European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Trying to stay alive

At that point I was determined to come back home,

I could not stand ending up like that anymore.

I ate just as bad as the others,

although my doctor tells me today that those two years in Germany

were good for my health and helped me to stay alive.

I didn’t do much, but I was never scared of not being able to make it home one day.

Only during the last three months did I let go:

I could not remember my family anymore,

it was as if that notion had vanished,

and it’s something I could not understand back then.

I was exhausted,

the food was terrible for all of us, but I did my best to survive even in those conditions.

Regarding my weight, you hear people say they were thirty-eight or forty kilos, but I never did weigh myself.

I might have weighed around fifty or fifty-five.

I know I was skinny, but I just had to live with that.

I saw some die in anguish, crying:

Then the Americans arrived at my camp.

They left some guards, but we were free to go wherever we wanted.

They began to find calves - I’m not joking! - then slaughtered them