GIORA AMIR: The whole tragedy starts with the girls. They have been the first victims.

EDITH GROSMAN:I was living in a small Slovakian city. We were 6,000 citizens there. About 60% Jews. And we were in very good relations with the non-Jews.

COMM: In 1938, Slovakia broke away from Czechoslovakia. After Hitler took power in Austria and Bohemia, a new president was elected. Joseph Tiso was a Catholic priest.

He was also an anti-Semite. President Tiso installed a fascist government with the help of a paramilitary group called the Hlinka Guard.

By 1940, anti-Jewish legislation in Slovakia was even more severe than in Germany.

Jews were not only forced to wear the yellow Star of David, they couldn't own a car, a truck, a radio, or even a cat.

IVAN JARNY...They took away our passports. Our rights to travel, even within the land.
Our rights to be admitted to a public hospital. We had absolutely no rights left. On every corner, there were anti-Jewish posters showing the Jews in the ugliest possible way. They were shown as fat, hook nosed, trying to exploit the poor and innocent workers. Every possible way that they could hurt us and showing this to the nation, every day.

[00:04:18.925]
EDITH GROSMAN: All of a sudden, they stop speaking to us and then we began to feel the first hate toward us, but really hate.

[00:04:32.355]
COMM: Aryanization laws were passed to destroy Jews economically. Jewish businesses were transferred to Gentile owners who could legally confiscate Jewish income and property.

[00:04:55.461]
IVAN JARNY: Slowly, slowly, the Jews became a mass without means of existence
because they didn't have any source of income, and there was only one way to solve the problem. The government had made an agreement with the Germans,  that the Slovak Jews will be deported to Poland, provided that the deported will not come back.

[00:05:26.534]
COMM: When Germany insisted that Slovakia send 20,000 workers to support the war effort,
President Tiso ordered unmarried Jewish girls to volunteer for work.

[00:05:42.258]
COMM: Bat’a was one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world. The girls and their parents believed they’d be working in the Bat’a factories,
making army boots. Everyone, even the local police, believed the government's lie.


[00:06:02.278]
GIORA AMIR: We have been deceived.
And the fascist regime said, "Okay, we give you young girls. You can employ them in your industry."

[00:06:25.343]
COMM: Tiso and his fascist government made a secret deal to pay the Nazis 500 reichsmarks the equivalent of 3,000 U.S. dollars today for every Jew deported.

[00:06:44.028]
MARTA MANGEL MARCK: They said they would take people for work. We thought we would be there a short time and come home, which never happened.

[00:06:56.124]
EDITH GROSMAN: One morning we wake up and we saw outside on the street,
it was glued on the houses, an announcement that all the Jewish girls, non-married girls, from 16 up have to come to the school the 20th of March, 1942.For work.

[00:07:25.278]
COMM: Edith and her older sister, Lea,lived near the Hungarian border in Humenne,
one of the first towns to start registering girls.

[00:07:36.414]
EDITH GROSMAN: My mother was so against it. And my father, he was so disciplined, you know?  He said, "It's a law, we have to do it."
And my mother said, "It's a bad law." And my father said, "But, it's a law, and we have to send those kids."

[00:07:55.057]
COMM: Margita Becker lived next door to Edith and Lea.

[00:07:59.896]
MARGITA BECKER: My mother said, "Hey, you don't have to go." And that was the first time, maybe, that I disobeyed my mother.  I said, "No, I want to go with my friends.” Friends are very important at that point, so I didn't want to be left behind.

[00:08:17.330]
COMM: A few blocks away, the beautiful redhead, Adela Gross, was also packing,
eager to join Edith and their friends.

EDITH GROSMAN: So we went to the school. And there was something that we were very surprised, an SS was sitting there. The doctor and an SS by the table when they were checking us.

[00:08:47.860]
COMM: Not every girl was collected in the same way. It took five days to gather 999 girls.

[00:08:57.453]
LINDA REICH BREDER:1942: suddenly, knock, knock on the door and the Hlinka Guard, was equivalent to the SS. The Hlinka Guard told us, “We are taking you to work to Germany." So we can help our families who are behind, and support them. So it was my chance, since we were very young, so we said, "Oh, that'd be wonderful," because you know, it was horrible already. No money. No food.

[00:09:34.699]
REGINA SCHWARTZ PRETTER: We wanted to protect our father. We said, “We are young kids, we can work.” We went assuming that we will come back in six months.

[00:09:49.964]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: When the police came...I had to start packing.
They told my parents that they were going to take me to work and there was no other choice. And my mother came with me to the next town. We stayed there overnight. Of course, nobody slept much. And from there, the next day, we were taken by buses. There were older the girls from our neighborhood, so Mother asked them they should take care of me, so I was always with these girls. I remember my father blessed me, and you know what? I walked around with my father's hands over my head. It’s very comforting. Very good for me.

[00:10:39.722]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: In the early morning, about 5 o’clock, a police car came, and they found us hiding. So that's how I got caught.

[00:10:54.904]
COMM: Magda Amster’s best friend, watched as she was arrested.

[00:11:01.035]
GIORA AMIR: Magda was hiding in the attic of their villa. They had a beautiful house. And they started to beat Adolf, "Where is your daughter? Where did you hide her?"  So she came down. The people were weeping and caressing their daughters. It was terrible.

[00:11:23.307]
EDITH GROSMAN: And all of a sudden, they took us out and we marched, and an SS with us. All the parents began to shout and cry, and shout and cry. And my mother, I heard her, I’m hearing her now. How she said,  "About Lea, I am not so worried. She's strong. But Edith, she's like nothing."

[00:11:49.500]
COMM: Adela Gross and the older girls wanted to show the Slovak government how patriotic and hardworking Jewish girls were, and cheered up the younger ones by telling jokes and singing.

[00:12:07.351]
[Hlinka Marching Song]

[00:12:25.661]
MARGITA BECKER  We saw the beautiful mountains, the Tatra mountains and everybody was singing. [Slovak] Wonderful Tatras. Oh boy!

