The ghetto was evacuated in four transports. Our family was included in the fourth transport, which left the ghetto on February 1. We did not know what the future held in store for us. We were frightened and confused, but we thought that at worst the Germans would use us as forced laborers.
They marched us to the railway station and packed us into freight cars — 120 to 150 souls in a car built for cargo. The journey lasted about 30 hours. We were forced to stand the entire way. We relieved ourselves inside the car. We were given no water for the entire duration of the journey. People died in the cars, but because of the crush they remained standing.
We arrived at the ramp of Birkenau, a concentration camp within the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. When we reached the final stop we remained in the train for hours — until the area had been cleared of the previous transports. In the afternoon the freight-car doors were flung wide open.
“Out of the cars!” a command rang out over the loudspeakers in German, in a firm and harsh tone. “Packages are to be left in the cars!”
We were driven out of the cars with shouts and blows, and subjected to a “selection” — a sorting of who would be sent to the camp and who would be put to death in the gas chambers and burned in the furnaces.

We could see that tradesmen and those who appeared to be in good physical condition were separated from the others. And I saw that children and mothers were being sent to one side. When asked my age, I said I was born in 1924 so as to be registered as one year older. I passed. My brother passed as well. We were sent to the camp. There, numbers were tattooed on our arms and we became numbers, no longer human beings. I was given the number 99288. My brother received the number 99287.
The camp was built some 3 kilometers from Auschwitz camp. The structures were horse-stable barracks. Wooden shelves ran along both sides of the building from wall to wall, and on those shelves we had to sleep — without a sheet, without a pillow, and with only a thin blanket in the depths of a very cold winter.
A reign of terror was imposed on us: early rising, roll call and counting, drills on the proper way to remove and replace one’s cap when greeting a German officer, and other exercises.
There were prisoners who broke down under these living conditions. Some became indifferent to their fate, or ran toward the camp’s electrified fences. Others gritted their teeth and made every effort to survive.
My brother could not hold out under the camp conditions. He did not become a Muselmann, but his hands grew weak and his spirit was broken.
“I cannot bear this any longer,” he told me again and again in a strangled, broken voice.
My efforts to encourage him helped for only a short time, as the conditions in the camp worked against me.
“I feel unwell,” he told me in a hollow voice. “I am going to sick call.”
In vain did I try to dissuade him from this decision.
“Don’t go — hold on, it will pass,” I said. I was admittedly a newcomer to the camps, but it was already clear to me that the Germans did not care if prisoners died. Every evening there were long queues of prisoners trailing in front of the camp infirmary entrance. They hoped to receive medical treatment and perhaps to be admitted to the ward, which would guarantee them a more comfortable bed than the bunk in the block.
Since there was a severe shortage of beds, most requests for admission were turned down — and when prisoners who reported to sick call were nevertheless admitted, only rarely did they return to the camp.
But my brother persisted. He reported to sick call and was sent to the infirmary. In later years I learned — from his number — that he had been hospitalized for about three days before being sent, on March 18, 1943, to the gas chamber.

At the end of March 1943 I was transferred to Auschwitz camp, to Block A17.
One day, a new prisoner was brought to Block A17 where I slept — different from all the others: he was not a Jew, but a German; a political prisoner from before the outbreak of the war. Rolf Winter was appointed “Kapo” [foreman] of a kommando (work group) of street cleaners in the town of Auschwitz. This forced labor was considered relatively good, because it allowed for discreet contact with the local population and for “organizing” food.
Since every prisoner was required to work at some task, and every “Kapo” was entitled to select prisoners as he saw fit, I asked Rolf to include me in his kommando. I offered him dollars from the cache my mother had hidden in my shoes, and he placed me in his work group.
When the townspeople of Auschwitz grew accustomed to our presence in their midst, they began to trade with us. “If you bring me… a gemstone or another valuable item, I will give you bread and sausage.” I became involved in this shadowy trade, aided in part by my connections with men of the “Canada Kommando,” as the workers of the kommando that handled the belongings brought by those who had been murdered in the gas chambers were known. Among other things, they were engaged in sorting through clothing and shoes. In these were found items of gold and diamonds, foreign currency, and the like. The SS men took the spoils, but the men of the “Canada Kommando” managed to smuggle a number of precious and sought-after items into the camp.
Some time after I began working as a street cleaner, Rolf appointed me as caretaker of the tool shed for his group. I also turned that shed into a storage place for the items I was smuggling in and out of the camp for barter. Rolf, who received a share of the items from me and looked after me, said to me one day: “You risk being caught. The penalty for such an offense here is death. Get hold of a diamond, go to the camp registration officer at headquarters and tell him you found the diamond and wish to hand it over to him. That way he will remember you.” I did so, and in return received two loaves of bread as a reward for my honesty.

A short time later, on May 17, 1943, during an inspection of the kommando shed, the items in which I had been trading were discovered. I was arrested and sent to the camp prison — Block 11, the punishment facility from which few left alive. Fortune continued to smile on me: the head of Block 11 was Yaakov Kozlczyk, a Jew who had earned the nickname “Shimshon Eisen” — Samson the Strong — for performing feats of strength across Poland. After the war, some claimed that he had killed camp prisoners for the amusement of the Nazis. From what I witnessed with my own eyes, and from the way he treated me, my impression was that he presented a brutish persona to the Germans, while in secret doing his best to ease the suffering of the wretches cast into the punishment block, especially the Jews.

I was sentenced to three months of punitive hard labor — SK (STRAFKOMPANIE), and on May 1 I was sent to the punishment group that was stationed at Birkenau.
The prisoners of this group were put to work digging drainage ditches in rocky ground, for many hours day after day. Had I continued with such backbreaking labor, I would not have lived to write these words. But in the punishment block overcrowding had become extreme and a number of prisoners had to be released. The camp registration officer, Raportführer Friedrich Stiewitz, came to supervise the selection. When he saw me, he apparently recalled my act of honesty and removed me from there, and also arranged for me to be given light work, in the potato kommando.