I - 40 years ago, what was your first impact with Auschwitz?

PL - Different; It was night time, after a disastrous journey during which some of the people in the car had died, and arriving in a place where we didn't understand the language, the purpose... there were some senseless writings, showers, the 'clean side', the 'dirty side'; Nobody explained anything, and they spoke to us in Yiddish or Polish, and we didn't understand. It was really an alienating experience. It seemed we had abandoned the ability to reason, we didn't reason.

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I - And how was the journey, those 5 days? What do you remember?

PL - I remember very well. I remember a lot. There were 45 of us in a small, very small car. We could barely sit, but there wasn't enough room to lay down. And there was a young mother breast-feeding a baby. They had told us to bring food. Foolishly we hadn't brought water. No one had told us, and we suffered from a terrifying thirst even though it was winter. This was our first, tormenting pain, for 5 days. The temperature was below zero and our breath would freeze on the bolts and we would compete, scraping off the frost, full of mist as it was, to have a few drops with which to wet our lips. And the baby cried from morning to night because his mother had no milk left.