Audio clips from the British Library’s archive of 665 oral history interviews with Jewish refugees from Nazism, Holocaust survivors and their children

Edith Birkin was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1927. In 1941 she entered the Lodz ghetto, Poland, and was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland in 1944. She survived a death march to Flossenberg camp in Germany and was liberated from Belsen in 1945.

Transcript:
It was filth, and lies, and smell, and death around you, and you just waited for the end of the war really, that is what we were doing.  One day we were standing, standing, standing, and no Germans came, and then we found out that all the Germans had gone.  A couple of days or so later the British came.  The tanks started rolling down the...sort of like a main road, but I was so weak I couldn't even go to greet them; most of us couldn't go to greet them, because we were so weak and tired.  I was so pleased I could just lie down and sleep.  We were always imagining that when we are liberated we are going to be dancing, and kissing them - and I don't think they wanted to be kissed by us to be honest!  We didn't think of it that way, we didn't think we were so dreadful you know, but to them we looked absolutely awful of course....They came with great big tankers of water; that's what we needed more than anything was good water.  Food.  Luckily, I think it was more luck than sense, they gave us the right sort of food.  My very first food was tinned creamed macaroni, you know the one in the tins, and that was heaven.  And every day on Liberation Day I feed my family this tinned macaroni, the poor things got to eat it.  

LoveCamden