Sally Pitluk was born to Jewish parents in Płońsk, Poland in 1922. A few days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Płońsk was occupied. Sally and her family lived in a ghetto from 1940-1942. In October of 1942, Sally was transported to Auschwitz, where she was tattooed and moved into the subcamp Budy for forced labor. She stayed in the Auschwitz camp complex until the beginning of 1945 when she and other prisoners were death marched to several different camps. She was liberated in 1945 and eventually moved to the United States.
In this interview, Sally describes the types of forced labor she did at Budy.
Anyhow, we started out there. And next day, we went to work. And how to describe, to describe this work is absolutely unbelievable what we did. We had to every year–this was the, the Auschwitz is there, uh, on the... on the... on the river. On the big river Vistula in, in, in, in Europe, in Poland. And this Vistula use every year, in the springtime, it would flood. So, we were supposed to make the...well, like, like, like a wall that, that the river shouldn’t flood in the spring. So, they gave us lorries. It was like big, iron wagons. And we had to go toward, like, toward like, uh, a mountain. And there we had to fill it up with dirt. And then it had, we had to go down to the… and, and we had to empty it by the, by the river, like. Now, the first week, we still had the strength, a little bit from the ghetto. Although we were emaciated already, but still, it was more or less, was more food than in camp. And we were all young. So we, we, we managed yet. But after a few days, when you were hungry and you–they wouldn’t let you sleep.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, EVZ, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of donor acknowledgement.
