The Dr. Rath Health Foundation is the Receipient of the “Relay of Life and Remembrance” from the Auschwitz survivors
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Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
Róża Krzywobłocka Laurów |
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English translation:
The photo shows my dead sister, Bożena, who I was with in the concentration camp. We were marched to Block 16A, known as the children’s block. Bunk beds in an enormous barrack – for some, it was where they lived for the next six months.
But something else was fated for me, because as early as 30th August 1944, I found myself in the infirmary, in other words, the concentration camp hospital, with suspected scarlet fever. I don’t think I was ill at the time. I only caught scarlet fever in the infirmary. However, the verdict of the hospital assistant, who was exceptionally malicious towards children from the Warsaw transports, and criminal prisoners with a green badge, was an unequivocal “sick”. I had to stay in the infirmary.
It was a very strange isolation hospital, situated in the same KL, but behind an additional trench and wire. In one barrack, in a three-bunk bed, were sick children and adult women, suffering from various different infectious diseases starting with my wretched scarlet fever, via various kinds of diarrhoea and spotted typhus, to venereal diseases in various stages of development. The majority of the patients were women of Jewish origin, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from various European countries.
Only once during my stay in the hospital did my mother manage to get to me for a moment, and that was at the cost of carrying a dead person four kilometres. The separation from my family and the lack of any news of them whatsoever meant that I began to think feverishly about how I could leave the infirmary earlier than expected. I came up with the idea that the earlier I could get the flaking skin over and done with, the quicker I’d get out of the infirmary. All that then awaited me was disinfestation and the baths.
Under camp conditions, that involved standing under a hot shower in the open air and frost for several hours waiting for disinfested clothes, which is why my joy at returning, healthy, to the children’s block and being reunited with my sister didn’t last very long. I wound up in the infirmary again, this time with serious pneumonia and inflamed joints. To make matters worse, in those few days with my beloved sister on one bunk, I’d infected her with my scarlet fever, which hadn’t been completely cured. This time she also had to go into the infirmary.
Like many sick children in the camp, we have to thank Polish doctors for saving us, as well as the prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, who managed, by methods known only to themselves, to get medicine and nurse us back to a state of health sufficient enough for us to return to the healthy children’s block. It enabled us to leave Auschwitz-Birkenhau halfway through January in 1945. We were transported to Berlin, to a branch of the concentration camp at Oranienburg, a so-called ‘kommando’ under the care of the SS-Baubrigade, sprawled over the territory of Berlin and its surroundings. There, we survived to be liberated by the Soviet Army.