The Dr. Rath Health Foundation is the Receipient of the “Relay of Life and Remembrance” from the Auschwitz survivors
- The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’
- European Constitution “For the People, by the People”
- Sign Petition online “For the People, by the People”
- Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
- From Nuremberg to Brussels – Lecture by Dr. Matthias Rath
- Two Auschwitz Witnesses – August Kowalczyk and Kazimierz Albin
- The Auschwitz Hospice Foundation
- Photos of the Event
Testimonials of Auschwitz Survivors
Barbara Puc |
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English translation:
My parents, Stefan and Stanisława, were arrested on 7th January 1943 in Mysłowice. The pretext was that during a search, a stock of dummies had been found in a child’s bedding. My mother was three months pregnant. She was already preparing my layette. On 13th November 1943, my parents were transported to KL Auschwitz, to Block Eleven – the death block. From 15th April 1944 – Brzezinka; my mother in a block where the Gypsies had been and my father – in a men’s block.
I was born a month later in the infirmary on a Sunday in the early hours. The birth, which was delivered by a prisoner, Dr. Konieczna, took place in a kind of tunnel which was supposed to heat the concentration camp blocks. The delivery was hard on my mother. She lost a great deal of blood. She called me Weronika, then later, at my father’s wish, Basia. She stayed in bed for three months with me. She got better. I was healthy, despite the nightmare of the sanitary conditions. I had blonde hair and blue eyes.
The Germans decided to take me away from my mother. They convinced her that if she didn’t give up her child for adoption by Germans, we’d find ourselves in Block Eleven. “You know what they do there – there’ll be no child and no mother”. Broken-hearted, my mother agreed. They put me in the infants’ infirmary without my mother. I was three months old. I didn’t want to take manufactured milk. My mother was allowed to come in twice a day and breastfeed me.
It’s strange how healthy I was, under those conditions, in such destitution, with such poor nourishment. My mother was afraid to think about what would happen next. She heard that a German woman was supposed to be coming to take the child and raise it as her own. I received the number 79496. My mother remembered the number that had been tattooed on my left leg and, after a while, she even asked for it to be touched up. She was afraid that as I grew, the number would disappear. After all, she intended to find me thanks to the number. She wouldn’t have to search.
In 1945, she waited, together with me, for liberation from the camp. She and two other prisoners turned a table and stool upside down to make sledges and put the children on them. I was ten months old at the time. They set off homewards. They got there and I, number 79496, was saved. I was saved after an infancy in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Was that not a miracle?