es for all the thirty-two barracks, and only one wash basin, people were still pushing and shoving when the order for roll call was given. We had to stand in place until late morning, when the Lagerälteste arrived to inspect us, a woman in uniform escorted by SS men and dogs. Before she came, some of the women fainted, and the trusty hit with a stick anyone who tried to help them. After the roll call, we all collapsed in exhaustion. We were not allowed back in the barrack, and so spent the day lying on the ground, twisted with hunger. In the evening, roll call again, until late into the night. Now there were dozens of women unconscious. We were ordered to drag them to the roll call and lay them out in rows of five. After the roll call we had to drag them back into the barrack. The next day, we got up in the dark again, again ran to the latrine and the wash basin, and went to roll call. Then our first breakfast, a soup of pine needles. We had no spoons, no dishes; we drank the sickeningly sweet but warm liquid from a single mess tin, passing it after each mouthful. In the afternoon, turnip soup and a piece of bread. In the evening, a little marmalade, a slice of brawn. The minute we swallowed the food, our hunger, unsatisfied, would gnaw at our stomachs worse than before, but then it would go away while we stood, half-asleep, half-unconscious, at roll call. We grew weak, we could hardly move. But we knew what awaited us if the last of our strength went; we saw what had happened to the camp inmates before us. One day, they herded several hundred women into the barrack next door, all skeletons who had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. In the evening, after roll call and after we had just got to sleep, we were awakened by shouting, barking, screaming. We went to the windows and saw closed black trucks in front of the other barrack and German soldiers forcing the skeleton women into them. The women resisted, they yelled at the top of their lungs that they didn’t want to go to the ovens, they were still strong, they could work, and their fear gave them new strength, they clutched convulsively at the door frames, the windows, at anything they could, and some even climbed on the roof of the barrack. But the searchlights from the guard towers located them, and the soldiers and dogs pulled them down and threw them into the trucks, which took them away. The following day, we began to be sorted for the ovens. Two SS men came into the barrack with a woman doctor in a white coat and the trusty. They set out narrow planks in the middle of the floor and, stripped naked, we had to run the length of them, from end to end. If anyone stumbled, lost her balance, touched the floor with her foot, the doctor made a tired movement with his hand, and the SS men grabbed her like a sack and tossed her, no matter how much she struggled, outside, where the black truck was waiting. I didn’t stumble, but something else happened. The SS sergeant, Handke — we tried to avoid him, because he enjoyed hitting us at roll call for no reason — was there, and when I ran across the planks, he beckoned me over with his finger. He looked me up and down, pinched my arm to see how quickly the flesh recovered, then repeated the test on my breasts and thighs. He told me to wait by the door. He did the same thing a little later with Klara, a girl from Užgorod. After the inspection was over and the black truck was on its way, the trusty took our numbers, gave us dresses, and Handke, with the other SS men, escorted us out of the barrack. He took us to be bathed and disinfected, just the two of us, then through the camp and to a fence that separated the camp from the administration building. The soldier at the gate stood at attention. We passed the Kommandantur, the workshops, and went as far as the hospital, on the other side. There, they handed us over to prisoner nurses. We were told to undress and were given clean hospital gowns. They took us into a room with a row of cubicles, put each of us in a separate one, and told us to lie down. A strong light was shining. Two nurses came in, told me to spread my legs wide, then gave me an injection there that hurt terribly. Soon I went numb. They came in again, helped me to my feet, and dragged me past the cubicles into the operating room. Klara was already on one of the tables. They strapped my legs to a metal frame, tied my hands to my body, and a doctor wearing a mask and rubber gloves came in. They all bent over me. I saw a long drill-like needle that ended in a corkscrew, then felt a burning between my legs and, despite the numbness, a sharp pain deep inside, in the womb, as if it were being pulled out. They withdrew the needle and untied me. I was bleeding heavily, and they packed cotton wool in me and carried me back to the cubicle on a stretcher. I asked what had been done to me. One of the nurses hissed through his teeth: “It’s so you won’t have a baby, stupid.” I was feverish. But in the evening they brought me food, a soup much thicker and tastier than anything I had had so far in the camp. The next day, while I was being bandaged, a nurse pulled the gown off my shoulder and tattooed something across my left breast. This time I didn’t even bother to ask what it was. I was half-delirious. Later, when I felt better, I read it. My convalescence lasted about a week. The bleeding stopped, and Handke came to fetch me. He brought a dress for me, which I had to put on right there in front of him. He motioned to me to follow him. We went out of the hospital and to a building nearby, which was called the “house of pleasure.” It was a long room with cubicles like those Klara and I had been in at the hospital, except that each cubicle was closed off by a white curtain. Each had a bed. Klara was not yet there, but there were women in the other cubicles. We were eighteen in all. We could sit or lie down, but were not allowed to leave the cubicle except three times a day and all together. The commandant of the house of pleasure, Gisela, was a German woman who had been found guilty of poisoning her sister. Her cubicle, the last, had a door instead of a curtain. She wore a uniform, boots, and had a whip attached to her right forearm. When the soldiers came, from either our camp or a nearby garrison, or from units passing through on their way to the front, Gisela would shout, “Everyone out!” We would stand, each in front of her curtain, and the soldiers would look us over and choose. The girl chosen was supposed to go into her cubicle, take off her clothes, and make herself available. Gisela warned us that we must be nice to our visitors, satisfy their every wish, and that any girl who did not would be beaten to