Hana Weingarten, roz. Wertheimerová

“A German arrived and instead of sending us in the gas he said that people who could work should be used in Germany, as German men were in the army and they had a shortage of labourers. They said: ‘We’ll do a selection and will select those who can work and send them to Germany. We can always kill them afterwards.’ All who were between sixteen and forty were to go. I was not sixteen yet, of course, I was fourteen. My mother was forty-one but they didn’t have the documents. My mum asked me: ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to go or do you want to stay here?’ I said: ‘I want to go away.’ But unfortunately my grandmother could not go, as he was sixty and could not say she was forty. I said I was sixteen and my mum said she was forty and in this way we got out of Auschwitz and went to work in Hamburg.”

“When we arrived to Auschwitz, we were in the “family camp.” The transport which had arrived there from Terezín in December was already there. We were the May transport, and they were the December transport. I had girlfriends among them, with whom I shared the room. All of a sudden I could see chimneys, and in my opinion, I was thirteen or fourteen years old, those chimneys belonged to some factory. I knew factories that had chimneys. The girls who had been there since December spoke clearly. They said it was gas, they were burning people there, and they would go there in six months just like the previous transport and we would then follow them. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I was saying: This cannot happen to me. This war against us cannot go on for so long. We haven’t done anything wrong and therefore I expected every day that the war would end.”

“I myself stayed in Bergen-Belsen till June, until I healed. Then the English sent us wherever we wanted to go. A part of us wanted to go to Sweden but I said I wanted to go to Prague, so they didn’t take us to Prague, but they took us to Pilsen, since Prague was occupied by the Russians, but Pilsen by the Americans. From Pilsen I took a train to Prague. Naturally I had no money, no luggage, but people when they saw me, they understood where I was coming from and many people gave me food on the train. So without any money I travelled to Prague and in Prague I went to Wilson’s Station and from there I walked to Žitná street, where I knew our Mařka lived, the woman who was not Jew and worked with us. She was there indeed and she told me she wouldn’t have recognised me in the street but of course she was like my second mum and took great care of me when I arrived.”

“They said that people who were between sixteen and forty years of age had to undergo a selection. My mom was over forty, and I was under sixteen. Grandmother was naturally over sixty. We didn’t know if it was true or not. People were saying that there was a reason why they wanted the young people, because they allegedly knew that they would lose the war and they were afraid that the young people would be able to stage some revolution and therefore they wanted to execute them first. There were no newspapers, nobody spoke to anybody, and my mom thus asked me if I wanted to go for this selection. I said: ´I want to go for the selection, I will tell them I am sixteen, and you say that you are forty, and perhaps we will pass.´”

“You are an adult, and so I can tell you this. We were completely naked, without trousers. Five persons lined up in a row like soldiers. We had to walk in front of those Germans who were looking at us and say how old we were and what our occupation was. My mom told me: ´Say that you work in agriculture.´ Agriculture shows strength. I said that I was sixteen. If I had said fourteen, they would not have selected me, and mom said she was thirty-nine. By chance they sent us to the correct side. We got to Hamburg, to Germany, where we worked very hard. We built roads, and we were working for the German army and in factories. What I remember from that time was that I was always hungry and tired. The two things that have never left me.”

“As far as I remember when we took train to Hamburg in July, we also travelled in a cattle car, but it was terribly hot. In every car there was a German who stood on a guard, so the door were open. Suddenly I saw how people lived. I quite forgot how people lived normally. I could see children on bikes, blankets in windows, I could see normal people from the train. It was then I realised that I had forgotten all of my life I had used to have and was fully occupied by the life I had then.”

“I want to talk about something very curious and unusual. We were thirteen grandchildren on the father’s side of the family, and we have all survived. We have survived because only four of us were in Europe during the war, and the others were in Palestine or in other countries where they had emigrated. It was very unusual that out of thirteen cousins, none of us was missing and we were able to reunite after the war.”

“Everything was all right until the time when Hitler entered Znojmo. We escaped, but we thought that it would be nothing serious and that we would come back again, but it was a mistake. We took very few things. My mom woke me up and told me: ´We are going to Jihlava to our uncle for a week and then we come back.´ We believed it, and my mom believed it too. My mom was a very optimistic person, and we inherited this from her. Obviously, we have not returned to Znojmo anymore.”

“I was a friend with those children, there was the Tchelet Iavan movement where we went. My sister took me there and friends… I remember playing with play-doh. I knew something about Palestine, that it was an interesting country and so on. It was in fact a Zionist movement but I was too small to understand this then. But I also attended physical exercise in Maccabi. We exercised twice a week. And it was nice. We were great friends.”