Grandmother relating her experience as a Shoah survivor

I thought [that] it was the end of us all then. I was 15 years old. I was all alone in this hell. They told us to undress and that we were going to be showered, and that they were going to give us clothes. The place was so cold, it was in early winter. Birkenau, which is Poland, it was freezing cold. We stayed there for hours to wait for our clothes. They took our clothes away, and they gave us inmate clothes. And it was paper thin.

The next day they came after roll call, and they tattooed me. They tattooed me and they told us [that] from now on, this is my name. My name is A‐5143. And they said, “From now on you do not answer by your name. Your name is your number.” And the delusion, the disappointment, the discouragement that I felt…I felt like I was not a human person anymore.

[…]

They took her away, and they threw—they didn’t bury or burn [everybody]. They just threw [some] out in front of the barrack—the door, and the mountain was as tall, uh, like, uh… to the top of the door. I’ll never forget it; it was a mountain of dead people, […] cadavers. And one day, [on] the second day, I decided to go look and see where Christian was, and I almost fell on the […] cadavers, because [sic] she was covered with lice! And I couldn’t believe it, and they were crawling [sic?] all over her, eating her flesh. And so I ran away; I couldn’t look anymore. And I ran away from her, and never looked at her again.