Eva Erbenová

“Mum told me she was dying, asked me to tell Dad. At that moment a German [woman] came in, bringing bread. She had an apron, a basin, and chunks of bread inside, which she threw to all the people around. She threw some to me and Mum. Mum died that very moment. I took both pieces of bread and held Mum as she turned cold in my hands. I kept speaking to her, I didn’t want to believe she was dead. Then Goldi [Eva’s Hungarian friend - ed.] came in and started speaking Hungarian at me: ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry!’ But I didn’t even cry, I just wouldn’t accept it. No, Mum wasn’t dead.”

“When they told us that the only way out of Auschwitz is through the chimney, we reckoned that the people were a bit crazy. In the beginning we thought that Auschwitz was a factory where men worked. We thought we were going to a labour camp, where we’d meet up with Dad. For a long time I didn’t know... You know what, I both knew it and didn’t know it. Nowadays people spend a lot of time researching how the human psyche reacts and how it processes things. Because people who would realise this and see what was actually happening wouldn’t be able to live.”

“We walked twenty-five to thirty kilometres every day. We slept in barns that we found on the way. Ordinary Germans or Poles had to give up their barns. And they crammed us into those. It was insane. Dark everywhere, with hungry and wet people who needed the toilet. Dreadful. Everyone wanted some space, but it was lacking. A lot of people were squashed and died.”

“A lot of people couldn’t go on any longer, so they just sat down and said: ‘Finished, I can’t go on.’ Those were shot. Right in front of us. A few metres away from us. You could feel the bullet sizzle. I never wanted the children to see anything bad. For instance, when there was something like that in the television, I closed the door. As an adult, I now often wonder how people can live with such memories. Those memories must be discarded. That is the art of forgetting.”

“We have never encountered anti-Semitism. I had no experience with it from school or from the street. Never, never. I don’t know about my parents, but I think they didn’t, either. They began contemplating emigration in 1939 when Winton came. My mom went to Hotel Jalta at that time and she had me registered. How did I learn all this? Suddenly there was a little suitcase in my room, and my mom was folding towels and my clothes there and she told me: ‘Perhaps you will go to London.’ That was because I was asking her where we were going. Now she told me that she had registered me and I started crying terribly. I remember the sentence which I told her, although it was not nice: ‘I will eat wood with you all, but I will not go anywhere.’”

“We went for three days because the bombardment continued all the time and the train was stopping constantly. We passed through Dresden and so on. When we arrived to Auschwitz after three days and the women were peeking outside through the cracks, mom said: ‘We are not staying here, this is some camp for criminals. There are dogs and whips and dogs everywhere...’ At that moment the door flew open and the Nazis got in and they kicked us out. Everything that followed was so traumatic, insane. The air was heavy so that you could not even breathe, there was dust, ash, fire, dogs, barking, yelling, snapping orders in German all the time. Then there was the line of people, Mengele, nakedness, undressing, bathing, rags, shaving, and so on. All of a sudden moms were without their children, a girl without her mommy, a person remained alone... Then there was the walk to the barracks; everybody now knows what Auschwitz was and how it looked like. When we came there, each of us got a blanket, a kind of an army blanket, and it was wet, too. Everything was wet, and it was in October when the weather was already cold.”

“The way I saved myself was purely accidental. After my mother had died, I was so devastated and I was already perfectly dead, apathetic, and I weighted thirty kilos, I could not even eat anymore. There were already not many of us, and at night they locked us inside some barn. I was still cold inside the barn. This happens when one’s end is drawing near: one feels cold all the time. There was a cow in the barn, and it stood alone in the corner and it was warm there. People always argued – this and that place is better, and there were always chaos. I went closer to this nice little cow and I huddled myself there and fell asleep. When I woke up, nobody was there anymore. I was left there alone. I thus do not have any... I didn’t plan it, I didn’t know, it was not my own wisdom, it just happened that way, it was like that.”