[00:12:39.300]
♪ Lightning flashes over the Tatra, the thunder pounds wildly ♪
[00:12:47.516]

[00:12:48.434]
♪ Lightning flashes over the Tatra, the thunder pounds wildly ♪
[00:12:55.941]

[00:12:57.401]
 ♪Let us pause, they will surely disappear, the Slovaks will revive ♪
[00:13:09.830]

[00:13:13.501]
ELLA FRIEDMAN:They took us to Poprad, and we were there a few days until they had young girls from Eastern Slovakia.

[00:13:34.021]
COMM: When the girls arrived in Poprad, they were secured in an empty army barracks. They were forced to clean, while being slowly starved.

[00:13:44.698]
Feed 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of either legumes, goulash, potatoes, or cabbage.

[00:13:49.954]
COMM: Ivan Jarny went to the barracks to visit the girls from his town.

[00:13:56.377]
IVAN JARNY: I cannot tell you what we saw. The ladies looked something shocking.
They were crying. Their mascara was running down.

[00:14:05.553]
EDITH GROSMAN: They didn't inform us at all about anything. We were waiting. They didn't even say why we are waiting.

[00:14:21.318]
COMM: Jews with economically important businesses could apply for exemptions to allow their daughters and families to stay home. Edith, Lea, Adela Gross, and Magda Amster should have been exempt. But the necessary paperwork didn't arrive in time.

[00:14:41.922]
COMM: On the afternoon of March 25th, when Magda Amster’s exemption arrived, her father jumped into a car and rushed to Poprad to save her. The girls stood in line as 999 of their names were typed into a list.

[00:15:21.921]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We had to line up, five in rows, and march to the railroad station. And far away, we saw a long track of cattle cars.
We didn't even think of it, that those are suited for us. We are human beings.

[00:15:49.156]
COMM: The railway charged 3,700 reichsmarks to transport the girls.And 360 reichsmarks for their luggage. The train ticket to deport them was the one-way third class travel to Auschwitz.

[00:16:07.132]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: 25th of March was my birthday.I was 19 that day. They loaded us on a train.

[00:16:17.935]
LINDA REICH BREDER:The guards started screaming, in Slovakian, naturally, “Up! Up! Dirty Jewish whores,” and so on.

[00:16:25.651]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: They loaded us, closed the door and then there is a little window up on the top, and I saw my father standing near the big gate, waving to me. I didn’t realize I never will see him again.

[00:16:43.919]
EDITH GROSMAN: We didn't know where we are going. We didn't have any idea.Not water. Not anything. And locked from outside.

[00:17:01.478]
COMM: By the time Magda Amster’s father arrived in Poprad, the girls were already gone. He chased the train across the countryside. His car was too slow to save Magda.

[00:17:20.372]
ELLA FRIEDMAN RUTMAN: We were really like sardines, and we were scared.

[00:17:25.002]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: I was sitting in a corner, and I was staring. What is happening? Some of them were screaming, crying...But nobody could really anticipate what’s coming.

[00:17:46.182]
LINDA REICH BREDER: On the Polish border, the train stopped. The guards gave the whole transport over to the SS. Since I was so tiny, the tall, big girls lifted me up,
to look what's going on there. There, I saw big sign in Polish. And I said, "Girls, we are in Poland.” “Maybe through Poland we go to Germany." In no time we went again. Maybe four, five hours... I don't know the time. The train stopped in the middle of a field.

[00:18:26.971]
EDITH GROSMAN: And there was an empty place. Nothing.

[00:18:37.971]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: The doors opened up, and the only people that we saw were SS with those big, huge German Shepherd dogs. The next thing that you heard is “Los! Los! Macht Schnell.” “Hurry up! Make it fast.” It didn't make a difference whether we took our luggage or not,but of course everybody tried to take, because we didn't know what's waiting for us.

[00:19:02.109]
LINDA REICH BREDER: A huge flat land in front of us where we marched with little flickering lights. When we came closer, we saw the barbed wire and we saw the barracks. We came and marched through an iron gate. The gate opened, on top, Arbeit Macht Frei. On the left side was a huge brick building with a huge chimney.
So we whispered to each other, "That's the factory where we are going to work."

[00:19:39.928]
ELLA RUTMAN: We just wondered. We just wondered what's going to happen to us.

[00:19:50.003]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We were the first thousand women who ever entered the gates of hell there.

[00:20:22.506]
COMM: After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Auschwitz became a concentration camp for Russian and Polish prisoners of war. Soon, Polish resistance fighters, intellectuals, artists and communists were also imprisoned there. All men.

[00:20:42.200]
COMM: On the morning of March 26, 1942. that changed. A few hours before our Jewish girls entered Auschwitz, 999 female German prisoners arrived from Ravensbrück concentration camp.

[00:21:01.196]
COMM: Was the number 999 coincidental? Head of the SS Reich's Führer Heinrich Himmler, believed in numerology and that the number nine signifies the end of a cycle. A final solution. His full name, Heinrich Leopold Himmler, also equals 9 9 9.

[00:21:28.449]
COMM: And it was Himmler who personally ordered the first transport, as well as the 999 women from Ravensbrück. A mixed group of murderers, prostitutes, homosexuals and communists. These Aryan women served as Kapos in charge of the Jewish girls

[00:21:56.136]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: When we arrived, through that gate, as we marched down to the end, where there were about ten buildings, we could heard the men screaming and shouting. Because they’d been prisoners for years and they didn’t see women.

[00:22:22.773]
LINDA REICH BREDER: They lined us up in front of those 10 barracks.
They counted us and over counted us. We were staying hours and hours outside. In March, in this part of Poland, it’s bitter cold. Snowflakes and frost. Awful.
So after a long time, they let us into the barrack.

[00:22:51.372]
RENA GELISSEN:: The door was not too wide, and we started pushing. Everybody wanted to get warm. When we walked in, there was a lot of straw  lying on the floor,
and nothing else in that room. Some of the girls sat downand suddenly, bed bugs were jumping all over us. They covered us.And we started screaming and crying.

[00:23:15.210]
RENA GELISSEN: And I was one of the first ones to jump up and pound on the door. So the rest of the night, I was praying and hoping for one thing only. That my sister Danka would not come.

[00:23:26.638]
COMM: At four in the morning, Kapos burst into the block and began beating the girls. “Wake up, wake up! Raus! Raus!” Everyone ran outside where they were once again lined up and counted.

