On Christmas Eve, it was so beautiful at home. Everybody gathered round the Christmas tree, and afterwards we went to Mass, and it was so beautiful. [Here] there was this camp, the cold, this fear. These SS men, these dogs, the shootings, everything. And then, all of a sudden, we heard the tune „Silent Night, Holy Night“. And we cried then, and Anni Borst told me: „But I have never seen you cry yet.“ „Yes“, I said, „I already thought, too, that I had no more tears. But look, now I am crying.“ So we held each other, with praying hands, and the tears came. And we asked ourselves whether they were still alive. No mail, nothing. You didn’t know whether they were still alive. I had three brothers, there sisters, father and mother. They were all gone from home.

Whether they were still alive?

That was hard.

And this sorting out [the selection] happened every day during roll call, they selected us every day. The fear was permanent, when your turn came. When does your turn come? Today it’s you, and you go, and tomorrow it might be me. That was the way it was. And one day they picked me from the rank, too. Put me into the other queue, for burning. I was standing there, and a Polish woman I knew passed by, and I aked her: „Save me!“ I asked her in Polish, and in Slovenian, „Resi me!“ And she pulled me out of the queue. I just walked beside her. The SS guards were already far up the queue, it was long. I walked beside her, and back into the queue, into the same queue. And that way I was saved, in such a way. And in that way, many, many were saved.

Mother was in the relocation camp. She was jailed with us in Klagenfurt. The doctor certified she was unfit for detention, and she got back to the relocation camp in Eichstätt. There, she dried bread for me. I don’t know who, but someone from home had sent her a can of Sasseker. That is a kind of lard, salted and with greaves, and she sent me things like that in little parcels. I got the parcel exactly on Good Friday, which is an important day of fasting. I thought it’s Good Friday, I won’t eat any of it today. But the situation was such that you had to take care that nothing was stolen from you. For example the clogs, we took them with us and put them under our pillows, because otherwise they would be gone in the morning. There were many who hadn’t got clogs any more, who went barefoot, and they obviously watched where they might get something. They were so poor. You had to take care that nothing was stolen from you, so I put this parcel into this sheet with me, and I thought that nobody would be able to steal it, that it would be safe there. But one woman cut the sheet open at my feet while I slept. In the morning, it was Holy Saturday, and I wanted to eat the bread. The parcel was gone. The Sasseker, I thought, I’ll save until Easter, I’ll eat it at Easter. In the morning I came to the toilet, and there was an empty can out there. Yes, well. And then, who knows who it was for. Maybe the same person saved her life with this bread. Maybe it was like that. It was, every piece of bread was important there.