…The gates were opened and we went out toward the town of Salzwedel.  Many people came down with typhus because they began eating all kinds of things.  The French were waiting for us and would not let us through.  The French were waiting on the road with soup and they made each of us drink a cup of hot soup.   I was with my relative, Miriam, and hand in hand we walked to town, like everyone else.  People plundered and stole and smashed; what they did is indescribable.  But not only us. There were Russian, French, Italian prisoners of war there, and German detainees.  And what I remember most is the convoys of Americans who were standing on both sides of the road and looking at us.  They did not believe what they were looking at!

…I will never forget that as we were walking along an avenue with trees, on the sidewalk, with American jeeps on both sides of the road, a German woman came toward us carrying stockings.  These were stockings of a kind that I certainly was not wearing then, nylons.  I stopped her.  My cousin pinched me and said:

“They will kill us, what do you want, we have been liberated, they will kill us.”

The German woman told me that she had daughters at home and that she had to bring them the stockings because during the war they didn’t have any.  I told her:

“Before the war I had a father and a mother, and now I don’t.  Now you will drop all those stockings and tear them to ribbons with your teeth and your hands.”

I stood beside her until she had torn the stockings. My cousin kept pinching me until I was almost blue.  Then I said to the German woman:

“Now pick up the bits of stockings and take them to your girls.”

That was how I let off steam…

Suddenly, just as we finished with that, one of the American soldiers said:

“Maidele, maidele, do you speak Yiddish?”

“Yo,” [yes] I replied.

“Come here, come here,” he said in Yiddish.  He asked me why I had done that to the German woman.  I said:

“What I did was for my mother, for my father, for my brother.”

I started to cry.  There was a huge Black soldier there and he cried too.  The Black soldier took a necklace from around his neck and put it around my neck.  We were all crying.

….In the children’s house in Sweden I was the only girl who had no one.  People came from the Red Cross and called out names, maybe someone was still alive.  Of course I gave the name of my brother, because father had surely not [survived].  A month later they called my name over the loudspeaker. But I didn’t hear because I was busy with the children. Someone said:

“Evika, someone is looking for you.”

I went to the office and they handed me a telegram.  It was from my brother! The Red Cross had found my brother at Cluj! I left the office holding the cable like a flag, and shouting:

“I’m not alone anymore, I have a brother, I’m not alone anymore.”  Everyone cried, really….

From the testimony of Eva Goldberg

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