Auschwitz, Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen survivor Mira Gold recounted her experiences to a crowd of about 75 students at Hillel last night in a presentation entitled "Never Again: A Holocaust Survivor Speaks."
Gold, a Slovakian, was taken from her family on March 27, 1942 at the age of 16 to work at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
"They told us we were just there to work and that we'd be back," Gold said. "They didn't take married women, only young girls."
In an ominous case of foreshadowing, Gold said she recalls how her father had told her he was positive she would return, but that the rest of her family's future seemed more dubious to him.
Unfortunately, Gold's father's concern proved completely accurate. While incarcerated in concentration camps, Gold would lose all seven of her siblings and both of her parents by the end of World War II in 1945.
"When I left, it was the last time I saw my family," Gold said.
The experience began when Gold and around a thousand other young girls were rounded up and placed into cattle cars. Although ultimately it would be revealed that Auschwitz was located only five hours away from her hometown in Slovakia, Gold said that the Nazis moved the train around for two or three days, so as to disorient its passengers and dissuade escape.
Compared to the Birkenau concentration camp - also located in Poland - Gold said that Auschwitz "was not so horrible" because of its relatively clean facilities. "It was built for soldiers, so it had toilets and running water," Gold said.
She worked largely as a street-cleaner and brick mover, carrying three or four bricks at a time across a distance of about a half kilometer. "The work was not a pleasure, but it wasn't real work. They were just trying to keep us down," Gold said.
Gold stayed at Auschwitz for about six months, until the autumn, when she and other young girls were transported to Birkenau, which Gold described as "really, really horrible."
"There was no water... there was nothing but muck," she said. "[The living conditions] were really unbelievable... I can't even describe it. We worked all day with muck up to our dresses, and were afraid to take our wet clothes of at night [for fear that they would be stolen]."
Gold said Birkenau's toilet system, called the "latrine," was little more than a large cement pit around which the women crouched. "I can't tell you how many girls fell in and that was the end for them," she said.
In addition to the unbearable living conditions, Gold said that food rations often consisted of a small piece of bread for the entire day. Occasionally, prisoners were also afforded a piece of cheese or salami to accompany their bread, as well as tea, which Gold said was like as "black water."
Gold said she survived her three and a half year ordeal largely through hope and a positive attitude. "I kept hoping the war was ending soon and we'd all get to go home," she said. "I would tell myself, 'No, I'm not going to die. I have to see the end of this - how it turns out.'"
"I don't know why, but I was lucky," Gold said. "I had good looks and good jobs." Mostly, however, Gold said she attributed her survival skills to her ability to seem happy and jovial.
"If you were down, the S.S. hated you," she said. "But when you're up and singing and smiling, everybody loves you. I was always singing, and for three years, I never shed a tear. I was beaten up and even then didn't cry," Gold said.
At Birkenau, Gold worked several jobs. As a hairdresser, she was responsible for shaving women's heads. The greatest boon of this position was her access to water, which, in the face of such aqueous scarcity, she used to bathe herself. "It was much better than working in the fields or with the gas," Gold said.
Another job Gold held at Birkenau was cleaning out the luggage of those who had been gassed in the nearby chambers. "It was a very good group to work [because] we'd find food and tea in the suitcases," she said.
Gold said that there was an air of constant fear and uncertainty that pervaded life in the concentration camps. "One night my girl friend who bunked with me had to go the bathroom. When she was out there, they took her away simply because they had one open spot in the gas chamber and used her to fill it. There were a lot of episodes like that," Gold said.
Once again transported, Gold said she found herself in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where she worked at a factory outside the camp. She said that during their marches to the factory, S.S. guards would randomly shoot at women and discard their bodies. On those marches, "there were sick and dead people everywhere, and the rats were just running all over them," she said.
One aspect essential for survival, Gold said, was "to make friends everywhere." With the friends she made in the camps, Gold said they could trade food items at night. In Bergen-Belsen, Gold said she even befriended an S.S. guard who sent her to the hospital when she became gravely ill.
Once in the hospital, Gold said she found herself face-to-face with one of the most notorious figures of the Nazi's concentration camp system: Dr. Josef Mengele.
"When I was in the hospital, Dr. Mengele came for a visit. He stopped at my bed and said [to an attendant], 'Tell me, what kind of princess lies here.'"
Gold said she was subsequently warned by her physician that she had to "disappear" because Mengele had been eyeing her for experimentation. Still ill, Gold was forced to leave the hospital and return to work.
Despite the atrocities that Gold encountered within the walls of the concentration camps, it would prove to be her newly found freedom that was "the worst thing of the whole experience," Gold said.
"I came back and there was no one. I couldn't find anyone," she said. "I kept hoping that maybe one member of my family would come home. When I would see others reunited with their brothers and sisters, I would get so jealous."
Ultimately, Gold said, the key to survival was to "[believe] in something. You have to believe in yourself," she said.
Gold is the grandmother of Tufts senior Daniel Gold. The lecture was sponsored by Hillel.
