I mean obviously there’s an element of just being lucky. But yes, there were contributory factors certainly. That my mother had died in the camp. If she’d have survived, she would have been deported to Auschwitz and she would have carried me into the gas chambers. Because I had no one to take me; I was sort of ‘left’. Because why bother? You know, I’d die anyway. Also, I discovered, again through the internet, a woman – a Czech woman, Aliska Schillinger. Her son contacted me. He’d seen- I’d written a chapter in a book for Bet Shalom, and under my birth name. And apparently his mother had been looking for me, because she had wanted to take me home with her at the end of the war. But she wasn’t married. She was very young. Obviously just after the war, they didn’t know whether I had any family. They wouldn’t allow it. And apparently she’d been looking for me forever you know because she wanted to know what had happened to me. And her son contacted me and told me that her job in Theresienstadt was growing vegetables. You know, obviously for the Nazis. And the guards never realised that when she went in to the vegetable garden she was thin, and when she came out she was fat. And she was hiding vegetables in her clothes for herself obviously but also she brought us vegetables as well. So fresh vegetables were like gold dust in- in the camp. The food was so contaminated. If you ate it you died, and if you didn’t eat you died. So the fresh vegetables were the great life-saver. But I did meet her before she died.