[00:23:45.493]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We didn’t get to eat nothing. Only later, they brought kettle with water, little lukewarm, dark water. But then, they separated fifty girls. Between the two barracks, they'd built a tent. And the fifty of us had to line up, one by one, still in our civilian clothes. And marching into the tent.

[00:24:15.706]
COMM: The girls were told to put their jewelry and valuables on the table.

[00:24:23.819]
LAURA SPANIKOVA [Slovak] , A guardsman came and took everything we were wearing earrings, necklaces, watches and rings. And he said, "You will not need it anymore." We still thought it was some kind of a joke.  It doesn’t matter! We will make some money and buy new jewelry. We felt that the world was ours!

[00:24:49.601]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ Now, to get undressed, for little girls,most of us came from Orthodox families. To get undressed in front of men, it was very hard. Very hard. I remember it. Boy, do I remember well.

[00:25:03.557]
RENA GELISSEN: From a distance, I noticed there is a table. And I heard the girls there. They had to lie down naked there on the table, and the officer with rubber gloves, the German officer, was doing something to them and she was screaming.

[00:25:18.385]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: The SS put their hands into our private parts and we were young girls. They ripped us, and we were bleeding. And they did it to the 100 that morning, and the 100 before. After that, they stopped.

[00:25:34.572]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ My number is 48, so of course, I was one of the lucky ones. I was internally checked. Now, for a little girl to go through this...It wasn’t so easy.

[00:25:46.852]
IRENA FEIN: They were checking on those first girls and they say, “Oh my, they all are virgins.” They were looking if they have something hidden or something. They are all virgins. The girls came back crying, so we cried with them.

[00:26:10.152]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: You had to completely undress and then sit on a chair, and they came and shaved us. Everywhere.

[00:26:20.480]
EDITH GROSMAN: The snow was bloody, when we were there, naked. All of us.

[00:26:25.433]
COMM: After they were shaved, the girls were forced to stand naked in the snow
and then ordered into a large vat of disinfectant.

LINDA REICH BREDER: And in the middle of the tent was a pool, kind of, with water.
Dark water.

[00:26:44.834]
IRENA FEIN: One after the other, one after the other, they weren't looking if they had period or something. We had to go.
[00:26:51.820]

[00:26:53.234]
COMM: In the last row were piles of dead Russian soldiers uniforms.
They were covered in blood, feces and bullet holes.

[00:27:03.104]
LINDA REICH BREDER:The uniforms still were stiff from blood. The blouse was so big for me, it was all the way down to the floor. The pants I put up were here. We didn’t have a choice. And nothing to hold it.

[00:27:23.545]
RENA GELISSEN: No underwear. Nothing at all. Just the uniforms with the holes and the lice in it. And a piece of wood, different sizes of wood with a leather strap.
That was all the clothes that we got.

[00:27:35.154]
EDIE FRIEDMAN: It was horrible. It was stinky. They killed them, took their things and gave them to us.

[00:27:42.217]
ELLA RUTMAN: This we had for six months. We never changed. We were going to work in it. We got wet. When we got wet, we laid down and slept in it.

[00:27:55.765]
RENA GELISSEN: They brought us over to the men’s camp. And put the tattoo on us. And my tattoo is 1,716. The 1,000 counts for the 1,000 German women they had there. From the Jewish women I am the 716th there. So this is the first Jewish transport that ever came to Auschwitz, and the first women transport.

[00:28:13.847]
LINDA REICH BREDER:I am the 173rd Jewish woman who ever entered Auschwitz.

[00:28:25.845]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: My number is zehn achtunvierzig, 1048.

[00:28:29.072]
MARGITA BECKER: 1955.

[00:28:31.046]
IRENA FEIN: Fifteen vierunsechzig (1564).

[00:28:33.216]
HELENA CITRON: 1971.

[00:28:35.385]
EDIE FRIEDMAN 1949.

[00:28:37.321]
ELLA RUTMAN: 1950.

[00:28:38.815]
MARGARET FRIEDMAN KULIK: 1019.

[00:28:40.225]
REGINA SCHWARTZ PRETTER: 1064.

[00:28:41.804]
ETA ZIMMERSPITZ NEUMAN:  1756.

[00:28:44.364]
 JUDITH SPIELBERG MITTLEMAN:  1800.

[00:28:46.704]
ANTONIA REICHNER ROSENBAUM: 1437.

[00:28:49.404]
EDITH GROSMAN:  Häftling (prisoner) neunzehn siebzig 1970. That was my name.

[00:29:07.610]
LINDA REICH BREDER: The barrack was a two-story building. Brick building. They were built before World War II. Like army barracks.

[00:29:18.750]
RENA GELISSEN: They put my group in Block 10. There were 10 buildings and there was a wire fence. And then the other blocks, 14 of them were for men on the other side.

[00:29:28.882]
RENA GELISSEN: After roll call, I looked for the new transports coming in. And on the second or the third day, there was my sister Danka. So my nightmare came true.

[00:29:39.068]
EDITH GROSMAN: Zählappell (roll call) means stand up to be counted. It took four hours and we were standing there.

[00:29:48.116]
RENA GELISSEN: Roll call is 4 o’clock in the morning. Every Block Elder had an assistant, called the Room Elder. They are using sticks to get you off the bed, if you can't wake up. and they are beating you.

[00:30:00.215]
EDITH GROSMAN: Everybody got a bowl, a red bowl, big bowl, and a spoon.

[00:30:07.764]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: Our food was a little bit of black coffee, and a small piece of black bread. In the morning and evening.

[00:30:13.561]
EDITH GROSMAN: They cut it in half and cut it in quarters, and a quarter of this we got with a piece of margarine.

[00:30:19.651]
 BERTHA BERKOWITZ:For lunch, we got soup. It was made out of horse meat. It was horrible.

[00:30:25.660]
EDITH GROSMAN: The soup was so bad that nobody could eat it. And we began to be very, very hungry. But after two weeks, we began to eat the soup also that we got in the bowl. The tea was in the bowl, and the soup was in the bowl. And sometimes was kakki in the bowls.

[00:30:45.051]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: Sometimes we ate in the bowl that we made in at night. And we couldn’t wash it. Because there was no water. And then when the soup came, right in that bowl you had to eat. You see the dirt around it. You had to eat from the same bowl.

