The author was interviewed by Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler in Berlin.

He reports on antisemitismin a Berlin school in 1933. Forced labour for boys under sixteen: sixty hours a week for about 25 Pfennig an hour. In order to avoid impending deportation to Poland, at the end of 1942 (p.1,4), he went to live with a “Mischling” (p.1-3), now his brother-in-law, who was already hiding his father and sister as well.

Non-Jews helping Jews, among them Dr. George Grosscurth, Robert Koch-Krankenhaus, who was later executed for his work with a Resistance Group, liquidated, in the Autumn 1943 (p.2,4). Frightened, the three illegal guests left their hiding place which was bombed out, soon afterwards. Bombenscheine (p.2, 4). The author's sister went with her fiancé into hiding at Vienna, the other two found a little room in Karow near Bernau (p.2-3) under false pretenses and through a forged document. Arrested by the Wehrmacht, the author and his father were taken to the Jewish Sammellager Schulstrasse; ill-treatment through Gestapo (p.3-5). Deportation via Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen (p.3). In February 1945, the author was separated from his father and never saw him again. Transports to Neubrandenburg, Ravensbruck, a small camp near Ludwigslust (p.3-4). Rote Kapelle resistance group (p.4). Volksdeutsche SS (p.3-4).

The author worked at the Belgian Ministry of Labour as a welfare officer. At the beginning of the year 1943, she joined theC.D.J. (Comité de défense des Juifs), in order to hide and help Jewish children. She describes the various departments and tasks of this organization (p.1) and how the work was done in the children’s group, to which she belonged; some examples of the complicated rescue work (p.2, 5-7). Reports on the extreme difficulties which had to be overcome, in order to return a small child to his mother, after the baby’s name had to be changed twice, his mother had been known to be dead for years and the foster parents wanted to keep the child (p.3-5).

Some people at Brussels were still afraid of the “Fünfte Kolonne“ when the occupation was over (p.4). Help from Catholic nuns, Avenue Clémenceau; deportation and imprisonment for other non-Jews helping Jews; Mr and Mrs Ovart, and their daughter who had hidden Jewish children and adults, pensionnat Gaty de Gamont (p.6). The author arrested twice could get away (p.6). Help from a police-officer; the Chief of the food office at Brussels generously helped out with ration cards (p.6-7).

Repeatedly they succeeded to rescue the children under the nose of the Gestapo during the raids, whilst the parents were arrested (p.7).

A report by Mrs Sussman, an Austrian Jewess, who had been living in Paris with her husband, an artist, since 1937. After the outbreak of war both were interned. They were not supplied with gas masks by the French as they also considered Austrian Jews as their enemies. When the Germans approached Paris the Sussman's marched together with about 2 millions French people into the so called “Free Zone”.

In 1942 Mr and Mrs Sussman decided to return behind the demarcation line in order to work against the Germans (Resistance). Seven times their identity papers had to be changed but in the end they were handed over to the Germans by the “Special Brigade” collaborating with the latter. Mr and Mrs Sussman were taken to the military prison at Fresnes. For two months Mrs Sussman was there in solitary confinement in her sixth month of pregnancy, but excluded from the care of the Red Cross. Thereafter she came to the reception camp Drancy.

In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nightmare transport in cattle trucks with a notice board: “8 Horses or 40 Persons” but they were about 120 in each. Mrs Sussman describes her arrival at Auschwitz and the already well-known conditions there.

All pregnant women were ordered to register ”in order to obtain a daily supply of 1/4 pint of milk”. Mrs Sussman was warned by a Polish doctor not to do so and thereupon she warned also the other pregnant women. But when almost starved one of them did register. For 3 days she received the milk whereupon the other women - with the exception of Mrs Sussman - registered too. They were all called for and never seen again. When Mrs Sussman, as a punishment, had to carry a very heavy sewing machine without help she gave premature birth to her child, a little boy, in a corner of a hut, covered with filthy rugs infected with Dysentery Bacilli. She screamed only once but this brought Dr. Mengele to her block who took the child from her and threw it in the open fire. Then a Polish doctor took her - at her own risk - to the hospital hut.

