Ruth Moser Borsos (1923–1999) was born in Frankfurt, Germany. She was 9 years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. She experienced antisemitism in school and witnessed the effects of the Nazis' antisemitic policies. After Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass") in November 1938, Ruth immigrated to the Netherlands. There, she joined her father, who was divorced from her mother. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. In late 1943, Ruth was imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp, where she had to perform forced labor. Her father acquired passports claiming that they had Paraguayan citizenship. In September 1944, Ruth and her father were sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany along with other people who held Paraguayan papers. As the war came to an end, they were transferred to another camp, where they were liberated in April 1945.
The lists of those people who were going to be sent to Auschwitz--we assumed it was Auschwitz, we didn't know 100 percent--but the trains came back from Auschwitz usually the conductor or somebody would let on where they came from, to pick up more people and to send them off, to, uh, away, and towards the east. Well, lists were assembled during the day on Monday and on Tuesday they were read off in the barracks, a Kapo came to the barracks and was reading off the names of those who were sent away. And, as you can imagine this was some horrible horrible times. People finding out that this was really probably the end, or they, they--we didn't know 100 percent what was going on in Auschwitz, we...we knew it was terrible but we didn't know exactly how terrible it was. And everybody would help always those who had to leave the camp. They would help them to assemble their stuff, to console them, to give them whatever they had, little food left to give them on the way.
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