[00:31:11.244]
EDIE VALO: First we were demolishing houses. We had to bring about 18 girls there. We had the big poles, and we hold it and used to try to demolish the walls.

[00:31:25.143]
EDIE VALO: That was our first job. It was very hard.

[00:31:28.344]
HELENA CITRON: [Hebrew] And we served as the “machines,” who had to demolish the buildings. The SS and their barking dogs were everywhere,and once the collapse started, we couldn’t escape because the dogs would tear us to pieces.

[00:31:48.827]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: That was very dangerous, and if the German if he felt like killing a couple of people, so he would say, “You push this way.” And the wall would come down and crash all the girls.

[00:32:00.793]
IRENA FEIN: We didn’t want to hurt our friends, so we started going slower and
two girls were injured. The SS came and they shoot them both. We had to carry them to the Lager (camp). I overheard the SS talking together, they said they would have a vacation for it.

[00:32:49.727]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: I got myself a Siddur. I have no idea how I got it. I don’t remember. But that Siddur, kept me alive. I prayed an awful lot there. Whenever I had free time, and whenever no SS were around.

[00:33:07.652]
COMM: For many girls, there was a sorority of survival. Religious devotion played an important part in their lives. For others, desperation and hunger motivated them.

[00:33:31.928]
EDIE VALO: Who needed the religion there and who would be bothered?
No religion, nobody dreamed about the religion. We couldn’t have nothing.

[00:33:40.601]
JUDITH SPIELBERGER MITTLEMAN: Sometimes we saved a little piece of bread,and we put it under the pillow. You know what? We stole from each other.I learned a lot, not to take anything for granted.

[00:33:58.619]
COMM: Deporting Jews was still not legal in Slovakia, but 7,407 young women and 3,470 young men had been illegally deported to Auschwitz in six weeks.

[00:34:15.887]
COMM: On May 15th, 1942, the Slovak Assembly voted to deprive Jews of their citizenship. From the gallery, armed Hlinka guards watched the law become ratified. It was finally legal to deport Slovak Jews. President Tiso assured his people that Jewish families were being "rehomed" and would remain together.

[00:35:08.481]
COMM: On the 4th of July 1942, the SS held their first selection of Jews. Immediately after the transports arrival in Auschwitz. 264 men and 108 women were admitted into camp. The rest were gassed in Bunker Two.

[00:35:31.295]
LINDA REICH BREDER:And they kept coming and coming, and coming...Auschwitz women's camp, with the 10 barracks, and people were living outside too, was so crowded, you had to step over people who were sitting outside.

[00:35:56.427]
COMM: When the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler arrived at his killing fields on July the 17th. He inspected the facilities, discussed plans for expansion,monitored the selection of 1,251 Dutch Jews, and watched the gassing 399 women and girls
and 50 men and boys. Since the crematoriums were not fully functional, he was especially interested in how the bodies were going to be cleared into mass graves and buried. That evening there was a reception held in his honor. The next morning, he entered the women's camp for the first time to inspect the Kapos and his Jewish prisoners.

[00:36:47.330]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: We had to be completely naked and march in front of him. You were not embarrassed because everybody was naked, you know?

[00:36:55.213]
EDITH VALO:We stayed like that more than eight hours in Zählappell. [roll call]
We couldn't move.

[00:37:01.761]
COMM: At the end of the day, Himmler approved the flogging of women and ordered all Jewish prisoners unfit for work to be killed. He then promoted Commandant Rudolf Höss and ordered the quick completion of a larger camp called Birkenau.

[00:37:22.528]
EDITH GROSMAN: And in the middle of the summer, all of a sudden, they took us together and said we are changing the place. We are going to Birkenau.

[00:37:32.750]
LINDA REICH BREDER: Birkenau was 5 kilometers from Auschwitz. We thought that Auschwitz it was hell. We didn't know that Birkenau is waiting for us.

[00:37:43.135]
EDITH GROSMAN: Birkenau was huge, with a lot of camps.
[00:37:47.152]

[00:37:47.640]
RENA GELISSEN: We marched in and assigned to different barracks. And in the barracks were three shelves, and a wall here and a wall here. On the shelves were wooden planks, and a little rag of a blanket there.

[00:37:59.735]
COMM: The Russian soldiers uniforms were finally replaced with striped dresses, but no one was allowed underwear.

[00:38:07.326]
LINDA REICH BREDER: Winter was bad. Summer was worse. It was so hot in summer, our heads, shaved heads, blisters everywhere. The feet swollen, the hunger, ‘Muselmänner’ [living skeletons],  just dragging our bodies.

[00:38:23.884]
LINDA REICH BREDER: There was no water. No toilets. The latrine was 200 feet behind the barrack. Can you imagine thousands of girls going to the latrine? The latrine was an open hole.

[00:38:43.154]
COMM: A typhus epidemic raged through the men's and women's camps.

[00:38:47.825]
EDITH GROSMAN: And there, the girls began to die, one after the other.

[00:38:55.041]
COMM: Mass selections were used to cull the sick, but SS often took healthy girls to fulfill their quotas. 18-year-old Adela Gross was one of those healthy victims. Her friends remember Adela, comforting sick and terrified girls on their way to be gassed.

[00:39:26.155]
EDITH GROSMAN: This is Adela. She was a year older than I am. She was completely healthy when they took her, yeah.

[00:39:37.458]
COMM: The murder machine now ran on full steam. Every few days, girls were selected to die in the gas chambers. The precise number of Jewish women killed in early 1942 is unknown.

[00:39:54.558]
COMM: Men's deaths were registered on a monthly basis, but the SS didn't accurately record women's deaths. All we know is that throughout the summer and fall of 1942,thousands of young women were gassed.

[00:40:12.827]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: I heard that they were looking for girls for Leichenkommando. Wherever a girl died, we were the ones to carry them out.I kind of think, that this is how I survived Birkenau,  because I didn't have to stand Zählappell which is two hours, that's a lot. We got a double portion of food...

[00:40:34.473]
COMM: Like Bertha, many girls scrambled for indoor work and speciality jobs. One of the best jobs was working in "Canada" sorting the belongings of new arrivals from the Jewish transports.

