,
    through forests and fields for several days.
    I recall it to be about 8 to 10 days.
    We were marching day and night in rows of five.
    And anyone who could not walk or who sat down and just was
    totally exhausted from this experience,
    was shot on the spot.
    The roads were littered with frozen corpses.
    And that is why it is called the death
    march, because so many people were killed during this time.
    Sometimes at night, we would be housed in a barn
    or on someone's farm.
    Sometimes we would just rest in an open field.
    My feet were bleeding.
    I was cold.
    I was hungry.
    The little bit of food that we took with us was long gone.
    And it looked like we will all die on this march.
    I kept myself alive by trying to pull up
    some roots from the ground if I could manage to reach them
    and reaching out for some snow on the shoulder
    of the person in front of me because there was no water.
    At one point I could no longer walk.
    And I told my two friends to just leave me.
    But they were persistent.
    They did not want to abandon me.
    They grabbed me under my arm and dragged me along for a while
    until I revived and was able to walk myself.
    At the end of about 8 or 10 days,
    we were again put into wagons.
    And we were taken to a camp called Bergen-Belsen which
    was the second most horrendous camp
    in the entire concentration camp network.
    At Bergen-Belsen, we lived in crowded rooms.
    There were no bunks.
    There was no furniture of any kind.
    We were sitting on bare floors huddled together.
    I don't know how many to a room, but there
    was no space to sit, or to stand, or to move.
    I was permitted to lean on my friends
    and they were permitted to lean on me.
    And that's how we huddled together and stayed together.
    The worst thing in Bergen-Belsen was the fact
    that the people who were already there for a period of time
    were infested by lice.
    And the lice carried the bacteria of typhus
    or the germs of typhus.
    And they traveled from one person to the other.
    And so everybody eventually got infected with typhus.
    And it was a dread disease, and it finished its victims
    very quickly.
    Every morning we woke up to see people around us
    who were still alive the night before, lying dead.
    We were made to take them outside and throw them
    outside on a heap.
    The mountain of corpses grew day after day after day.
    They just laid there.
    There was no time to bury them or to burn them.
    They were outside in the rain, and they just
    decomposed in the sun.
    And it was a terrible sight to see
    as one woke up in the morning.
    Our food rations were terribly meager.
    All of us were getting very weak.
    And this scourge of lice was unavoidable.
    And it was the first time that I remember
    that I was beginning to lose hope
    of ever surviving or coming out of this ordeal alive.
    I had no illusions about my family.
    By then I didn't think that my mother and my sister
    would be alive.
    But I was so determined to try to stay alive.
    But those last weeks in Bergen-Belsen
    made me almost hopeless too.
    I could see that pile of bodies growing taller and taller.
    And I kept thinking to myself, what a horrible way to end
    on a pile of dead bodies.
    My two friends and I had got typhus too.
    Luckily, we got sick in rotation and not at the same time.
    And the person who was feeling a little bit stronger
    took care of the one who was very sick.
    I was the last one to get typhus among the three of us.
    And I remember being half delirious and half alive,
    totally skeletal and sick and weak,
    when somebody burst into the room
    and started yelling that there are no guards in the guard
    towers, and that the camp gates are open,
    and we have deliberated.
    That is a moment that one cannot imagine.
    It is unforgettable.
    As sick as I was, I felt a great deal of emotion and a great joy
    that this nightmare has ended.
    I was too weak to wander around by myself.
    The next thing I knew was that British soldiers or soldiers
    in uniform were all over the room.
    They spoke a strange language.
    I didn't understand them.
    But they were smiling and they looked like they were kind,
    and they were going to help us.
    And sure enough, they did help us.
    They evacuated me into a field hospital
    that was hastily set up.
    And I was in the hospital until I recovered from typhus.
    The nurses and the doctors cautioned us continually
    to not eat too much food, because our stomachs
    were so shrunk and so starved, that eating
    a large amount of food at one time would kill people.
    And indeed, it did.
    And it's such a pity that some people who
    have managed to live till that moment of liberation
    have then died from eating too much food,
    food that we wanted so badly, and yet we
    had to curb our desire to consume a lot of it.
    Because it could kill us.
    I recovered from typhus eventually.
    The miracle, the feeling of the miracle
    of lying in a bed with a sheet and a blanket and a pillow,
    was just the most incredible thing imaginable.
    I remember asking one of the nurses to show me a mirror.
    And I looked into the mirror and I did not recognize my face.
    It looked entirely different.
    I was terribly skinny.
    I weighed about 65 pounds.
    My hair was beginning to grow back.
    I was pleased about that.
    They were very encouraging and very kind to us.
    Well, when I was strong enough to leave the hospital,
    I made my way back to my hometown in search of family.
    I was hoping that from my many cousins and uncles and aunts,
    somebody would survive.
    And I was almost convinced that my father
    would come back looking for me.
    Unfortunately, I was mistaken.
    No one in my family survived.
    I lost, in addition to my immediate family
    of grandparents, parents, and sister,
    34 other family members, extended family members.
    It was difficult to put my life together after the war.
    I was only 16 years old at the time and I was totally alone.
    I found myself back in my hometown for several weeks,
    as I said, looking for family members.
    And then I met a very close friend of mine
    who took me home to live with her at her home.
    She was the only person in my hometown
    whose mother and father both survived, miraculously
    survived.
    They were the only family where there
    was a mother and a father.
    Nobody else had mothers and fathers.
    All mothers and fathers were killed at Auschwitz.
    In this household, I met my husband
    and we became friends, and eventually left our hometown
    together.
    We went to live in Czechoslovakia
    where we got married.
    I was 17 years old at the time when we got married.
    And we lived in Czechoslovakia for a number of months,
    when there were rumors coming around
    that they will take us back to what
    is now Russia to our hometown.
    So we fled once again.
    This time we made our way to Germany
    where there were displaced persons camps set up
    for people like us who were displaced from our homes
    and who were survivors of the Holocaust and of the camps.
    And we lived in a displaced persons camp near Munich
    for a year and a half before we were permitted
    to come to the United States.
    We came to the United States together in September of 1947.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Judy Freeman
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Allentown Jewish Archives

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    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

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    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a copy of the interview from the Allentown Jewish Archives.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:11:47
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