Magdalena Swinkelsová, roz. Hackerová

“I passed through Mengele’s hands tree times. I was very young at that time and he was looking for young girls for work. They had to have good eyesight, because the work we did involved tiny wires for aircraft lights. Mengele conducted selections as the trains were arriving and people were getting off. He assigned a person depending on how he liked them. He pushed my mother to the wrong side right away. And my sister too, but he heard her calling ‘mom’ and he thus returned her to our side, because she was young and she was good for work. I passed through the selection three times. The first time when I arrived to Auschwitz, the second time when they selected us for work, and for the third time it was before we went to Germany to work in a factory there. He was checking whether we were able to do what they needed. He was a handsome man, he really was a good-looking and polite man. At that time we did not know that he was such a murderer. To us he was a doctor.”

“The Englishmen were already there (in Bergen-Belsen – ed.’s note). My sister had typhus, and she could not walk any more and she told me: ‘Go and look outside, something is happening there.’ I just walked out of the barrack and there were about twenty girls from our block. We were telling each other that we were liberated. But not far away from us there were a German and a Hungarian warden and they told us to go inside. We thus went inside, but they did not wait and they started shooting at us. I got hit in my neck and hand. The bullet which grazed me on my neck killed the girl who was standing behind me. She was tall and she got hit in her heart. The bullet which only scratched me killed her. I got hit into my hand and there were no bandages there, but later the Englishmen helped me. They placed me into barracks where the SS men had stayed before.”