[00:40:52.616]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We stole in the morning when we went to the barrack. We put on five underwears. We came to the camp and we gave it to another girl or whoever came.

[00:41:06.012]
COMM: What the girls working in Canada didn't give away for free, they bartered for extra food or better treatment.

[00:41:12.563]
MARGITA BECKER:I was an artist. Once I smuggled through something, a bed jacket in my shoe and I nearly died. It was so tight.

[00:41:20.227]
COMM: There were other ways girls survived. SS Franz Wunsch oversaw Canada.
At his 21st birthday partyHelena Citron was forced to sing for him.

[00:41:36.160]
HELENA CITRON [Hebrew] The Germans were very fond of art, they loved being entertained, and I sang very well.

[00:41:48.047]
COMM: SS Wunsch fell in love with Helena.

[00:41:56.764]
COMM: Edith and Leah were working hard labor outside, cleaning the camp roads and swamps of garbage, a job that would later become a punishment detailed to kill prisoners.

[00:42:11.570]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: We were digging in the water up to the hip, and taking up sand from the water.

[00:42:19.370]
EDITH GROSMAN: Everything was freezing on us, and then we went with these clothes to bed. and in the morning, the same clothes to work.

[00:42:29.156]
EDITH GROSMAN: I began to shiver and I said, “I think I will be sick.” Lea tried to take care of me. She helped me to go through it, and she was kissing me all the time. "You will see that this will pass also. A better time is coming." She was really pulling me to work because she knew that if we don't go to work, it’s the end.

[00:43:01.161]
EDITH GROSMAN: One day I woke up and I said, “Lea, I am healthy.  No fever.”  Lea said, "But I am sick." So we changed the functions, and I was schlepping her to work. But it didn't go, because she fell in a coma. So they took her there was a block, [The Block of Death]  it was called the 25th block.  Nobody came out, you know.
She was so beautiful. So clever and so intelligent.

[00:43:39.617]
EDITH GROSMAN:  I went out to her block, and there she was lying, not dead, but with... the rats, and I was just standing and...Why me, here, and why's she there?

[00:44:00.512]
COMM: A few feet away from Lea, Magda Amster was also dying of typhus.
[00:44:05.392]

[00:44:05.851]
LINDA REICH BREDER: It was December 1942. It was the biggest selection in the camp, whatever happened. We had to march after roll call, march out. Outside in front of the barbed wire was a big flat place. The camp was overcrowded.

[00:44:37.800]
COMM: The girls had to stand naked in the snow for 12 hours. Any girl selected to live had to jump over a snowy ditch. Those who fell into the ditch were also sent to the gas chambers.

[00:44:52.815]
COMM: SS records state that only 2,000 young women were gassed, but the real figure is 10,000.

[00:45:11.417]
EDITH GROSMAN: We went out to the Zählappell. It was a Saturday. An empty camp. 10,000 girls were burned and gassed, and burned in this night. And Lea among them.

[00:45:41.447]
COMM: Zena Haber, 17,
[00:45:44.074]

[00:45:44.825]
COMM:Gone.

[00:45:47.453]
COMM:Lenka Treil, 17.

[00:45:50.956]
COMM:Gone.

[00:45:52.833]
COMM: Regina Baruchovic,  17.

[00:45:57.588]
COMM: Irina Greenberger, 17.

[00:46:02.426]
COMM: Olga and Madugska Hartmann,

[00:46:05.053]
COMM: and their cousins Valerie and Edita Friedberger.

[00:46:09.933]
COMM: Pessy Steiner, 16.

[00:46:14.062]
COMM: The Zimmerspitz sisters.

[00:46:16.940]
COMM: Anna Moskovitz, 18.

[00:46:21.779]
COMM: Magda Amster, 19.

[00:46:25.908]
COMM: Henia Ehrenburg ,18.

[00:46:30.204]
COMM: Adela Gross, 18.

[00:46:35.042]
COMM: Anna Herskovitz and Edith’s sister Lea, 19.

[00:46:44.593]
EDITH GROSMAN: So the light went.

[00:47:07.825]
COMM: By the one-year anniversary of the first transport, almost 40,000 women and girls had been registered in Auschwitz. Over 24,000 had died or been murdered. A new SS woman took charge of the women’s camp. Maria Mandel ordered girls from the first transport be passed over during selections.

[00:47:38.689]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: From 1,000, we were left 300. So she said, “The first Slovak girls are out of the question.” [German] It was nice of her to say.

[00:47:55.455]
COMM: As the Passover holiday neared. Bertha Berkovitz and her surviving friends
prepared to hold a secret seder in their block.

[00:48:04.590]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: We stole salzkartoffeln from the kitchen. That’s potato boiled in its skin. Girls brought in raisins, so we made wine.

COMM: They steeped the raisins and sugar in hot water, covered the container to ferment and then hid it.

BERTHA BERKOWITZ: That was a big holiday. We said our prayers, whatever by heart, wherever we had a Siddur, and we had a Seder. You played with your life to do something like this.

[00:48:44.671]
COMM: No one survived Auschwitz on her own

[00:48:48.300]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: We were six girls in one Koya (bunk).I guess we had two blankets. There were no pillows of course, because our soup bowl was the pillow. If one turn we all have to turn.

[00:49:00.270]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ:  I always go to my barrack 27, and I see my bed where I spent my few years, my young years.

[00:49:12.616]
MARTA MANGEL MAREK: I had a cousin who was very good to me. She had already a position and I was the youngest, so she was watching over me.

[00:49:22.626]
COMM: Illness threatened every prisoner. And a month after Lea died. Edith became so ill, she couldn't walk. Her Lager sister took Edith to see a Slovak doctor from the second transport.

[00:49:39.284]
EDITH GROSMAN: She told me, "Listen, you have tuberculosis." And bone tuberculosis is very painful.

[00:49:48.193]
COMM: Dr. Manci Schwalbova gave Edith a bed in the hospital, and snuck her out whenever the SS came to select sick girls. Doctor Schwalbova did the same for many Slovak girls.

[00:50:02.416]
JUDITH:  I had typhus. When I came to the infirmary, the woman, she said to me, "I know you. I'm going to save you."

[00:50:18.056]
COMM: Girls working as functionaries and secretaries also helped each other survive.

