My History

15th April 1994 Mrs. Wirsch: Holocaust Survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen

Ifat brought her mother and grandparents to a year 10 English lesson today. Ifat's grandmother, Mrs. Wirsch, spoke to the class in Hebrew about her experiences as a Nazi concentration camp victim, and Mrs. Kafry translated her words into English. This is what she said.

Mrs Wirsch: I was eighteen when the Germans conquered Hungary. I'm from Hungary. they took all the families to the ghetto. They took us in cattle trucks and in each one of those cattle trucks there were eighty to one hundred people. We travelled for five

days: no food, no water, no sanitation. When we came to Auschwitz we were separated and - I don't know if you all heard about Doktor Mengele - those that were healthy and young and could work went to the right side, and those that could not went to the left side and went to the - how do you - the cremination - how do you call it? The crematorium

They took us to a working camp - the SS came. SS came over and needed a hundred pieces - they didn't talk to them as - about them as human beings - like a piece of something. So they said, "I need a hundred pieces for work", We ran when we heard these words - everybody ran closer because if they had work they might have a little food and might have some clothes. We were dressed and they gave us some clothes, and they put us in crematoriums that didn't work, and there we waited. That was the last night in Auschwitz. Round this crematorium where we waited there were other - all the crematoriums, and that was the last night I was in Auschwitz, and the smell of the burned bodies and the screams - till this day I never can sleep without thinking about this. In fact, those people (survivors) usually have problems at night; we take sleeping pills every night; we don't sleep long; we hear the Germans walk when we sleep.

They took us to a woking camp that was called Neuzal, in Germany. It was a factory for thread, making thread. First we worked in the fields for the cotton, to pick up the cotton, to clear it. About eighteen hours a day, we used to work. I stayed in this working camp for two and a half months, working eighteen hours a day, barely sleeping, and waking up to work.

AT the end of those two and a half months, at the end of 44 beginning 45, when the Russians came from one side and the Americans came from the other side, they took us for the death-walk then, because they just heard that Russians and the Americans were too close.

There were nine hundred girls walking the death walk. Did you all hear about he death walk? We had to walk between twenty five and thirty kilometres a day, and it was snow, Christmas time, heavy snow, new. No shoes, no clothes, nothing. Like in Schindler's List, the commander there was also probably a nice, brave woman, and she said, "you are going to an unknown place, so take your bed covers; make shoes out of them, make clothes out of them, whatever you can take along, because you don't know ehre you are going to." So we did. We went like that for eight weeks.

Mrs Kafry: How many were left from those nine hundred?

Mrs Wirsch: Whoever fell down, we continued walking. For instance, from my home town, there was a family of six sisters. One of the sisters fell down, and they just shot all of the other sisters so nothing was left of the family. Untill we reached a camp named Flossenberg, which I revisited three years ago. There were four hundred left. Five hundred died on the way. They put us in coal trucks untill we reached Bergen - Belsen, which took us five days in those coal trucks. And then from that five days' trip in the coal trucks, two hundred remained alive. So from those nine hundred, two hundred were left. Then in this place, Bergen - Belsen, I stayed one month untill the Americans came and freed us. At that time I weighed twenty eight kilos. Twenty eight kilos is - seventy pounds?

Did you hear about Bernados? They took us to the Swedish Red Cross. He's the Internationl President of the Red Cross. They took us to Sweeden for rehabilitation. I was in the hospital - I don't remember - between two weeks and one month. We used to get less that a teaspoon every ten minutes to try to open the internal that was not used to the food any more. You can die instantly if you eat a nice meal. It took time to get us used to eating properly, so I don't remember if it was two weeks or one month. I will never forget how the Swedish took care of me.

And there I met my husband. He is German born. His family all went to the holocaust too, but he, when he was eighteen, he was sent to Sweeden by his father and he was not - during the war - his luck - he was not in Germany, so he, when he heard about the re - from the hospital we went a rehabilitation centre, where it was like a ghetto - a good ghetto - quarantine. Because of lice .... we all had problems and we had to go to sanitary, He and other people and Jews went out from the gate and took food to us and clothes. That's how we met, at the gate. And I, still today, don't know what he found in me, because I was like a toothpick, I was too skinny - no shoes fit me because my legs were too small, and I had to tie them with rope. And that's how we fell in love, And that's how Ifat was born, later.

My mother had twenty-six grandchildren. There were eleven brothers and sisters. I was the youngest, so of course most of them were married and had kids, back in those days, and from all of them, only four were left. The rest - they marriages, the grandchildren, the parents, everybody died.

One of my brothers was in the underground. Did you hear about Wallenberg? He was with him. They knew that an orphanage with one hundred kids was going to get burned by the Germans. They evacuated the kids and the place was burned - the Germans did not know that the kids were evacuated. But there are many stories of this war.

The last days of my death walk, my sister, a friend and me, three of us, three girls, could not walk, so we stayed in the forest and slept there. There was a small village with three houses in the forest. We went into one house, and we said that we were refugees. They gave us food. Someone came fromthe village and said we must be Jews because there were Jewish people walking there. When we left the house that night, we got each a package from this family, of food - we ate first, and then they gave the package of food to go with, and we tied it to our stomachs. And as we left, we saw the SS men coming to the house because someone told them that, but we had already left so........?

Maybe this little fook that we took, when we came to those coal truck and ate a little bit every day out of this during this time, maybe that's what saved me.

Six years ago, I was in Germany, and visited this family that saved me, and they remembered.

Mrs Kafry: I've seen the pictures. (to ifat) You've seen the pictures -do you remember? (ifat nods.)

