After a lengthy struggle our senior camp inmate was granted 100 strong young people capable of hard work. Out of 1,500 people the camp doctor, SS Captain [Josef] Mengele , selected ninety-eight. I was among the "strong." We immediately went into camp; the rest of the family camp were gassed. In camp I became a helper in the kitchen. I visited the barracks of the Jewish work detail, which worked in the crematorium. These comrades told me about the horrors of the crematorium, where I would later work . After May 19 [1944] the Hungarian transports began arriving, with around 7,000 people daily.

In the camp it was well known that every transport was gassed after six months. I had been in the camp a month when the oldest transport was gassed. They took us immediately to the selection, at which the strongest men and women were sorted out. The remainder were gassed.

ON MAY 20, 1944, I arrived at Auschwitz -Birkenau as a fourteenyearold from the camp at Theresienstadt . The crematorium greeted us with its horrible tongues of flame coming out of its smokestacks. those of us able to march set out toward the camp on foot and had to carry the sick. Many of the elderly refused to cooperate with the SS, which had taken the last little piece of food from them. They were killed on the spot. After midnight we entered the camp. In the camp we went to join the Czechs; for the first two days we got nothing to eat. In these two days we saw how people who had once been good human beings had turned into ravening wolves. They did not care that we were their countrymen; they beat us to save their own lives.