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Those who had gotten on the so-called side of life went a completely different way than those who were immediately gassed. Because they had started the liquidation of Auschwitz, the Russians were very close. So, having already gotten on the side of life, we wound up where you had to strip down to nothing, and they shaved our hair off.
We then went to a shower place, and we were certain that now, there’d come the gas, and we stood there, but water came out of the taps and not gas. They showered us, then we could get dressed. We got – this is monstrous – the clothes of the people they’d already executed. The clothes were bloody here and there, and dirty. I got a summer dress and everybody got clogs, and then we marched into the barracks.
This part took from morning to afternoon. In the afternoon, a familiar Bratislava [person] called Glauser came in. Whoever was there, crowded around, saying, ‘Where’s my father, where’s my husband, where’s this person, that person, where’s my mother, siblings, children.’
She just wrote down the names, though [Glauser] had come over because she’d heard that a transport had arrived from Bratislava. There was the so-called Staatsgebaude office [German for ‘state office’]. The Jews who had been there for three years already worked there. There weren’t too many there, eight or ten.
They allowed these [Jews] to move freely around one area of the camp, because [the rest of us] couldn’t leave the barrack. She wrote down the names of who had come and said that the next day, or two days from now, if she could get back again and could get information, then she’d tell us something. She’d be able to tell us, because she’d got a couple good friends who were assigned to the gas chambers, and had to take the gold teeth from the dead.
In two days, this Glauser showed up, and of course, everybody surrounded her. She could even tell a few people what happened. I stood there and stood there, and waited. We knew each other well, my parents and her parents, so I turned to her and asked, ‘Do you have anything to tell me?’
At first she didn’t answer, she looked into what she’d written down for herself. I said, ‘I beg you, even if its bad news, tell me the worst of it, too. I don’t want to live hoping, even if it’s really bad, it’ll be better for me to know.’ She said, ‘Yes, between two and three in the morning, it was your parents’ turn.’ I know the exact date, 4th October, when they executed my parents.
There were three bunk beds in the barrack, everybody had to sit down. We sat in a circle, they brought a bucket in front of us, in which there was some brown liquid, which stunk even from afar. We didn’t know what it was, what to do with it.
An SS-man came and commanded us to eat, this was dinner. After that another woman came, who had her hair tied up, so we knew she was a prisoner too, and who had been here for a long time, that’s why she was allowed to wear a scarf. Now she says, ‘Wolf it down, I’m not leaving here until you devour that.’
Somebody said to that, ‘There aren’t even spoons!’ ‘And there won’t be, dip it out with your hands. But devour it.’ We were so terribly glad that she spoke to us like this. ‘Listen up, you’re going to wolf that down, because they [the SS] can die, but we still want to live. If we want to survive, we eat all the shit.’
That’s what she said. It turned out she was a woman doctor from Kolozsvar [Cluj, Romania]. At that time, Kolozsvar was still Hungarian, and they [the Jews] had been deported from that area long before. We didn’t eat a lot of the liquid then, but two days later we finished it all.
I was in Auschwitz for a total of ten days. The liquidations started heavily. The gas chambers were operating day and night. The air was so bad, there was no grass there, no bird, because the stench of burnt flesh was so horrible. We lived there without thinking, you couldn’t [think] there.
We could only go to the latrine if ten of us had to go. It wasn’t too difficult because, if you had to, we could convince two or three others to come with us. The latrines were a little farther away, on one side twenty holes, the same on the other. We sat with our backs to one another.
At every fifth step was an FS [Freiwilligenstaffel] or SS-man, we couldn’t tell the difference anymore, because they wore the same uniforms. I saw myself, that among them there wasn’t one who could have been abnormal, because they stared at our naked bottoms constantly and you could see they enjoyed it. It was terrible, these things were beyond human dignity.
Ten days later they put us back into the boxcars. We were put into boxcars, and for two days they hauled us around. After two day, we arrived in Germany, in Freiberg [one of the sub-camps of the Flossenberg concentration camp], this was between Dresden and Chemnitz.
There was a porcelain factory thirty kilometers from Dresden, which had been transformed into a military factory. In the porcelain factory, for two months, five hundred ladies – almost all from the old Czechoslovak Republic, mainly the Czech Republic, but almost 200 of us were from here in Slovakia – manufactured wings, and certain parts for the rockets, with which they were bombing London [V-series rockets which were used to bomb London from June 1944].