In Auschwitz Mrs Sussman became a kind of philosopher. She did not expect her co-prisoners there to behave like human beings anymore and even did not blame the nurses who stole the sick rations of their patients. On the other hand she speaks with the greatest admiration of the exceptions, the few heroic people who risked their lives in order to save others. Her fellow prisoners were women from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Austria, and Soviet Russia. She observed that none of them spoke of a future, they were all deeply concerned with the past.

After 3 months in Auschwitz, Mrs Sussman was transferred to the concentration camp Kratzau near Reichenberg-Zittau, affiliated to the Gross-Rosen camp.

Addendum :

     1) On her and her husband's Illegal Work in France : They produced and distributed illegal literature.

     2) On her pregnancy at Auschwitz : It was not conspicuous as almost every woman, because of malnutrition, had a swollen stomach.

     3) On sabotage in an SS armament factory in Kratzau : She pretended to be a good technician and succeeded, together with a Hungarian girl, in damaging the precision, mashine to such an extent that it did not work any more.

     4) On her husband's survival : He was already selected for the gas chambers when a SS-officer called for someone able to design Christmas cards and when he said he could was given back to life.

This report deals with a little-known extermination camp, the “Jugendlager Uckermark”. In January 1945 the authoress, Mrs Breinin of Vienna, who spent a year at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to join the death march of thousands of women to Gross-Rosen, from where they were transported in cattle trucks to Ravensbruck. She was then sent as “Lagerlaeuferin” to the so-called “youth” camp Uckermark. It turned out that this youth-camp was an extermination camp, especially for old, sick and weak women, were still, in the middle of February 1945, about 6,000 people were either gassed or poisoned, also healthy women, women of many different nationalities and of all ages.

The authoress was the only child of a well-off manufacturer in Vienna. In 1935 under the influence of the political situation, he moved with his family to Krakow, where he owned another factory. They lived in a most comfortable flat and the daughter studied philology, German and English. She reports here on the situation in Poland of the Jews, after the German army had occupied Poland.

In 1940 they were in Cracow (p.1, 3), in 1941 the Czknstochow Ghetto. This report includes details on Gestapo-chief Degenhard, the deportation to Treblinka of the older people (p.2), forced labour and ill-treatment for the remaining thousand by German SS, Ukrainians and Latvians (p.2-3). The authoress escaped together with her husband to “Nutzjuden” working outside the Ghetto, from there to Warsaw. Details forged documents and a job with the German “Ost Energie A.G.“. After several months of living with the family of a Polish army-officer (belonging, then unknown to them, to the Resistance Movement), everybody living in and arriving at the house was arrested and put in irons (p.4). Then, the men were taken to prison (Montelupe) and later back to the Ghetto, where the intellectuals were shot. The authoress whose husband was a doctor, never saw him again (p.4-5).

The women had to spend two months at Helclow after which all prisoners were transported to Auschwitz. Non-Jews helping Jews: an SS-official, like the authoress a grammar-school mistress, and a lady-doctor, interned as a Resistance-member, helped her to get a job with the Commando “Bauleitung“, where she worked for two years for the Chief, Sturmbannführer Bischof who proved to be human and helpful (p.6); their ‘Model Block’shown to Swedish Control Commission, in 1944; another model block was the ‘Experimental Block’ with lady-doctor Brewda, now London, and Dr. Fleck, his wife and child - the only child at Auschwitz - who returned back to Paris (p.6).

On 17 January 1945 she was evacuated and sent on a two-week death march to the Jiell of Ravensbrück. In February, she was transferred to nearby Malchow labour camp. Liberated on 9 April 1945 (p.6), the march back to Poland.

Since 1946 the author has been working with the Polish embassy in London. She has remarried and had a child; when she was called back to Poland; she left her job and stayed in England.