No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Irene Goes to a Better Camp

People were chosen to go to a new place, and I went to Leipzig, a German town that was also an ammunition factory. It wasn’t so terrible because they were not killing people on the spot.

Leipzig was very clean, no lice. Terrific camp. Almost not like a concentration, more like a slave-labor camp. A lot of showers for us. It was really more humane. Food was soup and water and bread once a week. But more bread at this camp.

I did a little bit something very sweet in Leipzig. I started to look at a Yugoslavian girl, very sweet. She always smiled when I was passing, so I borrowed from somebody a piece of pencil and paper and I wrote a note to her and I gave it in the hand when she was passing. I wrote, I don’t have a family here, but I want you to be my family. And she was writing to me what she was thinking. The same paper and pencil we passed. A half a year we wrote. We never talked. Never. We just wrote the notes. She wrote to me and I wrote to her. I was waiting already, looking forward to when she would give me a note. I never saw her again.