We worked there for two months, either twelve hours a day or twelve hours a night. It was difficult physical labor. They always assigned us somewhere else. First, where I worked, a person had to stand on a little platform, the plane wing was secured, and we had to drill little holes in the airplane wing with a drill machine.
The designer drew these little circles, where they would put these little studs. These we had to drill with the drill machine. The drills weighed five kilograms. We held them on our shoulder to drill the holes. You had to really pay attention, to be precise, because if someone missed, they got such a slap that they would tumble off the platform.
Then there was a part where four of us worked at a kind of spinning lathe machine. There we made spare parts. We also had to file steel plates. That was merciless work, because the steel plates were sharp. Normally, this work would be done in gloves. Naturally, we didn’t get any gloves. There were a few accidents.
We worked under constant female supervision. I have to mention, the female SS-guards were a lot more cruel than the men. We were continually tormented by hunger: the six dekagrams of bread we got had to be enough for the whole day. For breakfast, we got some kind of very dark solution they called tea, which was lukewarm, at least.
At noon, there was that kind of soup, in which there were three unhappy, raw potatoes first, by the last week there was only one. We lived on the top floor of the factory, which was terrifying. It was full of bedbugs. A person came up after the night-shift, those sleeping there at night had to get up, because we were sleeping in their places. Twice we had to sweep off all the bedbugs. We were living in horrible conditions.
We worked there for a couple months. After seven months, they suddenly told us they’re closing the factory. We stayed inside during the day, and those who worked upstairs saw that the SS were fleeing, and the previous workers, who had trained us, were fleeing as well. We weren’t even allowed to talk to them.
They bombed Dresden for two days and one night. They locked us in the factory – those were the most bearable two days for us. We weren’t scared of the bombs, sometimes the sky was red day and night, we were lying down on the ground and could finally get some sleep, finally we didn’t have to wake up.
We were scared of the SS and the Gestapo, not the bombs. So actually, I survived the Dresden bombing, too. [The US carpet bombing of Dresden from 13th-14th February 1945, along with the firestorm that ensued, nearly obliterated the entire city.]
Then this happened: the work was abandoned, they resettled us in a barrack camp outside the city, we didn’t get any food, not even tea. The barracks were in the middle of a meadow. Three days later the grass disappeared, the ground was bare.
They grazed all the grass. They ate it. When we thought, now we were really going to starve to death – and that’s a horrible death, because it takes so long – again they put us in boxcars, but this time in freight cars without a roof. And now comes the worst part of my war Calvary [sic]. We were in those open wagons for sixteen days, they hauled us back and forth around Austria, Germany and the onetime Czechoslovakia.
We went, with the Russians coming from one direction, the Americans coming from the other. Our enemies [the Germans] came from everywhere. We moved continuously for sixteen days – in the rain, the snow, the wind, and the sunshine. Meanwhile, April came. After sixteen days there were corpses, in our train car as well. We stopped a bit in Usti nad Labem [a Czechoslovakian port city on the Labe River]. When the locals found out what was going on, they threw bread into the cars. That was all that we ate. Then we went further, night and day, until finally we stopped.
Suddenly, they opened the boxcars. The SS struck in with loud yells, ‘Alle raus, alle raus!’ Everybody out, everybody out! We didn’t know where we were, I didn’t have the strength to get out – we’d been sitting for sixteen days, we hadn’t eaten.
Then the SS-guy, who was in front of our car, jumped up and kicked us out, the ones who couldn’t get out, with his boots. We fell onto the stone paving, we were weak, thin and somehow nobody broke anything. A miracle after all, because in normal situations that wouldn’t have been possible.
We stood in Funferreihe, five in a line. The woman standing next to me, asked if it didn’t say Mauthausen over there. I had traveled to Austria often, as a Bratislava resident, but I still had no idea where we were. The SS standing next to us answered in German, ‘Das heisst Mordhausen.’ [a German play on words; roughly, ‘this is called Deathhouse.’]
So not Mauthausen, but death. Well, here’s the end, but it really didn’t matter, let them gas us, we couldn’t stand it like this anyway, it wasn’t living, we had enough. As soon as they got everybody off the boxcars, we left.
We went up to the Mauthausen fortification – this isn’t far from Linz, about five kilometers on quite a steep road. Those who couldn’t keep up and sat down, were shot in that moment. So only a few of us arrived.
