When we arrived to Auschwitz,
the minute they opened the wagons,
there was just total, complete,
uh, misery--
beatings and screamings and beatings and barking of dogs...
and growling of dogs and whistles of trains...
and screaming and beating and screaming and-- and commands given.
It was just-- It was just like you opened the doors,
and all of a sudden you find yourself in this inferno--
in this unimaginable...
horror that you, as a adult or child, would see in nightmares.
It was coming through.
And we were just holding onto each other, and,
I don't know, within minutes,
my mother and my sister were dragged to one side,
and I was dragged with my dad to another.
We were told to go to another side.
And never had a chance to say good-bye to my mother.
Never had a chance to say good-bye to my sister.
The--
The pace, the speed of this thing was done by design.
It was done to both-- for the person not to be able to comprehend...
or understand or in any way be able to think for a second what was happening.
It was just incredible.
It was just an incredible situation,
and it was just--
As I tell it to you now,
it's difficult for me to even describe it...
because it was happening on a minute-to-minute situation.
And I got into this line.
There was this big line.
And I saw my mother on the other side. There was another side...
where the women went.
And I never saw her cry.
I never saw her reach out.
She just-- Last time I saw her, she was hanging onto my sister.
And my dad hollered to her, "You take care of her; I'll take care of him,"
in Yiddish.
"Whatever we have to do." This was the last word I heard.
And...
my dad threw me in front of him,
and he says, "Keep walking very tall. Don't even"--
'Cause we were observing what was goin' on in the front,
the front of the lines.
And the one thing you didn't want is...
for the Germans to see you were holding onto your child,
because that was the whole idea is to break up the family,
murder the family.
That was the genocide of the whole thing, so by not identifying that this is your child,
that was a little bit of an edge you had to possibly survive--
the fact that you were on your own, and you sort of didn't belong to any family.