[00:50:23.270]
EDIE VALO: I got myself a job as a secretary in one block and I had to count those girls, Appell. Where they are working and what they're doing.

[00:50:35.240]
EDIE VALO: I heard they are looking for girls with very nice writing. So I said to them, "My sister is writing beautiful," and Mengele took her in.

[00:50:51.089]
ELLA RUTMAN: It was my job. It wasn't difficult. People were glad to get the tattoo because when we registered the people it was put in a book. They thought maybe they will be saved, but the person was there without name, without number. We knew that, they will be killed.

[00:51:16.740]
EDIE VALO:  That was Mengele's business. He came nearly every day. He had a look and he left. I wouldn't even move when I saw him.

[00:51:30.337]
ELLA RUTMAN Everybody was shaking when he came in.
[00:51:33.144]

COMM: As a scribe for Dr. Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death, Ella not only registered girls coming into camp. She supervised the Leichenkommando girls.

[00:51:48.146]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ:  I was 15 months in Leichenkommando. That's a long time to carry dead people day in and day out. When the crematoriums weren't working fast enough, so they threw everybody on the 25th barrack, all the very sick ones. If anybody died, we had to go in and pick the body up.

[00:52:19.094]
IRENA FEIN: One day, I stayed in the Lager, because my shoe broke down. I didn’t go to work because I had already frostbite on my toes.

[00:52:35.986]
COMM: Irena had to hide while a friend organized shoes for her. When an SS caught her she was sent to the Block of Death - Block 25. The Leichenkommando girls recognized Irena from the first transport, and knew she would be gassed if they didn't help her escape.

[00:52:56.464]
IRENA FEIN: Her name was Eta (Ella). She pulled me out and took me to her block.

[00:53:05.182]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: One of the girls came out with us. She just held on to the stretcher and she come out with us. I hope she survived.

[00:53:15.859]
COMM: Safe outside block 25. Irena amputated her own toes and hid with Ella until she could walk again.

[00:53:26.411]
IRENA FEIN: And that was the story.

[00:53:32.125]
MARTA MANGEL MAREK: From every hell, somebody came back. Somebody has to come back from here, too.

[00:53:41.176]
COMM: By January 1944, over 74,000 women had been registered in Auschwitz. Of those registered, 45,000 had been murdered. Most of the survivors were not Jewish.

[00:54:01.655]
COMM: Listed among the Jewish survivors were 398 sterilization victims,

[00:54:08.828]
RENA GELISSEN: There were some rumors that Mengele is doing sterilization
and all kinds of other experiments.

[00:54:16.211]
COMM: 19-year-old Marta Friedman was one of those victims.

[00:54:26.179]
COMM: Birkenau had expanded across 472 acres or 15 square miles. The Death Gate now arched over train tracks and there were four gas chambers and crematoriums. Canada had also expanded, filling 30 barns where everything from pots and pans to shoes and baby carriages were stored. There were 600 girls working swing shifts in Canada.

[00:55:06.594]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We were separated completely from the rest of the inmates. We didn't have any contact with them anymore.

[00:55:12.600]
COMM: 50 feet away, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were entering the gas chambers.

[00:55:19.858]
LINDA REICH BREDER:The gas chambers, the crematorium, it was nicely landscaped around. Green grass. 95% went straight to the gas chamber.

[00:55:31.244]
COMM: When Slovak transports began arriving, again. the girls watched their own families walk to their deaths.

[00:55:40.879]
REGINA SCHWARTZ PRETTER All those cattle trains came each day and night and day...One day I was standing and looking out to the wire and I saw my cousins, my aunts, my uncles. I saw. Going. And I knew where there are going. I couldn't say nothing.

[00:56:08.323]
LINDA REICH BREDER: Seeing the flames high in the skies. The smell and the clouds settled and the ashes, black, greasy fat on our faces.

[00:56:24.130]
COMM: The girls in Canada were busy sorting when they saw Helena’s sister Rosa, heading to the gas chambers with her newborn baby and 6-year-old daughter, Aviva.

[00:56:36.351]
HELENA CITRON:[Hebrew] I went to the window, saw her passing by. She had a baby carriage, along with Aviva, who was then six or seven years old. After all these years, I said, "I want to die  with my sister, if not, just shoot me!"

[00:56:49.906]
HELENA CITRON: They weren't going to let me die in the gas. At that moment, Franz Wunsch arrived. “Schnell (quickly), tell me  what's your sister's name?” he said. My sister had already gone into the crematorium with Aviva, and her son, who'd just been born.

[00:57:17.892]
HELENA CITRON: She was moments away from stepping into the gas chambers, when SS Wunsch yelled, “Do you want to see your sister? Come with me!” Aviva said, “Go ahead Mommy, Aunt Helena [Tziporah] is outside. I'll take care of the baby.” Rosa left the children and followed SS Wunsch out of the gas chamber.

[00:57:48.423]
COMM: She had no idea she had left them to die.

[00:58:00.518]
LINDA REICH BREDER: I had the night shift, and early in the morning  suddenly a big blast. The crematorium was blown up. And the sirens started. The SS running around. In no time, hundreds of SS men were brought in on trucks.

[00:58:30.048]
COMM: Girls working in the ammunition factory smuggled gunpowder to boys who cleared the gas chambers of dead bodies.

[00:58:38.109]
RENA GELISSEN: We were first very overjoyed that the crematoriums were going to be broken up, but then we heard that four Jewish girls were arrested and they were going to be hanged.

[00:58:45.730]
COMM: Even under torture, those girls never divulged a single name of who they had worked with. Their silence saved, Erna Dranger and Marta Bindinger, who'd been on the first transport.

[00:59:03.122]
COMM: As the Russians advanced, the Nazis began relocating their slave labor force West to the German Interior.

[00:59:12.757]
BERTHA BERKOVITZ: left Birkenau October 31, 1944, by train.

[00:59:19.681]
COMM: On that train with Bertha were two Dutch girls. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot. They were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

[00:59:37.782]
COMM: As allied forces advance towards Germany. Reconnaissance planes could be seen in the sky over outfits. It was rumored that all healthy prisoners were going to be evacuated to Germany. And all unhealthy prisoners would be killed.