death. One by one she called us into her cubicle, undressed us, and showed us, herself undressed, what we had to do with the soldiers, but at the same time it was her way of getting her own pleasure. We had more food than in the camp, almost enough food, we were cleanly dressed, we showered every day, our heads were no longer shaved. But we were terrified at every visit, because we knew that we would not be able to defend ourselves against any accusation that we had not satisfied. Klara and I, in fact, replaced two girls who had been punished — that was what my neighbor, a Czech Jewess, whispered to me across the cubicle partition. I myself witnessed one such punishment. The victims were two sisters, Leah and Tzinna, brought into the camp from a Polish ghetto, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen, still undeveloped, and always terrified. Perhaps they didn’t know what to do in bed to satisfy the soldiers, perhaps Gisela just decided that they were not suitable or not to her liking as women. One morning, we were ordered into the circle in front of the administration building, and from the other side of the camp they brought hundreds of inmates right up to the fence, all of them stumbling skeletons, just as we had been before we came to the house of pleasure. Then the Germans emerged from the administration building, from the storerooms and guard posts, their uniforms unbuttoned, without their weapons, to watch the spectacle. Handke carried out the punishment. Two wooden horses were brought out, like those used in gymnastics but without the padded top. Gisela led the two girls up to them. The girls were holding each other by the hand, weeping. Handke, almost gently, separated them, suddenly ripped the dress off one and then the other, and deftly tied them tight to the horses, each arm and leg separately. A soldier handed him a stick, perhaps a meter long, and thick. Handke stood behind Leah and with all his might hit her on the leg below the knee. She screamed, but we could hear the crack of the bone breaking. Then he hit her on the other leg. Then on both her legs above the knees. Leah was still screaming. Then he stepped to one side and hit her across the base of her spine, so hard that her body, even though tied down, bounced. The next blow was to the middle of the back. Her head was now hanging — she had lost consciousness — but Handke kept hitting until he smashed her head in. After that, he stuck his stick under his arm, unbuttoned his jacket, and lit a cigarette. We watched him smoke and walk up and down the row of us, looking at us with a smile on his face. Tzinna, too, watched him, followed him with bulging, glassy eyes. He went up to her. He did the same with her. Then, brandishing the stick, he walked to the administration building with measured strides, and the Germans, as he went past, clapped him on the back. They led us back into the house of pleasure while some of the prisoners came with handcarts to take Leah and Tzinna to the ovens. Eventually Handke killed and replaced all the women except Regina, a girl from Košice, my neighbor Helena, and me. He had already told us that we would suffer the same fate if Germany lost the war, that we had no hope of living to see it. But we still hoped, each to herself, although when together we repeated Handke’s threats. There were frequent alerts because of Allied planes flying overhead, but we couldn’t leave the building. Gisela locked the doors from the outside and took shelter at the Kommandantur. It was at those times that we could make our plans. But we were careful, for Gisela had the habit of questioning us separately about what the others were saying. The only one I trusted was Helena, and during the alerts she came into my cubicle or I went into hers, and we plotted how to stay alive when the Russians or the Americans arrived. We talked nonsense: We would attack Gisela, tie her up, and use her as a hostage; or we would seize the weapons from the nearest guard post. But when the moment of liberation came, we had no chance to do anything heroic. The Germans emptied the camp in stages: They took the surviving prisoners into a field, where they mowed them down with machine guns and set fire to them, because the ovens couldn’t handle such a large number of bodies. Meanwhile, they themselves were leaving — the storeroom people, followed by the hospital people and the administration, until only the guards were left. No one visited us anymore, and we were given hardly any food. Gisela stuck a revolver in her belt. One morning, after we were allowed to go to the latrine, we heard hurried orders, a guard rushed up and shouted to Gisela, and she shouted to us to get back into the house of pleasure at once. Instinctively, I didn’t obey. I heard the women’s footsteps leaving the latrine, but then realized that they would find me missing and come to look for me. So I left the latrine, sneaked around the building, and lay on the ground behind a wall. I heard agitated orders, men running, shooting. I pressed my head to the ground and waited, determined not to move, to wait for my death there. The shots grew more frequent; whole bursts of gunfire could be heard, and the sound of men running. Then silence, then running feet again, the clatter of weapons, shooting. Suddenly, in the distance, the sound of many voices in a long shout that sounded like a shout of triumph. I didn’t dare believe my ears, I stayed where I was. The noise got nearer, then petered away. I heard something being broken nearby — it had to be the windows of the administration building. Again silence. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I raised my head and crawled out. There was no one around. I went into the latrine. Then I thought that a German left behind might find me there, so I went out again. Where should I go? I didn’t dare go into the administration building or the storeroom. The door of our house of pleasure was wide open. Inside, everything was smashed, the curtains were torn and bloodstained, and the women were dead in their cubicles, in pools of blood. I heard a groan. It was Regina, she crawled out from behind her bed and collapsed at my feet. I turned her over; she had a wound in her neck. I tore off a piece of curtain and bandaged it. She said, “It was Handke,” and pointed to her legs, which were wounded, too. I tried to drag her out by the shoulders, but she groaned, so I put her down and ran outside. There I came upon two prisoners, who were carrying bloodstained shovels. I asked them to help me carry the girl into the abandoned Kommandantur. I stayed there with Regina and took care of her until the Soviet army arrived, fed us, and arranged for our transport home.