That was the day they took my mother away. It later turned out that the whole transport went to Auschwitz, straight to the crematoria, because they were sick and emaciated people who couldn’t work. My mother had lost weight for a reason. She was very religious and she wouldn’t eat treif. So she would exchange soup for bread and things like that. When Passover came, she wouldn’t eat bread either. She lost a lot of weight and they took her…that was the end.
There were a few more Selektionen. Once they sent me to the left in the Selektion and they wrote me down for the transport, but something…they couldn’t find me on the general list. There was a member of the Jewish police named Finkelstein. He was a criminal. Jewish. He looked through the lists and then he said in Yiddish, I don’t know…something…his heart softened, and he said, “I hope I don’t find you on this list.” And suddenly I saw that all the people from my hut were going back to the hut, and I saw my father, and I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I ran and joined that group of people and no one said anything. I got into the hut and was saved that time. [I’ve been counting, and that’s the seventh time you’ve been saved, and me saved with you, thanks to resourcefulness, thanks to luck, thanks to your father, thanks to your mother. Every time you are saved, you save me. I was born easily, a normal child, without understanding what I understand now — the miracle of my existence. I am here thanks to the things that happened to you and did not happen to others, those whose children were not born, who do not exist. Sometimes, though, I think you can sense them in the air, maybe on holidays and large gatherings, you can sense the offspring of the man standing behind you, next to you, whose father did not hold him behind his back for three hours, for whom there was no order to stop shooting just in the nick of time, for whom no well-timed commotion arose just when the horse whip, the Peitsche, separated him from his mother.]
Life in Plaszow camp was very difficult because often, after work, they would make us do all sorts of things just to humiliate us and make our lives difficult. After a night shift, they would often take four people and load a wooden plank on their backs. There were these dismantled shacks that were made up of all sorts of pieces of wood and they would load a plank onto four people. The plank itself was heavy, and then they would load it up with anything we came across on the way. Rolls of barbed wire, stones, dirt. Until the people collapsed. He was simply a sadist, the officer who devised this game. I don’t remember his name, some SS officer, this was his hobby. The four would collapse and he’d take another four. It was…almost every morning after the night shift. Living conditions were very harsh. We lived in shacks with beds…not exactly beds, triple bunks, and each section held three people, and there were lots of fleas. We called them ‘paratroopers’ because they were red and they would fall on us from above. It was impossible to sleep. We used to sleep outside, because inside it was impossible. Outside there was rain and cold and snow. But it was better to sleep outside in the rain and snow than inside, where it was impossible. We had a lot of lice. After work, people would sit and kill the lice. You couldn’t wash or boil the linen.
Economically it was very difficult. There wasn’t enough food. My father had left some money with a Polish man in Bochnia who used to work for him, Mieczslaw Kozek. This Pole, from time to time, would send sums of money to the concentration camp. It was possible to get it to Plaszow. How he did it, I do not know. There were Germans who helped him. They must have gotten ninety percent of the sums that went through, but the ten percent were enough for us to buy bread or something. After the war, the Polish assistant told us that one day he saw an SS officer coming up to his barbershop, and he thought they’d found out about him and so he ran. He spent a week away from Bochnia, afraid to go back. It turned out the officer he ran away from was actually the man who had come to transfer the money. But it was no laughing matter, they really could have killed him for that. It was a great help to us. In any case, it was possible to get along for a while, but then it stopped. The economic situation was very difficult.
Then there was a time when Father was ill and had to be hospitalized. I also got ill. My joints were so inflamed I couldn’t even walk. We used to pass twice a day through the gates, and they would count us. We walked in rows of five. So when we had to go through to be counted, they would pick me up and walk me through the gates so I would be counted. Then they would sit me on the side. I couldn’t move. [Who would have cared if they had put a bullet through you? You lay there, unable to move, and for hundreds of miles around you there was no one who could help, no one to halt reality if a bullet shot out of the barrel. What did you think about? You say you didn’t think about anything in particular. I understand why you are such a Zionist. That was when you realized something that is difficult for me to understand — what it is to be without your own country. Without independence. Without having someone with a gun on your side too. So many days, lying there without moving, people around you being murdered over nothing. It must be harder than standing against a wall in the Bochnia ghetto, harder than being sent to the left, to die, and waiting a week for the transport.] In the camp afterwards I just couldn’t make it to the clinic. I couldn’t. But somehow I made it, I don’t remember how. They gave me some medicine. It helped me a little and I got better, but it was a very difficult time.
For a while they took us to work outside the camp and we built railroad tracks for Prokocim, a village near Krakow. Terrible conditions. The foremen were real murderers. They would beat us to death over any mistake, or not a mistake, just any little thing. And the walk was long, walking from Plaszow all the way to Prokocim and back. People collapsed, they couldn’t do it. The one good thing was that we could buy things from the Poles and smuggle them back into the camp. At first there was no money, but then Father somehow organized some money to buy stuff and smuggle it in. But the Germans knew this, and every so often they conducted searches. One evening they started a search. Everyone who had anything would be beaten bloody. There were some cooking pots laid out on kind of wooden planks. I told someone, “Come on, let’s take this plank and go.” We took a plank and started walking away. A German saw us leaving so he chased us. He was certain we were hiding something in the pots. When he saw there was nothing, he hit me and we left. But I had lots of things on me, and then we were able to get money.
In Plaszow there were a few Jews who were no better than the Germans — and some that were worse. There was the Chilewicz, the ‘head Jew.’ This man was a criminal. There was also Finkelstein, the one I mentioned before, and the two of them were no less cruel than the Germans. Sometimes even worse. [I read in the testimonies about their fates. Just before the liquidation of the camp, the Germans took Finkelstein and Chilewicz and Chilewicz’s wife, who was even worse than he was, to a hilltop and killed them. Speak kindly of the dead.] In that period there was nothing to eat. I always tried to find a way to sneak into the kitchen. I was a small, thin boy. I would burrow under the fences and steal soup and run with it to Father. On my shirt you could see the menu every week. There was no other way to survive. I also managed to get something through to my sister, in the women’s camp. Mother, I already said, would not eat soup because it was treif. At the end of ’44 they sent us in a transport to Gross-Rosen in Germany. At the same time they sent my sister to Auschwitz, and then to Ravensbrück. My father was already quite sick. We didn’t know he was suffering from kidney problems. His legs swelled up horribly.