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I was completely weakened, I couldn’t think anymore. I couldn’t even think of my mother anymore...
I simply let myself fall to the ground. I was crouching on the ground.
And there was just one thing I wanted: I just wanted to see the sun once more.
And it didn’t really take long. They were trampling over me and they were knocking me down,
they were treading on my hands, and I only wanted one thing:
I wanted to see the sun once more. And I saw the sun.
It was such a comfort to me. I I never had a single moment of despair.
It is September 1943 at the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
19-year-old Erna de Vries is kneeling in the yard of the infamous Death Block 25.
On this morning she is supposed to be murdered in the gas chambers.
While all around her doubt and fear of death are prevailing
she just has one last wish:
"I just wanted to see the sun once more."
The town of Kaiserslautern in the Palatinate region in the southwest of Germany.
On 21st October 1923 Erna de Vries is born there, then bearing her maiden name Erna Korn.
She is the only child of Jacob and Jeanette Korn.
Her father is Protestant and her mother Jewish.
The family are well off. Jakob Korn is the co-owner of a freight company.
Thus Erna has a happy early childhood
In 1931 her father dies.
From now on, her mother has to maintain the family alone.
She continues to run the family business with the co-owner.
In 1933 the National Socialist Party come to power.
Discrimination against Jews begins,
and they are gradually excluded from society.
Even young Erna Korn feels it:
Children stopped calling us any old names but took to labeling us "You Jew, You Jew!" instead.
If there was any kind of small disagreement, they’d always say "You Jew!"
Sure, we were Jews - we are Jews, but in those days it was used as an insult.
And I felt really offended whenever they called me that.
It was any such things like other children not wanting to play with us anymore...
...that really made us feel that we were ostracized.
"Germany is boycotting the Jews."
As early as 1933 the National Socialist Party are calling for a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses.
In Kaiserslautern too the Jews are to be forced out of the economy.
Business for the Korn family company is getting worse and worse.
Eventually, in 1935, Jeanette Korn is barred from the Freight Union.
She is forced to sign over her share in the business to the other co-owner.
The family have to live off their savings.
By this time Erna Korn is attending primary school.
Due to the circumstances the teachers encourage her...
...to change to the Franciscan Institute, a Catholic private school.
She spends two carefree years there.
However, the school fees become a strain upon the family finances – and moreover her marks keep getting worse.
My mother then said it didn’t make any sense for me to stay at that school.
"We have to save every penny – who knows how long all this is going to last...
...and you know that we are forced to live off our savings."
It was really getting to me – that I had to leave this school I was so fond of.
So then I joined the so-called "special Jewish class".
This meant in 1937: 28 Jewish children...
...from the first grade to the final grade...
...all taught by one single teacher.
It was difficult for us to learn and difficult for him to teach.
Every day the teacher had to come to Kaiserslautern as far as from Zweibrücken.
At the same time we were becoming more and more excluded, more and more alone.
We could no longer keep in touch with Christian, I mean non-Jewish families,...
...because we were afraid – we thought that they would be given a hard time because of us.
Moreover, they avoided us.
Events come thick and fast.
In August 1938 the destruction of the synagogue begins.
The oriental style building has to disappear from the cityscape.
In the same place the Nazis intend to build a square for military mass rallies.
On November 7th there is an assassination attempt on Ernst vom Rath, a member of the German Embassy in Paris.
The perpetrator is a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynspan.
Two days later the Nazi press all over the country whip up a storm,...
...saying that not ONLY Grynspan but THE COMPLETE JEWRY are found guilty for this assassination.
The death of Ernst vom Rath on November 9th serves as a justification for nationwide violence against Jews:
the Night of Broken Glass.
At about 6am we heard heavy knocking on our door.
My mother answered tentatively, you never knew what was going to happen, and why at this time in the morning.
And outside stood a former driver, a chauffeur, who had worked for our company.
And, completely agitated, he told us what he had seen as he had been walking through the town to work,
How the rabble, that’s what he called them,...
...had been smashing the shop windows of Jewish shops with pickaxes and sledgehammers.
Commodities had been thrown onto the streets, with people grabbing some of them.
Furniture being chucked out of the windows.
He was really agitated and wanted to warn us, but there was nothing we could do.