[01:00:00.346]
RENA GELISSEN: You could hide, maybe hide with the sick staying behind, but then the rumors were going they were going to set fire to the camp from all sides.

[01:00:10.481]
COMM: On January the 18th, 1945, the men's and women's camps were forced to line up for roll call.

[01:00:20.325]
IRENA FEIN: They put us in the Zählappell, and from the Zählappell, they take us to a march, to the Death March.

[01:00:32.587]
RENA GELISSEN: It was the worst snowstorm in many, many years.

[01:00:38.009]
LINDA BREDER: It was very cold. Snow was about over a meter or two meters high, so we walked over corpses. If the corpse has still something usable, a shoe or a sweater, we took it. The roads were paved with corpses.

[01:01:01.658]
IRENA FEIN: I was pulling with me a girl from Humenné. She couldn't walk. She was saying, "I can't. I can't." "Don't do this to me!" I said.  "You are going. I had frostbite on my feet.  I'm going. You go." So I pull her through and she's alive.

[01:01:24.681]
COMM: That girl was Edith.

[01:01:28.142]
EDITH GROSMAN: We were marching for I don't know how many, 200 kilometers that can be about 120 miles. It was the second time that I saw the blood, when we were walking, the bloody snow, you know?

[01:01:44.450]
EDITH GROSMAN: It reminded me of when we came into camp. When we were there, naked, all of us. It made them so strong...heart...ache that you cannot imagine.

[01:02:03.636]
LINDA BREDER: The only thing that we had to eat was snow. Frozen. Wet. Slept. It came the night. We slept on the snow. I didn't dare take off my shoes, wet shoes, because I wouldn't be able to put them back on.

[01:02:26.868]
MARGARET KULIK: We marched from Thursday, 18 January, till Sunday morning.

[01:02:34.667]
REGINA SCHWARTZ PRETTER: Marching and marching.  Day and night. We were on the Death March.

[01:02:48.346]
MARGARET KULIK: Sunday morning, the first time they let us sit  on the top of the snow. And people were dying. People would be shot because if you couldn't walk anymore, they didn't bother to let you alive there.

[01:03:07.074]
LINDA REICH BREDER: We came to the border of Germany. They loaded us in open coal wagons, and it was snowing. They squeezed a hundred of us  in one open car.

[01:03:22.673]
LINDA BREDER: Many of the inmates died there, so we just throw them out. This journey on the train that was the worst experience that I ever had. Freezing to death, throwing over my dead comrades, who survived three years in Auschwitz.

[01:03:54.747]
COMM: 9,000 female prisoners arrived in Ravensbrück camp, but there was no room for the new arrivals, and no food.

[01:04:05.424]
EDITH GROSMAN: We were so many girls there we were sitting one in the other, one in the other. To go out to the snow to make pee-pee was impossible, because you were really stepping on people.

[01:04:21.023]
JUDITH SPIELBERG MITTLEMAN: We didn't have the beds. We were sitting on the floor. Five o'clock, they brought horses who are dead. And I went to the kitchen. It was early in the morning, nobody was there, and there was the horse meat. I put in and I put in and I put in. I don't know if I wore the apron, and I brought it to the girls to eat.And the horse meat was good. Yeah, we were hungry. We were hungry.

[01:04:55.181]
LINDA REICH BREDER: You don't know, who was not in a situation, how hunger hurts. It's worse than a disease. Hunger hurts very much. I didn't dream of too much, only to have a roof and to have what to eat.

[01:05:26.047]
COMM: Back in Poland, the Russians were liberating Auschwitz. They found 5,800 sick prisoners. 4,000 were women. For those prisoners, death marched to Germany, liberation would take another three months.

[01:06:05.002]
COMM: To reduce the prison population in Ravensbrück, 6,000 women were gassed. Others were transferred to satellite women's camps. But food was scarce and prisoners were starving to death. Edith was taken to work at an airport repairing runways. Whenever allied bombers attacked, the prisoners ran to the kitchen.

[01:06:35.794]
EDITH GROSMAN: That was the first time that we ate a little normal food. because when they run in the bunkers, the SS, so we went out of the block, and went straight to the kitchen and ate out everything that was there cooked for the SS. I ate so good.
Semolina in milk, sweet semolina in milk. Ah, what it was.

[01:07:07.648]
COMM: Liberation would come soonest for Bergen-Belsen, which the Germans surrendered due to a severe typhus epidemic that had already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

[01:07:19.702]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: There were piles and piles and piles of dead bodies in Bergen-Belsen.

[01:07:26.375]
IRENA FEIN: Bergen-Belsen was a very bad Lager. Everybody was sick. Everybody was sleeping on the floor.

[01:07:36.150]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: Come April 15, 1945, over the loudspeaker, "Wir sind schon da, wir sind schon da. [German] Wir sind um euch zu befreien gekommen." “We're here. We're here. We came to liberate you."

[01:07:56.739]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ: It was beautiful. It was wonderful. And the next day, I was traveling around with the Lagerführer,  And I was showing around where the piles and piles of the dead people are,but I was the free person now and Kramer was the Häftling. He was the prisoner. It did me so much good. I had such Neqamah  [revenge]. It was just wonderful.

[01:08:33.776]
COMM: Bertha’s little sister, Fanny, was in a neighboring camp and hid in the back of a Red Cross van to reach Bergen-Belsen.

[01:08:42.313]
FANY BERKOWITZ ICKOWITZ: I went to the gate and I asked for Bertha Berkowitz. And they said, "Oh, Bertha! Bertha! Bertha! Bertha!

Bertha! Bertha! Your sister is here! Your sister is here!"


[01:08:55.089]
BERTHA BERKOWITZ That's how I met my sister. It was happy and it was sad.


[01:09:09.186]
COMM: As terms for surrender were being negotiated. Reich's Führer Heinrich Himmler took 1,000 female hostages and threatened to execute them  if the Swedish Red Cross didn't pay his ransom.

[01:09:23.450]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: They put us in a field. And machine guns were pointing at us. We were there, maybe for a whole day, and they were about ready to shoot. An SS comes on a motorcycle and he says, "Halt. Halt. Stop." They took us to Sweden.

[01:09:44.054]
EDIE VALO: When we came there, we couldn't believe it. They opened the door and we looked around, and there was nuns, the Red Cross. People threw bread from the windows.

