AuschwitzPage 1234 BirkenauPage 123 Other Plaszów
Kraków
living barracks, Birkenau
<< BackNext >>

Living barrack for prisoners. These were previously horse stables. These barracks, originally intended for 52 horses, were filled with more than 400 men.

"Ten of us got together on top of my bunk. Understand that in order to do this, a population shift had to take place. In other words, there couldn't be more than ten or twelve people on a bunk, so my mother had to leave and a few other people. My sister stayed and we invited those who wanted to participate with us. On top of my bunk we decided to remember this moment, remember this time. So we composed a song. Neither of us knew music, but we enjoyed singing. We all spoke, had one common language among us and we spoke other languages too. We chose Hungarian, since that, every one of us knew. Since we were not musicians we chose a melody that we all knew as well. So all we had to really do is come up with the words. We had no pencil and no paper. Each time we composed a line, we sang that line, over and over again. And then we'd compose the second line and so on, until we had, I forget, about four verses, thirteen lines all together. With each line we would go back to the beginning and we would sing. And this happened for a few days. We sang other melodies that we knew."
The testimony of Gloria Hollander Lyon - Czechoslovakian survivor of 7 camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Beendorf and Ravensbrück. Used with kind permission of The Oral History Archives Project