Despite the driver's warning she goes to work.
She doesn't notice any riots.
However, there is an edgy, nervous atmosphere in the sewing workshop.
After about an hour it was suddenly announced, "Everyone get up, get outside," out of the workroom.
And we had to line up on some stairs which went down, with a platform inbetween and further down to the ground floor.
We gathered there and suddenly a couple of men appeared, yelling "Jews get out, Jews get out!"
And there were maybe six or seven of us - Jewish employees - of course it was a Jewish business, I forgot to mention that before.
And, ..., I only had one thing in my mind: "What’s happening to my mother, what… how’s my mother?"
And I simply had the thought, "Get home, get home."
I went downstairs with the other Jewish people.
And when I got there I simply ran away.
In fear, Erna and her mother seek shelter at the Christian cemetery.
They hope to be safe from the rioters beside her father’s grave.
After some time Erna can’t bear it any longer.
She wants to see what has happened to her home.
So I went to the courtyard - I should have rather turned around and gone back, but I was pulled towards it, like magic.
I couldn't do anything else; I simply had to go there.
But unfortunately when I got there, I ended up standing next to a woman who was hostile towards me.
Whenever she saw me she would either spit at me or call some cuss,
... or when I was in the shop she would ask the shopkeeper, "Are you still selling to Jews?"
And if I saw her entering that shop, then I would leave, or I simply wouldn’t go in the first place.
And on that day of all days she was standing next to me.
I wanted to be strong; I didn’t want the gawkers - that was my name for them - to see my weakness;
they ought not see that I was crying. And without intending to, tears were running down my face.
And then that woman cried "Look now she’s blubbering! Throw her into the junk! Throw her in the pile!"
She kept on shouting that again and again and no one lifted a finger.
I was also afraid that she might grab me.
And I had to listen to how everything inside was being destroyed.
I heard wood shattering and wood cracking and plates being smashed.
And it was so awful to be standing outside, to know that you are entirely helpless.
When my mother saw the mess she literally broke down. She just collapsed somewhere on the ground.
It was really horrible. What she had prepared for lunch was stuck to the walls.
To my mind it was worst in the bedroom: All the bedsheets had been slit open.
Back then we still had those marble panels on the bedside tables. Everything was smashed.
Whatever was breakable in the bedroom was smashed.
The closet was knocked over onto the beds, the back panel was smashed.
It was awful.
There is no time for them to come to terms with the horror which had taken place.
On the very same night they are ordered to leave Kaiserslautern.
The town is intended to become "judenfrei" - "free of Jews".
They flee to relatives in Cologne.
A short time later Jeanette Korn returns to Kaiserslautern.
Erna Korn remains in Cologne. From 1939 she works in a senior citizens' home.
Her dream to get into medical school one day is denied to her as a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Instead she strives towards her training as a nurse.
In 1941 she gets a trainee post at a big Jewish hospital -
the Israelite Sanctuary in Cologne.
From September 1st, 1941, all Jews are forced to wear a yellow Star of David in order to label and humiliate them.
Erna also wears this star. It is clearly visible on her nurses' uniform.
And so one day I was walking through town.
I am telling this because it’s still important to me today, and because back then it was particularly significant.
I went into a shop, I had to pick up some groceries.
To my right and left were the shop windows, and as I went in a woman made way for me.
Nothing out of the ordinary, but when I had finished my errands at the shop she was still standing there.
That struck me as strange.
And suddenly she grabbed my wrist and I thought, "What is she up to?", but she was already speaking:
"Sister, wear that Star with pride."
And I must say, such incidents buoyed me up later on,
I thought - not everyone is like the masses, like the whole brown Nazi bog.
There are still people who think like people, those who remained humane.
In 1941 the deportations from the German Reich begin.
Those Jews still remaining in Germany are removed from their homeland by trainload.
In fear of being separated from her mother Erna Korn returns to Kaiserslautern.
After a few days there she receives a letter from the Israelite Sanctuary Hospital.
The hospital has been completely cleared out,...
...all the Jewish employees and patients have been detained and taken to concentration camps.
Erna thus escaped deportation.
She is never going to finish her apprenticeship.
So then I stayed in Kaiserslautern.
And in order not to vege out at home all day, I found work there -
at an iron foundry.
