Irena Nosková

"She gave birth to a baby boy who died three months later. She had no milk, couldn't feed him, and he died. She suppressed the trauma or else it would drive her insane. It was terrible for her. She told me later how many of them lived in that house - a lot. I actually saw the barracks with my own eyes; some of them are ruins now, some are still upright. I shot a full reel in Auschwitz; we were there for two days and slept in a hotel in Katowice. She remembers they picked up stones on the other side of the fence and her arm got paralyzed, and they could hear the SS singing from afar. When the sirens were going off, they weren't sure which barrack they belonged to. There was a period when the guards used to open every other barrack and take the prisoners out; by then, they had already heard they were going to the gas chamber, then to be cremated, and gone. Mother told me that when the sirens started going off, the women in the barracks went crazy because they never know if their barrack's door would open. They knew they would go away and never come back. Their house never opened."

"They went straight to Auschwitz. My mother knew the train was halted during the day and only moved at night. Those were cattle cars. Mom and Dad cried all the time; they didn't know anything. When they came for them at night - mom doesn't know if it was the Gestapo or the SS; they were just soldiers yelling at them, and Mom was eighteen - they were only allowed to take the most important things. Gold, if any, documents, and essential clothes up to a certain weight. I don't know more details. For instance, my mother had no idea the transport went via Czechoslovakia. We didn't find out until 1995 when my mother, my husband and I came to Auschwitz and were given all the paperwork that the Germans didn't manage to destroy. Apparently they kept amazing records, because the papers included the date her daddy died, just everything."