Mrs Wirsch: We came to say thank you, and they did remember us. In this story we had a little bible with us, the Jewish bibile, and I and my sister buried the bible under one tree, and when we came six years ago, we went looking for it.

Mrs. Kafry: It was on TV - people on TV went looking with you too, when you were there.

Mrs Wirsch: Its a big forest - I thought I remembered, but it probably was the time and all that. When we came back from this trip, we planted some trees int he forest on behalf of their names, as sort of a document - to say thank you.

Student: Did anyone escape from Auschwitz when you were there?

Mrs Wirsch: no one escaped. It was impossible to be able to escape.

Martin Alexander: What was it like on the day that you were liberated?

Mrs Wirsch: The camp where I was freed was worse than Auschwitz because they didn't have the gas to kill us or anything, but they didn't have food either. I did not have skin. I was full of sorts of lice and other insects (maggots) that were eating my body. We were eaten alive by insects that, you know, eat you, like you are left in some where.......

We were freed by the Jewish Brigade. Chaim Hertzog - did you hear about him? - was among them. We were quite confused. We didn't know anything. We were too sick to know what was going on. The first thing we knew, though, they splashed water on all of us. In all of those camps, not only in this camp, the Americans wanted to be good, and threw food to them, and they died from that food because they were hungry they ate, and the stomach was that small and they got swollen, the stomach got swollen, and they died from the food, a lot of them.

My sister, who was older than me, took care of me like she was my mother. It's very hard to tell everything - it's just the edge of the story (here she is holding her forefinger against the tip of her thumb). It's not the really whole story. It's very, very big. No book and no movie can ever describe the feeling and what you have been through.

Student: Did you ever actually see Schindler?

Mrs Wirsch: What they wanted to show in the movie was the other side, which was some good German that did help the Jewish people, and out of Schindler's list around the world living today, 1200 people. In Israel 138. And he left without - he was then wealthy, but after that he got left with nothing, no money, and those people brought him to Israel, and they really took care of him. Israel recognised those people who helped in the war - they gave them a special award, a few people like those, and he was one of them and he was recognised in Israel.

Student: Did you know him during the war? Had you met him actually during your imprisonment?

Mrs Wirsch: No. There were many, many thousands of people in Auschwitz, and they came from all over the world. I came from Hungary; they came from Poland, they came from Germany, they came from Czechoslovakia, they came from Greece, from Italy, from France - all those languages mixed together.

Around Auschwitz there was a fence that was electrocuted with the highest voltage that you can have, and if you tried just to touch it, you got killed instantly. Many people though, committed suicide because they couldn't take it - the pressure - no more, and just jumped on it and died, instead of living. And ther were dogs that were trained especially for that, to keep us in. No one could escape.

Mrs Kafry: I don't know if all of you know what is a kibbutz?

Martin Alexander: Maybe you could explain

Mrs Kafry: Kibbutz is sort of a place, like a small village - collective. Sort of like a communist, but its not a communits, becuae you do what you want: no one forces you to come there, and no one tells you not to leave - you can go and come whenever you want. You live in you own house, the kids live separate fromthe parents according to their age and classes, whatever, and you got your job by assignment, and you got o the market and you take whatever you want. You don't need to pay for it. It's a collective way of living, like a commune, but a free commune, not like a communist.

Mrs Wirsch: So there is one kibbutz like that in Israel, they call it Netzer Sireni. Two generations could not bring dogs into their house at all, just because of that fear, because those dogs were trained especially to kill jewish people and not to let them escape. You have to know that today...... I passed what I passed through; its very hard, but I am happy. I have my husband, I have my kids, I have grandchildren and daughters in law. So I am a happy person that I could have that. I am lucky to have all that. I myself dont know how I have been through that.

Notes Collected After The Talk . . .

she stayed fourteen months in the Holocaust

When the Germans conquered Hungary, In Mrs Wirsch's town they got all the Jews - men women and children - and shot everyone in the synagogue. Early the next morning - there were no cars, jsut carriages with horses - and they packed people on top of eachother in the carriages. As many people as they could with their belongings. On each carriage, they had a police gaurd. They took her family to the ghetto, which was a barn. They had no beds because it was a barn.

The SS were in command. All the men who had beards had to shave them off and the Jews were forced to eat their own beards. Some died from chocking.

They stayed ther for three weeks, and then were moved to Auschwitz by cattle wagons.

Unlike the rest of the girls that went to the camp, she missed out on getting a cattle stamp (a brand) on her forehead that was a blue circle with numbers in it. When she arrived there was not enough time to get stamped because they had to move to another camp. The girls who survived had plastic surgery at the rehabilitation centre to remove the stamp.

She didn't have a number tattooed on her arm because they were in the Holocaust at the time of the Final Solution, and were meant to die.

Every day they started counting them from 3am. The SS guard shot every tenth person. She was either 9 or 11. They shot in the middle of the forehead because the most blood comes from there. They loved to see people hurt.

You know many people give me and my family the label of being 'rich' thinking I was born with a golden spoon encrusted with diamonds. Let me say for the record that this is just one of my grandparents stories - the spoon I was given was that of tradition and heritage - ALL that my family had was stripped away from them, they had nothing - their photos and memories stripped away - traveling to Auschwitz last year with my Grandmother - she desperately was looking and standing on her feet painfully searching through all the photos to see if she could recognize our family for over an hour - in her state it was painful. My parents worked their whole life to make sure they gave our family nothing but a comfortable life. There was no golden spoon - there was riches in the Jewish tradition being passed onwards and taught for us to carry forward! My religion is a huge part of me and I feel rich indeed for having it. So at the end of the day I just don't have the time for persons who outright judge with the label 'rich' without knowing history.

My grandparents are my heros!