d out these ambulances were carrying military personn el or cyanide poison gas cannisters for use in the gas chambers. We made the best we could of the situation. My younger brother had hidden a book by the German poet Goethe. We read it twice. We read it three times. We memorized it. We quoted from it. We had a deck of cards. We played card games. There wasn't anything else we could do. Eventually my brother got a job laying a stone road. They gave him a half a portion of food more. But the work was excruciating. Nothing grew in Auschwitz. There was not a bird, not a living thing, no grass or anything. A drainage ditch ran through the B camp. Daily the SS guards sent prisoners from other camps to lay sod along the banks of this ditch. We were desperate for food. M y mother remembered seeing in our small village the geese eating the wild grasses. She knew there were plants growing in the sod that we could eat. She gathered them and whenever we could we ate them. We were starving. We were dreaming of food. We were ta lking about food. We had not had enough to eat for three or four months already. Yet we hoped in 1944 that the end of the war was in sight. At Auschwitz people died of huger because they had come to the camps already weakened. The people who had died were thrown or stacked at the very end of the barracks row underneath the watchtower. They were stacked like cordwood, naked, without dignity. Nobody to close their eyes. They were stacked four feet high. Every twenty-four hours a cart came. People were simply grabbed by the hand and foot and tossed on there. We knew they were taken to the crematory to be incinerated, but we still had no knowledge of the gas chambers and that people were killed or gassed in such numbers as they were. Top Ben at AuschwitzBen Stem spent six months in the Kielce ghetto and then was taken to a forced labor camp called Henrykow. In 1943 the Kielce ghetto was disbanded and the people in it sent to con...
