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Germans invaded Russia in 1940 when I was five years old.
Okay. When they...
...when they came to your village, was that village...
Jewish people...
...what was the religion of your village?
My village is Greek Orthodox.
When the Germans came, they were taking the food from the villagers
to feed their soldiers.
And when the food was gone, they would
destroy the village and move
the people out somewhere else.
So we were being moved from village to village, especially when they were needing
uh... doctors for the villages because my mother was a doctor.
Most of the villagers would try to escape
but uh... others who
weren't able to escape for some reason, they were kept as workers to clear
the roads
in the winter.
This was mostly winter... to clear the roads
in the winter so that the German trucks
and their equipment could move from village to village.
That's how usually they treated...In the spring and summer they expected
the Russians to feed the soldiers.
And uh... they used to take their eggs and
chickens and cows. Each village
had to pay so much.
When the Germans started to leave Russia
they started collecting
uh...
people, the villagers and all their possessions, whatever they could put in the
truck and uh...
uh... and their livestock, especially livestock. And they told the villagers that they
needed that because
uh... most of their
uh... people were
shot or killed. They needed people working on the farms. They needed livestock
because they were kind of starving themselves...
so not to give them any trouble and come along.
And they would move us like
towards the West
to other villages. So I was eight years old when they moved us from one village...
and starting moving us West towards Germany, but we were still in Russia.
And there was one camp we stopped over.
for a... I mean
the Germans moved us uh... in a train. So we stopped over there and
those people
were starving. They weren't made to work or anything. They just kept them
in that camp for some reason. In the barracks...
But the people had eaten everything. They had eaten all the rats, all the
crows that were flying over. They said they ate all the bugs. There was
nothing to eat at all.
And uh... But the Germans kept us in there only for a few
hours.
Probably like
four hours
before they put us back on the train, and
started moving.
When we were on the train, it was the regular box train, and everybody
standing room only, so....
Finally when we were brought to Germany, there was a camp, I would call it a distribution camp
where you keep
people in the barracks, and then the German soldiers would come in and decide
which people would be sent where. Whether they were young men, they would pick them out
and
send them to work in the factories. They
put others
older man and older women with children
they would
put them on the farms, to work on the farms. But every concentration camp was a
concentration camp, period.
And uh... uh
whoever needed what type of people
would send in their request to that camp, and we would be chosen and taken. A lot of kids were
taken for experiments.
Okay, in this distribution camp if they came from Russia, they were called
Russians. And we all called each other Russians.
But by talking to the people, we knew that
some were Jewish, some were Polish, some were from the Ukrainian region.
And that
we were all mixed, but we all spoke Russian.
We were told that all the camps were going to be like this. That means one barrack is like
a corridor.
And there are bunk beds. And we stay in those bunk beds. Men, women, children, doesn't matter.
To go to the bathroom you go into another barrack, and there's a big ditch in the
middle of the
uh...
floor, and some chlorine powder put in. You have to squat over it and do your business.
And so there was one for women, one for men.
There is no place to wash. There are no sinks anywhere,
no nothing. We were given food. When they called, they say OK, you come over
and bring your little container, that's your food.
uh...
So all camps, like I said, were considered to be camps,
just concentration camps. The reason they called them concentration camps
because everybody is concentrated
in one area.
There was no such thing as a death camp or a work camp or anything.
It depended on the commandant. All the camps were run by the military. And the military
commandant was the one who ran the camp.
And if he
was a nice person,
he made sure his people got fed. If he wasn't a nice person,
he would take most of the food to his soldiers, because off camps they had
their own quarters. They had
they had
their entertainment centers.
They too would take some of the prettiest girls to their entertainment center...
whatever they did there... and uh... uh... They had their own kitchen, their own food.
So
if the commandant didn't care about the people he was in charge of, they starved.
If he cared and fed them fairly well, considered they were skinny,
nobody was fat,
but at least they could work well. The percentage of the good and bad commandants,
I can't tell because like I said I was a little girl.
And there were some who liked to
torture people.
And uh... there were others who were quite against it. And because of that
a lot of the German people got into trouble.
uh... Like one time I was
looking out
uh... the door of the barracks and
the soldier, the guard,
I guess was bored because he was marching back and forth. So he decided, "Here's a good subject."
He walked over and kicked me, kicked me so hard I
flew several feet. And a German woman was walking by, and she got so upset over
that. She yelled at the soldier.
She said that he was a disgrace to the soldier uniform.
How could he kick a child
who wasn't doing anything but just standing at the door
and looking out.
So uh... So most of the Germans were against these
uh...
uh... camps.
And the luckiest people were the ones who were sent to work for Bauer. Bauer is
a farmer.
And they used to have a better life on the farm, and used to work...and get
fed better and get
taken care of by the farmers better.