The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

particularly thick; three times we heard English or American attacks, but even when one of the bombs fell near the prison and a large part of the town was destroyed, the prison walls remained intact. All in all we were there about three months, during which more Jews joined us from other towns - Cetinia, Nikshic, and a Jewish family from Petrovac that owned a matchmaking plant. When the Germans withdrew in May 1944, we were raised, about a hundred and ten Jews, to trucks. We traveled for a whole day standing, crowded like sardines, through Kosovo to Rasha in Serbia, from there to Belgrade, to Zemun and to the final destination - Sajmishte on the outskirts of Belgrade - a former fair converted to a Nazi concentration and extermination camp. In Sajmishte we were housed in buildings that contained three wooden bunks floors. The older prisoners on the scene told us that, before we arrived, inmates were killed there with gas trucks and then thrown into brothers-graves, which were dug beforehand in the German occupation area of Serbia. We stayed in Sajmishte for about a month. When a another group of Jews arrived, about a hundred and fifty people from Prishtina in Kosovo, which flee to Albania, joined our twenty families in this group and together we were called the "Albanian" group. During the day we were free to walk around the campground but not get out. The famine in Sajmishte was unbearable. Throughout the day we had not get food except bread here and there, and we had to dig through the garbage for food scraps. We collected empty peas and vegetable pods and my mother picked nettles, gathered twigs and lit a fire, and so she cooked, what we were able to glean, in a military aluminum saucer. So we spent a month in the camp, until one night the Croats Ustasha were taken out all the men and beat them to death with whips and sticks. My father was lying in the bunk below me and I put my blanket on dangling from the bed in a way that would hide him, so I managed to avoid him from the suffering of the blows. It was a terrible night. Rabbi Halevi’s sister, who was with us in the camp, suffered a nervous breakdown in the light of the events. She came out of our hut and we heard a gunshot. Later we learned that she had been killed and that her body had been thrown into the Sava River. In the next day morning we were assembled, including those men who had been beaten the night before, they could barely walk, and we were all crammed into a freight train which was to lead us to Bergen-Belsen.

Bergen-Belsen

We arrived at Bergen-Belsen on June 20, 1944, my birthday. We had been taken down at Zelle subway station and from there we walked about two kilometers to the camp.

For the first few days, we were kept in seclusion in the barracks. Next to us, beyond the fence had a group of Jewish-Polish inmates who had a Palestinian-English passport,

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