We got up there, and they took us to a barrack. Before we arrived in Mauthausen, the train had stopped somewhere in Austria for a long time. We heard that there was a train that had stopped next to us, but we couldn’t see anything.
There were Russian prisoners in it, and they yelled over to us, ‘Hitler, kaput!’ We thought they wanted to console us, maybe that wasn’t true, but it was nice that they were bringing such good news. The news was really true, he wasn’t alive anymore in April. [Hitler committed suicide on 30th April 1945 in the Chancellor underground bunker in Berlin.]
[In Mauthausen] The really unlucky ones – and I was really unlucky – ended up down in the so-called Gypsy camp, where the SS-women were already fleeing. There were only a few left there, and since they knew that Jews were coming there, they gave the Gypsies authority and gave them a white armband.
They watched over us. I’m not a racist, but I have to say that it was horrible. The gypsy-women – the whole time I was under deportation, I had never had any corporal punishment – they flogged me once so badly that I had marks on my back for months. I was lucky the whole thing didn’t last very long.
There was a very nice creature among us, a lot younger than me. She said, ‘Whoever wants to come with me, I’m escaping.’ I immediately joined up. We were seven women, we left. We didn’t get far, there was a forest there, we went around like little red riding hood and the wolf. We constantly went around and around, it was pouring with rain the whole time. Well, what do we do? Let’s go back. We couldn’t find our way back.
We got somewhere, and saw steps, but leading somewhere fantastically high up. This woman, who was strapping strong, and leading us, says, ‘Wait here, I’ll climb up, to see what it is.’ We waited a little, then slowly started to follow.
‘Come on, these are some kind of lager [camp] barracks.’ She yelled in Slovak down to us. We started climbing up on all fours, until two or three men came out of the barrack, gathered us up, because by the time we reached the top, we didn’t have the energy to move.
This was the Czech political camp. They hid us in the hay, because they had beds here, filled with hay. That’s how we ended up in a barrack with Novotny [31], the later president of the Czechoslovak Republic. They brought us something to drink, what it was, didn’t matter, and they hid us there, just our heads were sticking out, but they always threw something over us. But they weren’t controlled anymore [except for roll-call], they were political prisoners after all.
We then went to a shower place, and we were certain that now, there’d come the gas, and we stood there, but water came out of the taps and not gas. They showered us, then we could get dressed. We got – this is monstrous – the clothes of the people they’d already executed. The clothes were bloody here and there, and dirty. I got a summer dress and everybody got clogs, and then we marched into the barracks.
This part took from morning to afternoon. In the afternoon, a familiar Bratislava [person] called Glauser came in. Whoever was there, crowded around, saying, ‘Where’s my father, where’s my husband, where’s this person, that person, where’s my mother, siblings, children.’
She just wrote down the names, though [Glauser] had come over because she’d heard that a transport had arrived from Bratislava. There was the so-called Staatsgebaude office [German for ‘state office’]. The Jews who had been there for three years already worked there. There weren’t too many there, eight or ten.
They allowed these [Jews] to move freely around one area of the camp, because [the rest of us] couldn’t leave the barrack. She wrote down the names of who had come and said that the next day, or two days from now, if she could get back again and could get information, then she’d tell us something. She’d be able to tell us, because she’d got a couple good friends who were assigned to the gas chambers, and had to take the gold teeth from the dead.
In two days, this Glauser showed up, and of course, everybody surrounded her. She could even tell a few people what happened. I stood there and stood there, and waited. We knew each other well, my parents and her parents, so I turned to her and asked, ‘Do you have anything to tell me?’
At first she didn’t answer, she looked into what she’d written down for herself. I said, ‘I beg you, even if its bad news, tell me the worst of it, too. I don’t want to live hoping, even if it’s really bad, it’ll be better for me to know.’ She said, ‘Yes, between two and three in the morning, it was your parents’ turn.’ I know the exact date, 4th October, when they executed my parents.
There were three bunk beds in the barrack, everybody had to sit down. We sat in a circle, they brought a bucket in front of us, in which there was some brown liquid, which stunk even from afar. We didn’t know what it was, what to do with it.
