The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

In addition to them, each hut had a capo from the same hut that distributed food. Ours capo, when he knew the prisoner who was waiting in front of him, he used to scoop the thick broth from the bottom of the pot, while for those whom he did not recognize and did not care, he would serve the thinner liquid from the top of the pot, but he wasn't a sadist. Every once in a while the camp air smelled like a feather burned, and then we knew that inmates were being burned in the crematoriums, those whose power was not up to them. However, Bergen-Belsen did not serve as an extermination camp, but if any prisoner had violated the rules of the camp, he would have been sent to Auschwitz. For example, one day a Yugoslav prisoner, who worked with me in separating shoes, he found a pair of whole shoes and he locked them at his feet. He was caught, and the penalty for this "offense" was his deportation to Auschwitz. He never returned from there. Shortly after we arrived at the camp, we were taken to the baths. The clothes and shoes were collected and transported for disinfection, so to speak to protect us from infectious diseases and parasites. For more than an hour we waited naked until the clothes were returned to us, only to finding out that all our woolen clothes and shoes have shrunk in the disinfection process and that we couldn't wear them anymore. That way we were left without a warm garment and without shoes in the freezing cold of northern Germany. At the beginning of my stay in the camp, I won a relatively coveted job - a job in the SS kitchen. During the day we peeled potatoes, beets or onions. Each of us had a plank and a barrel, and when the barrel was filled I would turn it around and take an empty barrel. We worked under the watchful eyes of two SS soldiers, whose job was to make sure we do not neglect our work and do not steal from the food; however at any opportunity I stole from a carrot, cabbage turnip or onion piece. One of the soldiers was a tall and thin, that we called him among us "electric poll". He was human and treated us kindly human. He turned a blind eye when he noticed us eating and he even took, vegetables that I peeled for him from my hands. Sometimes I managed to hide in the crease of my headscarf few slices of carrots, cabbage turnip or onions and bring them to my sister, cousin and father. My mother refused to eat after seeing a piece of pork fat in food, she and my grandmother were anyway toothless and could not chew these hard vegetables. The other SS soldier was fat - we called him "horse" because he had wide rump as of a horse. He, too, was German and of the same rank as of "electric pole," but unlike him, he was a devil, a really savage man. There’s a Yugoslav proverb that says, “In every wheat field is growing too wild weeds", and that overseer was definitely wild grass. One of those days I didn't notice he was behind me, and I put a piece of carrot in my mouth. The other prisoners did not notice or warn me, and the "horse" struck with the butt of the rifle, with such intensity, that two of my front teeth broke and remained stuck in the carrot piece, and my upper lip swelled and since I didn't receive any wound care, not even a wet handkerchief

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