It was a stupefying, dirty job - but it had the advantage of being close to my home.
I only had to walk about seven minutes to get there.
Any job was ok for me just then, I didn’t care. The main thing was that I was near my mother.
I kept imagining:
They take her away and I have no idea. And then I come home hours later.
I worked there the whole summer, from '42 to '43.
And out of the blue on July 6th, 1943, a neighbour came to see me at the iron foundry.
I should mention, this neighbour got himself in danger as well because he was getting in touch with Jews.
I coudln't get that out of my head, the risks that man was taking just to help us.
And he drove to the factory...
... and the foreman said, "Go outside quick, there’s a man there, your neighbour, he wants to speak to you."
And he [the neighbour] said, "Go home right now, quickly, they want to take your mother away."
I went home as quickly as I could with his bicycle.
When I got there I saw two people from the crime pol… from the Secret State Police [Gestapo] in Saarbrücken.
A driver and an officer. It was totally clear that there was nothing I could do about it.
So I went to get our suitcases out of the wardrobe.
We always had two bags packed with everything that we thought we might need...
bacause if we were sent away, we would be so stressed out we would throw anything in there,...
...things that we wouldn’t really need, and forget about important things.
And as I took the suitcases out, the officer said:
"No, not you - only your mother is going to be taken away."
And I begged him and said to him that he should at least take me as far as Saarbrücken.
Finally he agreed.
He let me get get into the car with my mother.
They picked us up, just the two of us, in a simple motorcar.
The two of them are kept in prison in Saarbrücken for a whole week.
There is no official reason for their detention.
The line in the form is simply left blank.
After a few days Erna is sent to see some Gestapo [secret state police] officials.
He said to me, "So you want to go with your mother."
And I said, "Yes."
"Do you realise where your mother is going?"
And I said, "No, I don’t."
"Your mother will be taken to Auschwitz!"
And he said, "Are you sure you want to go with your mother?"
And I replied, "Wherever my mother goes I go too."
And he replied really cynically: "You’d be a bad child if that wasn’t the case."
He knew that we were supposed to die there.
He couldn’t have known that it worked out differently for me; neither of us could have known that.
Erna and Jeanette Korn are deported.
The transport lasts several days in locked carriages.
At the end of July 1943 the train reaches its destination:
the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow.
Auschwitz, the biggest concentration and extermination camp of the Third Reich.
Symbol of the Holocaust, the biggest genocide in history.
More than one million people were murdered here -
most of whom were Jews.
Nowadays the remains of the camp are accessible as a reminder and a memorial.
Yet the crimes that have taken place here remain unimaginable.
We arrived in Auschwitz at the railway ramp and were driven to the camp on a truck.
There we had to enter a room called the "Sauna".
But in fact I didn’t see any water there apart from this muddy brew which we were to be disinfected with afterwards.
Tables were set up there and behind them women.
All ordinarily dressed, in civilian clothes.
We could see later that they were all marked with a big black cross.
Marked with a cross so that they couldn’t even escape without quickly being recognised.
We had to put our suitcases on the table.
we were asked if that was our belongings, if we had packed them ourselves, thusly, formalities.
And then we were registered.
We were shaved before anything else, all parts of the body with hair were shaved.
Then we were tattooed. This is my number.
Then we were clothed.
We had to give up every single thread we had on, everything of our own that we were wearing.
Erna and Jeanette are put into the women’s camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They have to spend the next four weeks in quarantine, allegedly to prevent epidemics.
In reality, this measure only serves to torment the prisoners:
They sleep in an extremely overcrowded block.
They have to spend their days in a dried out meadow.
It’s high summer.
The sun is burning hot.
The prisoners get very little to drink and almost nothing to eat.
Hunger and thirst are unbearable.
After quarantine Erna and Jeanette are forced into work.
They have to work at a fish farm outside the camp.
My mother and I were forced into awful work.
We had to walk for a kilometer and a half every morning to a pond -
- a fish pond, in a place called Harmense.
The reed had already been mowed and was swimming on the water when we arrived.
We had to fish it out with a rake.
I was 19 then and my mother was 49.
And us young ones went in front and stood up to our armpits in water.
And the older women stood backwards and took the cut reeds which we pushed towards them onto the bank.