An SS-man came and commanded us to eat, this was dinner. After that another woman came, who had her hair tied up, so we knew she was a prisoner too, and who had been here for a long time, that’s why she was allowed to wear a scarf. Now she says, ‘Wolf it down, I’m not leaving here until you devour that.’
Somebody said to that, ‘There aren’t even spoons!’ ‘And there won’t be, dip it out with your hands. But devour it.’ We were so terribly glad that she spoke to us like this. ‘Listen up, you’re going to wolf that down, because they [the SS] can die, but we still want to live. If we want to survive, we eat all the shit.’
That’s what she said. It turned out she was a woman doctor from Kolozsvar [Cluj, Romania]. At that time, Kolozsvar was still Hungarian, and they [the Jews] had been deported from that area long before. We didn’t eat a lot of the liquid then, but two days later we finished it all.
I was in Auschwitz for a total of ten days. The liquidations started heavily. The gas chambers were operating day and night. The air was so bad, there was no grass there, no bird, because the stench of burnt flesh was so horrible. We lived there without thinking, you couldn’t [think] there.
We could only go to the latrine if ten of us had to go. It wasn’t too difficult because, if you had to, we could convince two or three others to come with us. The latrines were a little farther away, on one side twenty holes, the same on the other. We sat with our backs to one another.
At every fifth step was an FS [Freiwilligenstaffel] or SS-man, we couldn’t tell the difference anymore, because they wore the same uniforms. I saw myself, that among them there wasn’t one who could have been abnormal, because they stared at our naked bottoms constantly and you could see they enjoyed it. It was terrible, these things were beyond human dignity.
Ten days later they put us back into the boxcars. We were put into boxcars, and for two days they hauled us around. After two day, we arrived in Germany, in Freiberg [one of the sub-camps of the Flossenberg concentration camp], this was between Dresden and Chemnitz.
There was a porcelain factory thirty kilometers from Dresden, which had been transformed into a military factory. In the porcelain factory, for two months, five hundred ladies – almost all from the old Czechoslovak Republic, mainly the Czech Republic, but almost 200 of us were from here in Slovakia – manufactured wings, and certain parts for the rockets, with which they were bombing London [V-series rockets which were used to bomb London from June 1944].
We worked there for two months, either twelve hours a day or twelve hours a night. It was difficult physical labor. They always assigned us somewhere else. First, where I worked, a person had to stand on a little platform, the plane wing was secured, and we had to drill little holes in the airplane wing with a drill machine.
The designer drew these little circles, where they would put these little studs. These we had to drill with the drill machine. The drills weighed five kilograms. We held them on our shoulder to drill the holes. You had to really pay attention, to be precise, because if someone missed, they got such a slap that they would tumble off the platform.
Then there was a part where four of us worked at a kind of spinning lathe machine. There we made spare parts. We also had to file steel plates. That was merciless work, because the steel plates were sharp. Normally, this work would be done in gloves. Naturally, we didn’t get any gloves. There were a few accidents.
We worked under constant female supervision. I have to mention, the female SS-guards were a lot more cruel than the men. We were continually tormented by hunger: the six dekagrams of bread we got had to be enough for the whole day. For breakfast, we got some kind of very dark solution they called tea, which was lukewarm, at least.
At noon, there was that kind of soup, in which there were three unhappy, raw potatoes first, by the last week there was only one. We lived on the top floor of the factory, which was terrifying. It was full of bedbugs. A person came up after the night-shift, those sleeping there at night had to get up, because we were sleeping in their places. Twice we had to sweep off all the bedbugs. We were living in horrible conditions.
We worked there for a couple months. After seven months, they suddenly told us they’re closing the factory. We stayed inside during the day, and those who worked upstairs saw that the SS were fleeing, and the previous workers, who had trained us, were fleeing as well. We weren’t even allowed to talk to them.
They bombed Dresden for two days and one night. They locked us in the factory – those were the most bearable two days for us. We weren’t scared of the bombs, sometimes the sky was red day and night, we were lying down on the ground and could finally get some sleep, finally we didn’t have to wake up.
We were scared of the SS and the Gestapo, not the bombs. So actually, I survived the Dresden bombing, too. [The US carpet bombing of Dresden from 13th-14th February 1945, along with the firestorm that ensued, nearly obliterated the entire city.]
Then this happened: the work was abandoned, they resettled us in a barrack camp outside the city, we didn’t get any food, not even tea. The barracks were in the middle of a meadow. Three days later the grass disappeared, the ground was bare.
