Testimony Of Asher Barasi

…After marching 3 km, we entered a camp where we saw many civilians with yellow patches.  We understood that they were Jews; they were looking at us and crying… They saw that we were Jews and also wore the yellow patch…This was the Theresienstadt camp…

We were there a short time, about three weeks, until the liberation.

It was morning when we were liberated.  There was a typhus epidemic in the camp and we were not allowed to go out.  But after being locked up for so long in camps, everyone jumped on the fence, broke it down, and went out.  This was joy such as I had never seen before!

I started to walk and walk.  I crossed the bridge and reached the city of Litomerice.  I want into a number of houses and took food, for fear I would run short. I collected food and in the evening I returned to the camp.  Naturally, the conditions had already changed – we were liberated – and they let us live like human beings: cleanliness, food, like normal civilian life!  Two months later representatives of the French Red Cross arrived and transferred us from Theresienstadt to Germany, to a DP camp in Bamberg.  At Bamberg we were free.  We would enter and leave the camp as we pleased.  We had food and clothing, we lacked nothing-only the parents we had lost…From Germany we traveled to Greece via Italy.  When we reached Saloniki the suffering began.  There was no money, there was nothing.  We found nothing, neither the houses and property we had left behind nor our parents.

…I started to work in my profession and to make a living, but with no enthusiasm.  I couldn’t stand to be there even for a minute…I decided to join a hachsharah [Zionist training farm] in order to get to Eretz Israel…

From the testimony of Asher Barasi, born in Saloniki, Greece, 1922.

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