We had to do this work for a while.
By then I had lost my shoes and got wooden clogs.
My ankles were really inflamed.
The block was full of vermin.
We were lying on wooden pallets, we had to cover ourselves...
These pallets were photographed after the war, with the people's heads sticking out at the front.
Five, six people were able to squeeze into such a pallet.
We lay on the bare wood and to cover us we had a blanket,...
...which had once been a quilt. It was all torn, the wool stuffing was coming out.
and it was full of bugs, lice and fleas. You could be infested by all sorts of them.
And I was: We were full of vermin.
I scratched - I scratched the flea bites so much that they got infected.
So each time you had a small bite it would spread to become a big wound.
I scratched so much and in the dirty water where we had to work it got so much worse.
Everything got infected. I had big weeping wounds, as big as a 5 mark coin [the size of a toonie coin].
It was a genuine ulcer, a pus filled infection of the skin tissue.
It wouldn’t get better and I already had misgivings.
The camp inmates have to face Selections on a regular basis.
A doctor evaluates the ability of the prisoners to work.
He decides whether a prisoner is to live or to die.
Whoever is old, ill, or weak will be murdered in the gas chambers.
Erna Korn’s fears come true.
She is selected and separated from her mother.
She is relocated to Block 25 - the notorious Death Block.
There the prisoners who are to be gassed are confined.
They are divided from the rest of the camp by a high wall.
Some have already been there for a few weeks since the camp administration waits until the block is filled. Then the inmates are set for ***.
The block was overcrowded.
And I couldn’t find a place where I could lie for the night.
It was already getting towards dusk.
And we knew, I mean... I spoke to some girls... they were going to gas us the next day.
How could we know that?
Well, every night in the block, in the whole camp, at a particular time all the lights possible were put out,
so that one could hardly make things out in the block.
But not here. Here, bright light was burning all night,
and we didn’t get anything to eat. We were no longer allowed to go to the washrooms.
Instead, in this block there were buckets distributed in which about 600 women had to defecate.
Can you imagine how the block looked afterwards?
Erna experiences an awful night there.
One night in the certainty that she is supposed to be gassed the next day.
The following morning, the women have to gather in the courtyard.
The door is pushed open.
Trucks drive up.
Overseers shove the confused women into the loading area.
There was an awful confusion, there was a screaming crowd, a crying crowd, a confused crowd.
The people – the women fell to their knees, tearing at their hair, as much as they had any.
And they screamed - it was terrible.
And I - I was completely weak. I couldn't think anymore. I couldn't even think of my mother anymore.
I simply let myself fall to the ground. I was crouching on the ground.
And there was just one thing I wanted: I just wanted to see the sun once more.
And it didn't really take long. They were trampling over me and they were knocking me down,
they were treading on my hands, and I wanted just one thing:
I wanted to see the sun once more. And I saw the sun.
It was such a comfort to me. I never had a single moment of despair.
And I prayed: "Dear God, I want to live, but your will be done. It's up to you."
And I simply crouched there and prayed and I was knocked down.
And suddenly I heard my number called.
That I heard anything from the depths of my despair still surprises me today.
I looked up, and saw that an SS man was standing near the door of the block...
...with an index card, an index card box under his arm, and a card in the hand.
He called my number.
And with that - you had to go, it was an order.
So I pulled myself together and went to him.
There were by this time maybe still 40 or 50 women in the yard, mostly the younger ones who had pushed backwards.
I went to him and he compared the number on my arm with the number on the index card,
thumped me on the shoulder and said, "Blimey, you’ve got more luck than sense!"
He opened the door of the block and shoved me in there. I couldn't make sense of what he meant.
Outside the people were shouting, inside it was deathly silent.
All at once a young woman with a blanket over her head and her face as white as a sheet came up to me
And she said, "Are you coming to Ravensbrück, too?"
At the last minute, Erna evades a certain death.
She will be transferred with some other women to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
She never finds out why.
Initially she is housed in another block.
I said to the elder of the block, "I have to see my mother again."
She said, "You can’t just run around here wherever you want."
I replied, "I can. I’m going to my mother’s block."
And so I went, and she couldn’t do anything about it.
I got to the block and I met my mother.
