The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

I had to stand barefoot in the cold. Bread was four cm in length that should have been enough for a week. Among the inmates were many whose hunger passed them on and who ate the all dish at once, and then had to steal to survive the week. I kept my dose of bread in my pocket. I had a small knife which I used to cut slices of about two millimeters each time, so that the dose of the bread will last for seven days. Cigarettes were also used as a currency for the merchant in the camp. Prisoners of sixteen or more years received occasional Red Cross packages including Croatian cigarettes and ground chickpea powder that we used to mix with water and make a spread. One time we got snails, them I quickly switched, and another time we got a cheese slice with worms. We disliked it, but the Dutch went crazy for this cheese and were ready to give for everything we wanted. By the time I arrived at the camp, I was a gentle girl whose whole life had been looked after not to fall or be harmed, while my sister Cila was the one who cared me and bent down to pick up fallen objects so I didn't have to bend over myself. But in the camp, the power relations between us turned upside and I were the one who cared for her. As is sometimes in extreme circumstances, people changing and receiving forces that did not know of their existence, and who knows where from. Thanks to my father improvising a calendar on a piece of paper he obtained, we could keep track of the dates in the camp, when the time passed different from anywhere else. Towards the end of 1944 arrived at the camp a group of Hungarian Jews who were held in Auschwitz and walked up to Bergen-Belsen, because Auschwitz was facing eviction. They were in very poor condition, very sick, exhausted and starved. Because they were already very familiar with the crematoria and the murderous production line of the Germans, they broke into shouts as they were instructed to enter the shower in Bergen-Belsen. To calm them down, we were set up at two o’clock in the night, in the dark and cold the winters, and we had to take a shower so that those prisoners would realize that these are just baths and relax. Among the women from Auschwitz was a Yugoslav prisoner, who was caught in the forests, in the Gospitch area. She was the one who told me about what was going on there and about their arduous journey on foot from Auschwitz, Poland to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. After their arrival, there was deterioration in the living conditions of all the inmates in the camp. Those meager resources that were used by us earlier were now supposed to suffice for a much larger quota of prisoners. At this point, we crowded two into a three-story bed. At first I shared a bed with Mama while Cila slept with Dinah. Then I went to bed with Cilla and Grandma with Mom. We were constantly crowded, but at this point we were all as thin as a stick; I weighed 28kg, Cila didn't weigh more than 20, and nine-year-old Dinah weighed about 15kg, so we could huddle together in an 80cm bed.

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