They grazed all the grass. They ate it. When we thought, now we were really going to starve to death – and that’s a horrible death, because it takes so long – again they put us in boxcars, but this time in freight cars without a roof. And now comes the worst part of my war Calvary [sic]. We were in those open wagons for sixteen days, they hauled us back and forth around Austria, Germany and the onetime Czechoslovakia.
We went, with the Russians coming from one direction, the Americans coming from the other. Our enemies [the Germans] came from everywhere. We moved continuously for sixteen days – in the rain, the snow, the wind, and the sunshine. Meanwhile, April came. After sixteen days there were corpses, in our train car as well. We stopped a bit in Usti nad Labem [a Czechoslovakian port city on the Labe River]. When the locals found out what was going on, they threw bread into the cars. That was all that we ate. Then we went further, night and day, until finally we stopped.
Suddenly, they opened the boxcars. The SS struck in with loud yells, ‘Alle raus, alle raus!’ Everybody out, everybody out! We didn’t know where we were, I didn’t have the strength to get out – we’d been sitting for sixteen days, we hadn’t eaten.
Then the SS-guy, who was in front of our car, jumped up and kicked us out, the ones who couldn’t get out, with his boots. We fell onto the stone paving, we were weak, thin and somehow nobody broke anything. A miracle after all, because in normal situations that wouldn’t have been possible.
We stood in Funferreihe, five in a line. The woman standing next to me, asked if it didn’t say Mauthausen over there. I had traveled to Austria often, as a Bratislava resident, but I still had no idea where we were. The SS standing next to us answered in German, ‘Das heisst Mordhausen.’ [a German play on words; roughly, ‘this is called Deathhouse.’]
So not Mauthausen, but death. Well, here’s the end, but it really didn’t matter, let them gas us, we couldn’t stand it like this anyway, it wasn’t living, we had enough. As soon as they got everybody off the boxcars, we left.
We went up to the Mauthausen fortification – this isn’t far from Linz, about five kilometers on quite a steep road. Those who couldn’t keep up and sat down, were shot in that moment. So only a few of us arrived.
We got up there, and they took us to a barrack. Before we arrived in Mauthausen, the train had stopped somewhere in Austria for a long time. We heard that there was a train that had stopped next to us, but we couldn’t see anything.
There were Russian prisoners in it, and they yelled over to us, ‘Hitler, kaput!’ We thought they wanted to console us, maybe that wasn’t true, but it was nice that they were bringing such good news. The news was really true, he wasn’t alive anymore in April. [Hitler committed suicide on 30th April 1945 in the Chancellor underground bunker in Berlin.]
[In Mauthausen] The really unlucky ones – and I was really unlucky – ended up down in the so-called Gypsy camp, where the SS-women were already fleeing. There were only a few left there, and since they knew that Jews were coming there, they gave the Gypsies authority and gave them a white armband.
They watched over us. I’m not a racist, but I have to say that it was horrible. The gypsy-women – the whole time I was under deportation, I had never had any corporal punishment – they flogged me once so badly that I had marks on my back for months. I was lucky the whole thing didn’t last very long.
There was a very nice creature among us, a lot younger than me. She said, ‘Whoever wants to come with me, I’m escaping.’ I immediately joined up. We were seven women, we left. We didn’t get far, there was a forest there, we went around like little red riding hood and the wolf. We constantly went around and around, it was pouring with rain the whole time. Well, what do we do? Let’s go back. We couldn’t find our way back.
We got somewhere, and saw steps, but leading somewhere fantastically high up. This woman, who was strapping strong, and leading us, says, ‘Wait here, I’ll climb up, to see what it is.’ We waited a little, then slowly started to follow.
‘Come on, these are some kind of lager [camp] barracks.’ She yelled in Slovak down to us. We started climbing up on all fours, until two or three men came out of the barrack, gathered us up, because by the time we reached the top, we didn’t have the energy to move.
This was the Czech political camp. They hid us in the hay, because they had beds here, filled with hay. That’s how we ended up in a barrack with Novotny [31], the later president of the Czechoslovak Republic. They brought us something to drink, what it was, didn’t matter, and they hid us there, just our heads were sticking out, but they always threw something over us. But they weren’t controlled anymore [except for roll-call], they were political prisoners after all.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Katarina Löfflerova