I was happy to see her again and she was glad that I was getting out of Auschwitz.
She walked with me a short distance along the main road through the camp.
And at the end she said to me, "You are going to survive and then you will tell the world what they've done to us."
And that is what I do, whenever I am requested to do so. Like today.
We said goodbye in the knowledge that we would never see each other again.
How that feels, I'll leave to your imagination.
The Ravensbrück concentration camp.
80 km north of Berlin [near the small town of Fuerstenberg in Brandenburg].
The biggest concentration camp for women on German soil.
Erna’s transport reaches the camp on 16th September 1943.
With her, 83 other women are transferred out of Auschwitz to Ravensbrück.
All of the women are classed as so-called "half-breeds".
According to the Nuremberg laws of 1935, all individuals who have both Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry...
...are designated as "half-breed".
Because Erna’s father was not Jewish she is also classed as "half-breed" -
As a "first grade half-breed".
This fact gets her a place on the transport to Ravensbrück and helps her escape the gas chamber.
The arrival in Ravensbrück proceeds similarly to that in Auschwitz.
Here too, the first stop is the "Sauna".
Thanks to German thoroughness, our bags came with us from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück.
Mine was opened again, and the female inmate asked, "Are these your things?"
And I saw the things, some of which my mother had sewn, some of which she had embroidered. In any case it was her who had packed them.
And as I thought of my mother, whom I had left behind in Auschwitz, I started to cry bitterly.
I asked this woman if she would give me something from the suitcase.
She said, "I’m not allowed to do that, I’m not allowed to do that!"
If I had so much as expressed a desire in Auschwitz, if I had even spoken to someone without being ordered to do so,...
...I would already be lying in the dirt after two words.
And she said to me, "No, I’m not allowed, I’m not allowed!"
In response to my plea she gave me a flannel, a wash glove.
This a wash glove I treasured for a long, long time. It was simply a thing, which my mother had once held in her hands.
In the women's concentration camp, Erna meets an old acquaintance, Libusé Ingrova.
In Auschwitz they were quartered in the same block.
A friendship between the two women had begun there.
Libusé Ingrova had been transferred to Ravensbrück a month before.
She supports Erna wherever she can.
Once a week she gives Erna an extra ration of bread.
Bread is scarce in the camp and is a necessity for life there.
After I had met Libusé Ingrova I saw myself properly for the first time.
I had really let myself go in the camp.
And I simply didn’t want to look like that.
That was still against my values.
I started to meet her every week and I didn’t want her to feel ashamed if she was seen with me.
So then I paid a lot more attention to myself.
I scrubbed my hands as well as I could.
I got every single stain out of my dress.
One day I even went so far as to exchange some bread for a bit of leather…
Somebody had "organized" it from the storage chamber.
It was the back panel of a bag.
I cut it into strips.
And I bartered with bread to get hold of a belt-buckle.
I made myself a belt so that I didn’t have to wander around with just a cord around my waist.
So that I could meet Libusé - clean at least from the outside...
In Ravensbrück, too, the prisoners had to do forced labour.
Erna is not allocated a fixed job.
She is "available, on call". Prisoners "on call" like her have to perform varying jobs.
Jobs which are particularly hard, futile and dangerous.
By that time it was my 20th birthday. And I thought,...
"My 20th birthday - even under these awful circumstances that's something special."
The evening before, I saved my ration of bread for the next day. I didn’t eat a thing.
I wanted to feel full just once, on my birthday.
I hid the bread in a bag. There was a spoon in there and a knife ...
... and some other bits and pieces that we were allowed to have, like a toothbrush.
And I hid the bag.
The next morning when I groped around for it, it was gone - it had been stolen.
I had such a mixture of feelings.
On the one hand, grief when I thought of my mother.
Then also fury at whoever had done that to me.
I became completely confused.
I had nothing of my own any longer. It was all gone.
I then had the misfortune that on that day I was called for duty to pull the roller.
That was awful work.
The roller is still there in Ravensbrück.
In my memory it’s so much bigger than it was in reality.
That was a dangerous job, pulling that thing.
Lots of women got injured doing that.
I resolved, "As hungry as you are,...
... and with everything that has already happened to you today...
...you will not pull the roller, you will not pull the roller!"
