Inge Auerbacher

"Later they said: The commission will come, everything must be perfectly prepared and shown. They put a band on the main street and they played, I saw that. They also had a pavilion for the children, to whom they handed out bread with sardines when the commission passed by. The committee were mostly Swiss and the kids had to say, 'Uncle Rahm, we've got sardines again!' I had a friend who was among the children and she experienced it first hand. "We're full, can we go play now?" But as soon as the committee walked away, the sardines were taken from them again, and they never saw any again."

"My father used to regularly go to the garbage dump where the bones from the horses' meat were dumped - so we didn't get any meat, just fibers, but he always tried to find a little something extra to eat because we were starving. Occasionally he would find a bone with some gristle still on it, that was all we could eat for variety. But it wasn't very often. Mostly we ate potatoes." "Your father didn't work?" "No, my father didn't work, but my mother did, in a room nearby... My mother worked, washing clothes after the typhus patients, cleaning and so on, and then in a room near the Dresden barracks she took care of old sick starving women as a nurse, although she had never done that before. One day I went into that room and saw that all the people on the beds had canes in their hands and wondered, 'Why is everyone carrying canes?' One woman said, 'Well, at night I felt something heavy on my shoulder. And when I turned around, there was a rat sitting there!'"

"The potato was like a diamond. I wrote a poem about it - Diamonds in the Snow. The potatoes were stored in a cellar in the Dresden barracks, and my mother would sometimes go into the cellar to steal potatoes, and of course someone else had to keep watch because of the ghetto guards, and you weren't allowed to leave the buildings after a certain hour. Then we hid the potatoes under a straw and slept on them. She always took another woman with her to keep watch so that she wouldn't be caught by the guards on patrol in the ghetto, then she might get to Auschwitz or the Small Fortress, where it was similarly terrible to Auschwitz, a living hell. Once, for my eighth birthday, I got one potato."

"Then came Mrs Rinderová, her husband worked in the kitchen, she was from Prague and had a six-year-old son named Tomi. She asked, 'Are there any children on the transport?' 'Yes, seven-year-old Inge.'She replied that she had a three-piece mattress in one of the children's rooms, where small children were accommodated, in the Dresden barracks, where her little son also sleeps. It was a three-part mattress, the parts of which could be separated without cutting. She brought one part of the mattress up to the attic so that I wouldn't sleep on the bare floor. Then she said it was better in the children's rooms, that she would put me in the room where her son was. Her husband worked in the kitchen, it was a better job for him and anyone else, he could occasionally take something out of the soup or peel an extra potato secretly - potatoes, I still remember the word in Czech, was very important. So then she took me to the nursery so I wouldn't have to sleep on a piece of mattress on the floor. There were a lot of children there, bunk beds, and a large number of the children had scarlet fever, and there was a complete epidemic, so after a few weeks I also got scarlet fever and was very ill. They even took me to the hospital in Vrchlabí, so I couldn't see my parents."