Paul Calvert spoke with Ester Manheim

Two girls were going for a wash but they were found and they were killed.

There was a man and on his back was something moving; the Commandeer saw it, he took his gun, a revolver and shot. It was a child hidden there, he killed the child.

He took a child, a very small child, maybe one year old and smashed his head against the wall. He killed that child. The crying it was something awful. It was something you cannot describe. Death was working through us. We didn't know if we would live or die.

On an evening we came to Plashov, staying in barracks. In the night we hear "they are coming, they are coming, the children are coming". All the mothers that have children ran to see their children, but only a few children came. To see the look on the mother's face when their children didn't come. As they looked at the children and mothers that were re-united and thinking about their children. I could feel for them with empathy, I could feel their sorrow and their pain.

Ester with her german friend Christa

The children weren't allowed inside the barracks but they were hidden there from the German soldiers. One day they hung a young boy because he was singing a song. That Commandeer Get thought it was a Russian song so he must be a communist. The Boy was 14 years old.

On another day they kill a group and in this group were a few of my good friends. They were killed because they found that one of them had some white bread, "where did you get white bread"? They asked.

Every day was something new, something awful. The commandeer had two dogs, Rolf and Ralf and the girl who worked for him had to call the dogs Heir Rolf and Heir Ralf, Mr Rolf and Mr Ralf. These two dogs killed children. He would send them to kill pupils; people on the street; perhaps if someone wasn't in his barrack working, maybe they were on the way to the toilet; he would send the dogs after him, kill him. It was a sport.

The worst thing was the nights. You couldn't sleep. You were very tired but you could hear the whole night the name of the child, "where are you, where are you"? One person wept and then another person wept; but we tried to dream of a better time and we sang songs. We wanted to live and hoped that it would be better.

They took all the children from the kindergarten, all the Jewish kids. Parents wept and the policeman said there was nothing you could do they are on the train to Auschwitz.

One day a good friend came to me and she said they have taken my mother, I couldn't tell her anything, what could I say? What did people say to me when they took my mother? Then a woman was weeping, "my two boys my two sweet boys, they have taken them". There was a woman, she turned to me and said "you know I can feel her pain, it's a year ago that they took my boys".

There was a famous doctor with us, he took two shoes, shoes of his children and he spoke to those shoes; he spoke to them and smelled them, he was speaking to them as though it was his girl, his daughter.

On another time there was a selection and they took my father, my uncle and my boyfriend. Three of them went to Mathousen, only my father survived, the other two died in awful conditions.

Then they took us to Aushervitz. The journey should be one hour, but it took one day. We were closed in a wagon without food, we couldn't go out. In the morning they opened the wagon. We didn't know where we were or what it was.

They took us to a sauna and we waited, we didn't know what would come, whether it would be water or gas. They took all our clothes, it was cold; October in Poland is cold. It was cold and we were hungry. They put us 12 people in a barrack.