[01:09:57.234]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: People were wonderful. They gave us chocolate. They gave us cigars. We were smoking cigars, and throwing up from it.

[01:10:08.787]
COMM: For the rest of the girls still in camps, liberation would not happen until May.
The day Edith was liberated, she got her period for the first time in three years. She began shouting: “I'm a woman again! I'm free!”

[01:10:32.394]
RENA GELEISSEN: We were liberated from that camp by the 82nd Airborne Division.

[01:10:36.357]
LINDA REICH BREDER: It was the 4th or 5th of May. We saw tanks coming. And finally, Russian tanks came in and liberated us.

[01:10:47.084]
JUDITH SPIELBERG MITTLEMAN: They said,  "You are free to go." We got liberated but we didn't know where to go, what to do. You don't know where or what. I was confused.

[01:11:02.716]
COMM: To reach home, the girls got rides on wagons and trains. Some walked for weeks.

[01:11:12.685]
LINDA REICH BREDER: I know my three brothers, my sister, everybody was wiped out. But anyway, I wanted to go home.

[01:11:21.944]
COMM: Escorted by Polish and Czech men, one group of young women walked from Prague, all the way to Slovakia. A journey of over 200 miles.

[01:11:34.623]
LINDA REICH BREDER: Finally, we found the train. The only room, because it was loaded with refugees, was on the top of the train. I was so young. Why not on the top of the train?

[01:11:51.432]
COMM: But not every girl wanted to return home.

[01:11:56.437]
RENA GELISSEN: I finally realized, or allowed myself to realize, that the promise that I made, that I'm going to bring my sister home to Mama, and Mama's going to open the door, and I say, "I brought your baby back," that this is not going to happen.

[01:12:07.239]
JOAN ROSNER WEINTRAUB: I wrote a letter to my aunt to America. I never went back to Europe after the war. I didn't want to go back to my town.

[01:12:18.625]
COMM: Most of the girls who returned to their homes found no one waiting for them.

[01:12:24.381]
MARGARET KULIK: I thought I'd find somebody at home. Nothing. The house was burned down. The stuff that we had was taken away. I sat on the stairs in the front of a store and crying. What should I do with myself? This woman stopped.

[01:12:42.941]
MARGARET KULIK She says, "Why are you sitting here? Why are you crying?"
I have nowhere to go, and I'm crying, I have nobody. Nobody survived from my family and I don't know what to do with my life." She says, "Don't worry. Come with me."

[01:13:00.125]
MARTA MANGEL MAREK : I think in every misery there is some kindness. We happened to have a neighbor that was a very decent human being. My parents gave her their candelabras, two candelabras. When I came back, she gave me back
my candelabras that my parents got as a wedding gift, and just those I have.

[01:13:42.418]
LYDIA MAREK: The neighbor gave her the candlesticks, and with that, her history.

[01:13:54.847]
EDITH GROSMAN: We didn't have any idea who is alive. I didn't have any idea that I will find parents and siblings at home. My mother fainted on the spot when she saw me.

[01:14:10.434]
GEORGE GROSMAN: My father lost most of his family during the war. One brother and one sister, survived. And, he met my mother the day that she returned from Auschwitz.

[01:14:26.366]
GEORGE GROSMAN: My grandmother invited my father for lunch. For gefilte fish.


[01:14:33.427]
EDITH GROSMAN: He came and ate in our place. The next day he came to take me out, so we went for a walk. Then he said, "I didn't fall in love with Edith. I fall in love with the gefilte fish."

[01:14:48.275]
COMM: Like many girls, Edith eagerly returned to high school and planned to go on to college. Other girls wanted to get married and start families.

[01:14:58.994]
MARGARET KULIK: That's my friend, Serena, the other one is Roza and this is the bride. Her name was Lily Friedman, and this one is Malka. We were together in Auschwitz.The same transport. We came together. All six of us.

[01:15:22.184]
JUDITH’S DAUGHTER: First wedding after the war. There were about 600 people who came to the ceremony. They couldn't believe that there would be a wedding.

[01:15:31.443]
JUDITH SPIELBERG MITTLEMAN:  Now I remember how I looked.

[01:15:39.707]
COMM: Edith and Ladislav were only married for a year, when Edith became disabled by the  tuberculosis in her leg. She was pregnant and had to have a medical interruption or an abortion to save her life. Many girls were too weak to survive childbirth and had to terminate their pregnancies. Many had miscarriages.It took years for some to be able to bear children.Some were never able to have children.

[01:16:14.111]
MARGARET KULIK: Why couldn't I have children? I was kicked in my back from an SS man and he damaged my uterus.I lost twins.Two boys.

[01:16:25.163]
ELLA FRIEDMAN: I didn't want to have children because I thought, "I don't want children should go through what I did." It was a surprise. The best thing that happened in my life. Rosette, without her it wouldn't be a life.

[01:16:45.183]
ROSETTE: Just terrifying, that a 16-year-oldand 21-year-old could be an enemy of the state.

[01:16:57.571]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: Who cared about hundreds of girls who went to Germany to work? Nobody even mentioned it. Nobody knew about it. Then suddenly, you open the door for that tragedy.

[01:17:17.716]
ELIZABETH SILBERSTEIN BENCE: I never could work it out why was that particular transport only young girls. What was in their mind? And I still can’t work it out. What was the reason?


[01:17:41.114]
COMM: The Nazi genocide had to target Jewish girls specifically as women because Jewish identity is passed down through the mother. The continuation of the Jewish race depended on young women. The future mothers of next generation of children.

[01:18:04.346]
GIORA AMIR: I would do anything to have the girls remembered.

[01:18:13.313]
ELLA RUTMAN: I wanted to tell that story because, I didn’t tell you a lot. I told you very little. But it shouldn't be just forgotten.

[01:18:24.366]
RENA GELISSEN: To honor my parents, my parents' memory… I got to watch it now because the tears come…And...to spread the word what happened, so it never happens again. Maybe. Just maybe.

[01:18:39.923]
EDITH GROSMAN: Please, please, you have to understand, you don’t have a winner in a war. Even the winners are losing kids, are losing houses, are losing economy, are losing everything. That’s not a win. A war is the worst thing that can happen to humanity.