Ioannina, 2014
I often wonder myself: “Did I actually live through all that?”
I was taken to many concentration camps; I don’t even know where to start… I often wonder myself: “Did I actually live through all that?” I’m now scared, I don’t know. Did I do well? Their souls are still alive…Did they want me to tell everything? I don’t know if I did well.
I wonder if I could ever recount the atrocities we lived through. It’s not possible for a human being to grasp what we went through. Inside the wagons it was, oh God, no water, no light. My sister had a baby, six and a half months old and since the mother had neither food nor water, the child didn’t get any either; only blood would come out of her breast and the child would be suckling blood. What can I tell you… My sister-in-law, Efi, started going into labour inside the train. We made a stop somewhere, the train stopped somewhere, I don’t know where exactly. Those who were making, who were supervising the train rails below, were shouting “gold, gold”. There was a tiny window, what can I tell you, fifteen centimeters by seven, a hole, and they were shouting “gold”, whether we carried gold with us. Then, an uncle of hers below, a banker, asks her: “Madame Flora, have you hidden anything?” “What do you want to know?” she tells him. “We’ll get candles, so that if your sister-in-law goes into labour my mother will be able to help as the midwife”. My mother had five pounds hidden away, she fastened the coin on a piece of rope and they brought it down and we pulled up what they gave us: two candles and two cans of milk. But how could we give that milk to a six-month baby, the canned milk?
[…]
And when they took us to… that same evening we were all crying, “what are they going to do to us, where has my mother gone, where are my siblings?” Then a girl from Thessaloniki came to me. “Do you want to know where your mother and family are?” I replied “yes, if possible”, and she says “look over there”, the fire was burning all the way up to the sky, “your family is in there”. I lunged at her like a wild beast, to kill her. “It’s not possible. I was with my parents not an hour ago. How can they be burning now?” And yet. I said “God, please forgive me, if you are really God in heaven, I wish you’d also burn in this fire”. I couldn’t take it any longer. I just couldn’t conceive the fact that from being together with fifteen people around the family table I went to being [alone]… and she was telling me “they’re burning”. “Why are they burning?”. How is it possible to think that these people, these blameless people, who did nothing, who harmed nobody… They wanted to work. To work, not to burn.