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Exodus
- Jewish Publication Society
- Chapter
- Additional Information
19 ,una E X O D U S ,una The headmistress at my new school in England knew my history and must have taken pity on me, taking extra special care to find what I think must have been the very best home in Kendal, that of Mr. and Mrs. Staples. I think one of the first things they did is to buy me a dog, a Chow, which is a lovely, fluffy, sheeplike animal, and I still have a picture of him. They were Methodist, quite religious. He was the superintendent of the Sunday school and she had been a Sunday school teacher since she was 16, so our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, and yet it didn’t matter at all. We just fitted together from day one. Because of their Sunday school work they must have had a bit of psychology training, but I don’t think that would have quite prepared them for me. Nevertheless that, together with their instinctive sort of good sense and the fact that they were very loving and caring, enabled them to deal with this still rather lost child from Germany. I was very much taken care of. And apart from the anxiety about my parents, in the Lake District I barely knew that there was a war on. The Staples used to go to church every Sunday morning, but I never went with them, except on odd occasions—if there was somebody particularly interesting preaching, I would go along— maybe sort of two or three times a year. I used to go to the socials which were held there—but that’s all. In fact, they didn’t try to influence me religiously in the slightest—no, never, it never crossed their minds. But I fasted for Yom Kippur and Mildred decided, announcing that fasting wouldn’t do her any harm, that she would fast with me. That’s the sort of people they were. I mean, they were lovely, just lovely. Ruth B. Germany Shemot Parenting 21 [44.202.128.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:05 GMT) ,una Ididn’t know that much about concentration camps— other than the general thing that Hitler had these camps and was trying to eliminate the Jewish people. Word gets around the army, and probably from the Stars and Stripes newspaper. We used to get that even during the battles and all. But I didn’t really know that much about them until I actually went into them. That was in ’44. I didn’t know we were going into one until we drove up the road and started going through dead bodies getting into the road. They were on the outside of the camp lying on the ground. I knew what it was. I knew what it was real quicklike. And, of course, word got down the line real quicklike where we were going into. There were bodies stacked alongside of the road, and we were in a few of the trucks that followed the tank column. I was on the back of a tank at that time, and we began to see these bodies alongside of the road. We just went into a complete mess when we got in there—the minute we got in there—it was just a complete mess. I mean, we got sick right away, we all got sick. There was all these Quonset huts all the way up and down the line, and they were full of dead people and live people in the same beds, and people were laying around, some of them dead and some of them alive. I’d never seen a skeleton walk before, but I saw some of them then. We had to go through the buildings and try to make sure that there wasn’t anybody else in there that could shoot at us, you know, and Joe Palermo, this guy that was with me most of the time, and I went up to this one building and we heard a noise downstairs. I told him, I said, Joe, you watch the top Va-’era’ Liberators 22 ,una of the stairs here, and cover me, and I’ll go down, see what the noise is. I went down and there was a big SS trooper down there chopping up bodies with an axe, heads and torsos and everything else all around, and he was doing that so he could put as many bodies in the incinerator...