had that they wante d was a leather jacket. I told my father that I regretted having to give my jacket. He said, "Child, if we ever get out of here, I'll buy you ten of these." The bunks we slept in were in three tiers, lower, middle, and upper. The mattress was just burlap filled with straw. We had not eaten at that time, and we were not to get anything to eat until the next morning. The Daily Routine at AuschwitzIn the morning we got metal cups and spoons. We were each given two slices of bread and sometimes a pat of margarine or a little bit of marmalade. The coffee was toasted acorns ground up. It tasted terrible. The midday meal was potato soup with maybe a li ttle bit of meat. Potatoes were the main ingredient and the kind of beets you normally feed to cattle. We were already hungry in the Theresienstadt ghetto because we did not get enough to eat. In Auschwitz we were beginning to starve. In the evening we go t another slice of bread, some coffee, no marmalade, no butter, no nothing. Every morning we had the counting of the prisoners. We were arranged in groups of five with just small distances between us. The SS trooper would come by and start counting one, two, three, four, five. If he miscounted, he went over it again. Sometimes we stood there two hours. I kept wondering why none of us tried to overpower this lone guard who had just a small pistol. But what could we have done? There were guardposts on either end and high tension wires in between. We would all have been killed. We did not know that Auschwitz was an extermination camp or that we could be put to death. We did know that there was always this sickly sweet smell in the air. We saw a large chimney belching smoke 24 hours a day. We saw German military ambulances with t he Red Cross symbol on them going back and forth. The Germans had painted the symbol on the vehicles to hide their true purposes from the camp prisoners and from overflying airplanes. Much later we foun...