But I didn’t know yet how I should go about avoiding the work.
In any case, I had started to pull, once or twice, back and forth.
Suddenly, a group walked past us, really nearby.
So I simply let go and mixed myself into the crowd, and walked away with them.
No one in the group objected to it.
Either no one had noticed, or… or none of them wanted to blow the whistle on me.
On that day Erna Korn demonstrates to herself that she is still human.
A human who can make her own decisions.
Had she been caught, she would have been punished in the worst possible way.
In Ravensbrück, the prisoners have the possibility to find out about their relatives in other camps.
Erna wants to find out how her mother is.
In spring 1944 she receives the shattering news:
Her mother has already been murdered in Auschwitz on November 8th, 1944.
Just a few weeks after they parted.
Despite this difficult strike of fate, her situation gradually improves.
In '44, at last, I also got to work for Siemens.
I had work there which was "quite ok".
and for that reason above all it was good to work for Siemens.
It was forced labour, and we worked for the armaments industry.
We were working in the construction of telephones and microphones for submarines.
That meant we had to, there was nothing else left to do.
It continued that way for the whole year.
It was appreciably better. We didn’t have to be down in the base camp any longer.
Up there, a special Siemens camp had been set up.
We didn’t have to walk there and back any more.
The provisions there were a bit better.
We even got an extra slice of bread. But I didn't see Libusé again.
Like many other manufacturing companies, Siemens also utilised the cheap source of labour.
Erna continues to work at the Siemens factory until the production is discontinued on 14th April 1945.
She has to go back to the base camp.
By this time, Germany has already lost the war.
The Allies are advancing ever nearer.
The concentration camps near the front are being cleared out.
The prisoners are transferred to other camps, including Ravensbrück.
The conditions there degenerate considerably.
The barracks are overcrowded. There is hardly any food.
Death is ever present.
In April 1945, the Allied troops come so close to the Ravensbrück camp that this also is evacuated.
Those who are still able to walk are forced to march.
The rest are left behind to die.
Day and night the prisoners march north-west.
Many of them don't survive the exertion of this "Death Walk".
Erna is also at the end of her strength.
I said to my friends, "I can’t go any further. I can’t manage any more."
It didn’t make any sense to walk further. It was simply torture.
I saw that I was at the end. I simply didn’t have any more energy.
I thought, "What’s the use of putting myself through this suffering now?
For whom? My mother is no longer there." I didn’t have a dad anyway, nor siblings.
I was alone there. I could decide. I simply didn’t want to go any further. I couldn’t any more.
And the girls, they were so listless and weak, they couldn’t either.
But in the end they just took me by the elbows.
They didn’t pull me, they couldn’t have done, they couldn’t help me, they were too weak themselves.
And the oldest, she was 16, maybe 17 years old, she said to me,
"You managed to hold on this long and now you want to give up?"
At that, I pulled myself together and walked on, despite my aching feet.
We didn't walk... we dragged ourselves.
With our heads hanging, we crossed the road.
I don’t know how long, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. We dragged ourselves there.
At some point we felt everything ahead of us shake.
We called out and shouted and laughed and cried and hugged one another.
And all of a sudden American tanks approached us.
That was our liberation...
Today, Erna de Vries lives in Lathen, a small community in Emsland region, north Germany.
After the liberation, she gets to know Josef de Vries, and they marry in 1947.
He is like her Jewish.
He survived six years in concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau amongst others.
With him, she is able to talk about her terrible experiences.
Their conversations help them to deal with that period of their past.
The couple remain in Germany and start a family.
They have 3 children together.
Josef de Vries dies in 1981.
Since 1998, Erna has been telling her story. In particular she speaks in schools about the risk of forgetting the past.
It is especially important to her...
...to point out the small acts of humanity that kept on giving her courage.
She fulfils her mother’s final wish:
I particularly appreciate that so many people showed up here today.
When I got separated from my mother in Auschwitz back in 1943,
she told me, during the last moments we had together:
You are going to survive - and you will tell the world what they've done to us...
And I've been doing this since 1997 - when I was first requested to do it - whenever I can.
And that's why I'm content every time as many people as possible get to hear this...
...because it's important to me to keep the memory of that past alive.
And as long as I can do this, I will.