Maybe thousands, maybe two thousand, maybe three thousand
we had to.. we started to walk
It was January, January '45.
My friends and I tried to stay together,
that is we had to walk in lines of six people, we tried to stay next to each other,
but obviously we couldn't.
We walked, I don't know for how long, until we reached a town called Mikołów.
I had a good friend in the Hachsharah and he was half Aryan
that is, his mother.. his father was not Jewish
and he didn’t want to escape, he wanted to walk with the group.
When we reached Mikołów he wasn't able to walk anymore and said, "I am staying here."
The people who lagged behind the march,
those who couldn't continue walking because the snow was so high;
they shot them, they shot them and threw them into the ditches at the side.
He decided that he wasn't walking any further,
he couldn't walk any more,
and then we beat him
and we took him by force
onwards.
He stayed alive, yes, he is still alive today.
But it was a problem for me as well,
to beat him when he had already given up,
and to beat him so severely that we could drag him against his will
At Gliwice they loaded us onto trains
and they wanted to take us...
this became clear to me afterwards
because a number of my friends actually boarded the trains
and were taken to Czechoslovakia, to work.
They took us on trains
and we started to move
but these were open trains -
not the trains in which we had traveled to Auschwitz
you understand
they were open carriages
and everyone got on
you couldn't choose who you boarded with.
The problem was the issue of water
there was always a problem of water
so we ate snow as well
yes, we always ate snow.
