Eva Galler was seventeen when she was taken to her death camp. From there she was forced from the horrid conditions of the ghetto to the death train, the last sight that many prisoners in concentration camps see before they are murdered. They all knew that their next and last destination was the gas chambers, however they faced their destiny with pride and honor.
When they were inside the train, some prisoners tried to escape by pulling the wire off of the walls and jump out into the snow. Many were shot down by soldiers on the top of the train.When Eva and her younger brother and sister decided to jump, Eva was the only to survive the jump and she decided to work in Germany under a false name
When they were inside the train, some prisoners tried to escape by pulling the wire off of the walls and jump out into the snow. Many were shot down by soldiers on the top of the train.When Eva and her younger brother and sister decided to jump, Eva was the only to survive the jump and she decided to work in Germany under a false name
March Towards the Death Train
They took us in January . . . I remember . . . January 4th, 1943. It was very cold. It was that time such a cold winter that when you walked, the snow crunched under your feet. The S.S. people came into the ghetto, and they walked us . . . they chased us with rifles to the train. That time when they chased us, they didn't have television yet, so nobody saw whatever it happened. But now when you see on the television, and people they chasing out from Kosovo, and people . . . and they are going into tent cities, and it's very sad to look at it. But, to compare to the Holocaust, if somebody would have given us a chance to walk out of Germany, if to live in a camp, in a tent city . . . together the whole family . . . everybody would have been grateful. They didn't give us that chance. They took us into the train. It's a chaos was by the loading the trains because children cried, and parents tried to keep together with the children, and families wanted to be together. Now we came in, into that cattle train when it was full and closed from outside, locked that nobody could . . . was able to go out. The small windows with barbed wires, it wasn't any glass, only barbed wires. Of course, we knew that time what is awaiting us. Because we knew that time it was Camp Belzec, a few stations from our city, and there it was just crematoriums. You came in and they gassed you. They told you to go to the shower, but the shower had Zyklon gas in it and everybody was killed and later exterminated. Nobody survived. You don't have one survivor from Belzec. You have survivors from Auschwitz, from Treblinka, because it was also a working camp. But Belzec wasn't a working camp. It was strictly a death camp, and nobody survived.
Escaping the Death Train
People started to pull out those barbed wires and jumped through those little windows. Even the SS people sat on the rooftop of the train and shot, but everybody took a chance. Whoever could, whoever it was possible to take a chance. Well, my father told us, when the young people started to jump, he said, "You the oldest three"--I was seventeen, and my sister sixteen, my brother fifteen--"You oldest try. Maybe somebody will survive, but we will stay here with the small children, because even if they go out they won't be able to survive." So the parents went with the small children. My sister . . . my brother jumped first, my sister second. Then I jumped, and I landed in a ditch of snow. They shot after us. They shot . . . they keep on shooting, but the bullet didn't hit me. When I didn't hear anymore the train, I got up. And the first thing I did, I took off my star, and I promised myself never again will I ever wear a star. I went first to look after my sister and brother and found them dead. And I found many corpses . . . many corpses. From that train one of my friends survived, too. She lives in New York. We were two people who survived that train, but many people jumped. Well, after that I survived under an assumed name, and I was caught to work in Germany as a Polish girl. And I worked on a farm, on a German farm, under a false name . . .pretended that I was Catholic and escaped until the end of the war.