The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

to lower the swelling, it remained swollen to this day. Only after the war I fixed my broken teeth.

After that case, I was transferred from the kitchen to work in a clothing release and separating the perforated parts from the integers for re-sewing. After a while, I was transferred to parachute production. We cut silk strips and out of every nine strips we twisted a sort of a strong braid that served as a parachute cable. We were required to meet a certain quota of a few meters braids per day. When the war was coming to an end we were moved to a much harder work in which we were required to unravel shoes - to separate the skin from the sole while using a razor. The whole skin parts and proper soles we stacked in separate stacks and were used in turn to make new shoes, while the torn pieces were stacked in a third pile. The constant pressure exerted on my palm, first in the constant peeling work in the kitchen and then in the dismantling of the shoes, combined with the intense cold that prevailed in the camp, over time resulted in deformity of my right thumb. This was in addition to the ongoing claim to meet the prescribed quotas; and still, there were those whose fate improved much less. Uncle Leon for example, he was slavishly worked with his sons in a tree division, and one day he suffered such blows that he passed away the next day. The children in Bergen-Belsen were not obliged to go to work and so Dina and Bato remained in the hut during the day. If any of the adults stayed too and did not go out that day, he would teach them a little songs or Hebrew. My parents, sister and cousin didn't work either, but they had to stand in the queues daily for hours, while we were attached to them on Sundays when we didn't work. Orders were the most difficult. We stood for hours and counted over and over to make sure no one was missing. We stood thus in the rain and snow, in the cold winter of northern Germany, in slender clothes and without shoes, in orders that sometimes extended from eight in the morning until evening. The legs, which were also very weak, were bullying especially to me during these orders, and I often crouched over my heels when I could no longer stand, and straightened back only when I heard that one of the German overseers approaches to count us. Money was not of much value in the camp, but the exchange trade flourished. For example, I did deals with Dutch prisoners, who were privileges and who came to the camp to teach the Germans how to polish diamonds. They brought with them the services from home, wrapped in newspapers, and once a month they had the option go to the warehouse and get stuff out of it. I sold them my weekly bread for wooden clogs, and the same old newspapers used me instead of socks, and every time they got wet it was necessary to replace them with new ones. As long as I worked in the kitchen I could eat the vegetables I managed sneak by and the soup we sometimes got at noon and so trade in my dose of bread, but after being transferred from my kitchen work I couldn't do that anymore. My newspaper stock was running out and

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