….I remember only that I awoke to terrible shouts. I saw all the inmates standing by the fence and shouting.  Outside the fence were American soldiers, I understood that this was the liberation, this was the end!

The Americans of course entered the camp, took it over.  It seems there was no one to advise them on how to feed us.  They cooked soup in pots, and then the terrible tragedy happened.  People fell like flies.  It was an indescribable spectacle.  People who had gone through that whole hell died just like that, unnecessarily.  I did not have the strength to leave the hut to eat.  Afterward they started to clean the huts, they went from hut to hut, and they found us.  They moved us to the clinic and American doctors arrived and treated us well.  And again the body, the marvel of the body.  It heals with unbelievable speed.  I weighed 28 kg.  I couldn’t stand on my feet, I crawled.  A month later I went home on my own! It is beyond words to describe what the human body is, what a human being is.

I was liberated on 28 April, 1945.

Here my second tragedy began.  I didn’t know who was alive and who was not.  I spoke with people from my town, they told me they were going to America, I said that I was going to Eretz Israel but that first I was going to my home town.  In the registry office I said I was from Carpatho-Russia.  The Russians didn’t want me, the Hungarians didn’t want me:

“Ibrei, zhid [kike].’

I went to the Czechs and I said I was Czech, not Jewish.  Here I saw something that is engraved in my memory to this day.  Every nation had a flag.  I had no flag.  Everyone had one except me.  Everyone walked with his beautiful flag, But I had no flag…

From the testimony of Haim Rosenfeld, born in Czechoslovakia, 1927.

The Anguish of Liberation, Testimonies from 1945, eds. Yehudit Kleiman and Nina Springer-Aharoni