Thessaloniki, 2014
Language was something miraculous. This is how we were saved.
As soon as we got off the train there was pandemonium. In the first transport were the hamal [porters in Turkish] of the Thessaloniki port, the notorious hamal of Thessaloniki who carried two, three hundred kilos on their backs. «A Dio, la muerte», «A Dio, la muerte» [my G-d, death, in ladino], in Spanish, but the Germans did not speak Spanish. They would beat them up and suddenly it clicked, the SS realized that these people did not speak German and they shouted “does anyone speak German?”, “who are you?”. So we immediately came forward. From the four of us, there was one that was healthy and had the right to live and one that was a cripple. The healthy one was my mother, the cripple was my father, who did not have the right to live. Then there were two small children, who also did not have the right to live because they would be selected. So they accepted us, “you will be interpreters”. And this saved us and gave us the right to speak about the Holocaust, all four of us. Maybe we were the only family who survived through the Auschwitz death camp because this was Auschwitz, a true factory of death. And they told us “You, and you, and you”. A cripple amongst you, two children amongst you, “all of you will be interpreters”. My mother and sister went to the Politische Abteilung, that is the SS office in Auschwitz, The Messer office, where they registered the names of the newcomers, while my father and to [a building] at the main camp, that had roof like the one you have here [points to the little house in my painting at the photograph behind him]. The rain did not get to us and this saved us, a cripple who did not have the right to live saved us, two children who did not have the right to live, because they made us interpreters. This is why language was something miraculous. This is how we were saved.
Afterwards, we survived all the other camps, not in any way tolerably, but we understood “do this”, we kept silent, did not speak, we listened, what does he want? The role “you are interpreters” that they gave us at that moment in Auschwitz saved us. Why? Because they brought us each night to all the transports, the nineteen transports destined for Auschwitz from Greece [from Thessaloniki]. We were always at the station and acted as interpreters and we said to all the newcomers “do not yell, do not act up, they will beat you up, they will do this, listen to what they are telling you”, and, unfortunately, we told them what to do. “Do not speak”. They were all sent to the crematoria, the doomed ones… And my mother and sister were placed in the Politische Abteilung, which was an office with a roof. When you work in an office with a roof you are saved. In a country where the climate is harsh and cold you are saved, in Poland at the time it was twenty degrees below zero, this is how my father and I were saved, because we went in and we were not treated harshly. Then, the difficulties started, but in the meantime we got bread each time… in all nineteen transports. When they came, we were there, they unloaded the wagon, and those headed for the crematoria were taken away. They unloaded the wagons, they cleaned, the wagon commando, there was a commando that was there, they would collect everything and take it out. Inside there was bread, loaves, everything, we would fill our pockets with crumbs, stuff our mouths, we ate, ate, ate and were saved. So it was –this is how I call it- a miracle of life.
In 1981 Heinz Kounio’s book A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread: The Diary of Prisoner Number 109565 was published, where he collected memories and documents from the Nazi camps.