During my deportation I did not try to understand what was happening to me. I instinctively slipped into the situation by listening to my intuition. Intuition is the intelligence of life. It is the inspiration that does not come from us, but which draws us toward the light.
Death became a visible friend. I was not afraid of it. As soon as I accepted it, there was no barrier between death and myself. I was free to invent life. This confidence gave me energy, a life force, that came from beyond me.
Everyone was reduced to their own survival. I realized that attachments could only bring despair. If I had stayed with my mother or my sister, would I have survived?
I still ask myself that question today.
I felt there was a place inside me that the torturers could not reach. They could not have imagined the extent to which they represented absolute evil in my eyes.
I became impervious to emotions, indifferent to the lifeless bodies that surrounded me. My instinct to survive took precedence over the sufferings of others. They were not there.
Hunger and thirst have no morals. Hunger devoured me. I became Hunger. I became Thirst.
It was not words that spoke in Auschwitz, but faces, backs, feet, and hands.
I was never registered or tattooed. There were so many Hungarian Jews arriving that several of us simply slipped through the net. So many times I immediately obeyed my intuition when it told me to change lines, because the backs and feet in front of me said they would not live long. Not being tattooed helped me survive.