Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
Elżbieta Sobczyńska |
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English translation:
In the new sauna, where the transport reception took place, I had my first shock when I stepped over the threshold. With no consideration of age or sex, and there were boys of up to the age of sixteen there, we were ordered to strip naked. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the necessity of undressing in public. In my family, nakedness wasn’t the norm, but something embarrassing. Before then, I’d never seen my mother undressed. Her shame was painful for me to see, very much so. My mother, sacred to me, was thus so deeply humiliated in the eyes of her own children. I tried not to look lower than her face.
It was here that I received my first visual lesson in human anatomy. Catching sight, first, of certain physiological features of a mature woman and confronting the beauty of a young body and the unsightliness of an old one, increasingly deformed by obesity. A surplus of loosely hanging folds of skin aroused not only surprise and curiosity but, first and foremost, compassion.
As I was beginning to get accustomed to my nakedness and to human nakedness, the next shock was the appearance of SS men amongst us. They gave the impression that they’d wandered in amongst a herd of animals. In the place where all our hair was sheared off, the next drama awaited me. The awareness that they could cut off my locks and shave my head to the skin was horrifying. I believed that the only thing that could justify such a procedure would be lice.