Cecilia Kleinová

"When a boy reaches thirteen years of age, we have a confirmation ceremony, the Bar Mitzvah. It was a tradition to buy the boy praying straps for the occasion, and for Mum to sew a decorative pouch to wear them in. So Mum sewed him a pouch for the straps, the tefillin as they're called. He didn't save anything, only the tefillin and the pouch that Mum had made him." (Q: "He had that with him the whole time at the concentration camp, like you said?") "Yes, he had it with him the whole time, he kept them safe all the way home. And he has them stored as..." (Q: "A special relic of sorts...") "Mum made it for him. He didn't save anything else, just that."

"My mum was a strange person. We weren't rich, but we were never short on food. In those days there were many so-called beggars who would stop by, and every Jewish beggar knew that if he came to the Rothmanns, he wouldn't go hungry. She hadn't learned to cut a slice or two of bread and put that on the table, but instead she would put there the whole loaf, or half a loaf depending on what she had. And she didn't put a bit of butter, but instead however much she had churned, she put all the butter on the table. One time this one beggar cost her dearly. As she placed bread on the table - it was easily half a loaf. And next to it she placed a plate heaped with butter that she had churned that evening. And he ate it all. He spread the butter on the bread like this! Mum was abashed, I was just a child. But as I watched him bite into it, I could see his teeth marks deep in the butter. Well, that's when Mum learned not to put everything on the table."

"Since then I don't eat spinach. Because they served us spinach soup in Auschwitz. And it was made out of nettles and all sorts of weeds, complete with gravel, mud and stones... And they called it 'spinatsuppe' - and that was our lunch. And since then I just can't stand anything green."

"That's how I know that after Passover... I don't know if you know that we have to have different sets of dishes for Passover?" (Q:"Well, not only that but it mustn't touch anything fermented.") "Yes. And we took the dishes to the stream to wash them. We were used to do that every year, to wash, dry and wrap them with these rags or with paper. And when they were wrapped up, we put them in the loft. And that's what we were preparing to do. So all the dishes were at the stream, because we were washing them there when they came for us. And the dishes stayed in the stream. Because they didn't let us do anything, just quick, quick, pack a few things. Fifteen or twenty kilos, I can't remember. Then they herded us all into the synagogue, and from the synagogue into wagons and to Uzhhorod into the brickyard."

"My sister was a seamstress by trade, and she hand-sewed things for the prison matrons. They brought her scissors, a needle and thread, and she sewed clothes for them. And in return she got, depending on what she could steal, a piece of bread extra, a chunk of butter to go with it, a drop of honey... And this sister of mine - like I said, we weren't full sisters, only half through our dad - she gave that all to me, so that I would eat well, as I was a child. And I didn't want to eat, because I wanted her to eat too, so we kept arguing about that. And I told her that there's no need for me to live when my parents don't live. So we kept arguing about that, about the food."